In letter No.4, its author, a sergeant in the 1st West Yorkshire Regiment, described being ordered to choose ‘the two worst characters’ in his platoon to form part of the firing squad for the execution of Lance-Corporal Alfred Atkinson, also of the 1st West Yorkshire Regiment, on 2 March 1915, for the offence of desertion. When the two men, who were acknowledged by the author to be tough men, returned, he wrote that they were sick, suffered from nightmares, and could not keep their food down. They said: ‘The sight was horrible, made more so by the fact that we had shot one of our own men.’
A week later the same sergeant recalled how he was sergeant of the regimental guard, with thirty-two prisoners whom he described as ‘mostly twenty-eight day men’, when the execution of Private Ernest Kirk, 1st West Yorkshire Regiment, was ordered to take place on 6 March 1915. Some of the prisoners had been part of the previous firing squad and the order that the sergeant received made clear that: ‘You must warn a party of twelve men from the prisoners you have (those who shot Lance-Corporal Alfred Atkinson must not be included).’
In his letter the sergeant went on to write about his experience of putting together that firing squad:
I witnessed a scene I shall never forget. Men I had known for years as clean, decent, self-respecting soldiers, whose only offence was an occasional military ‘drunk’ screamed out, begging not to be made into murderers. They offered me all they had if I would not take them for the job, and finally when twelve of them found themselves outside selected for the dreaded firing party, they called me all the names that they could lay their tongues to. I remained with the guard for three days, and I leave you to guess what I had to put up with. I am poor with eight children, I would not go through three more such sights for £1000.
The experience of these men is interesting because it would appear from King’s Regulations (K.R. 482) that:
An offender in arrest or confinement is not to be required to perform any duty beyond handing over any cash, stores, or accounts for which he may be responsible, or fatigue orders on board ship, and he is not to bear arms except by order of his Commanding Officer, in an emergency or on the line of march.
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Private William Holmes of the 12th Battalion, London Regiment, recalled an execution in 1917 of two soldiers where the condemned were to be executed by members of their own company and the composition of the firing squad was decided by the drawing of lots:
Those that were drawn out – four of them – knew what they had to do at 8 o’clock the next morning. They felt as I would have done; terrified, almost sick with the whole thought of it. They were going to go and shoot their own mates. But there you are, we had to have discipline.
There were occasions when the condemned man was viewed by his peers as deserving to be shot and in this situation individuals may have been more willing to take part. Although there might be personal sympathy for the man concerned, as was the case with Private Holmes, such feelings were tempered on occasions by the view that there could be no excuse, as every soldier knew that they were going to fight and what the likely consequences of committing certain offences could be.
The majority, however, like Corporal Alan Bray (Arthur, 2002), had strong feelings that Englishmen should not be shooting other Englishmen, as they were in France to fight Germans. Bray wrote that in this instance he knew that the condemned man had lost his nerve to the extent that he could not have returned to the front line. In these cases personal sympathy was based upon shared service and experiences, friendship, and an understanding of the particular circumstances and issues faced by the individual concerned, leading them to conclude that the sentence was just not justified.
Private Stephen Graham (2009) has given an eye-witness account of the execution of Private Isaac Reid, of the 2nd Scots Guards on 9 April 1915. On this occasion, volunteers from the regiment had been asked to form the firing squad but none had been forthcoming, and so the battalion snipers were ordered to do it. Graham makes the comment that the lack of volunteers reflected the fact that nobody actually believed that Private Reid had disgraced the regiment.
Thurtle, in his letter No.5, includes an extract from an ex-private of the East Kent Regiment, who expressed his view that he should not have been part of the firing squad at the execution of a man whom he referred to as ‘a chum of mine’.
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Sometimes these approaches to raising a firing squad were not always successful, as Captain Stormont-Gibbs of the 4th Suffolks discovered when he received an order to form a firing party for the execution of Private Benjamin Hart of the 1/4th Suffolk Regiment on 6 February 1917, who had been sentenced for the offence of desertion:
I sent a chit to OC companies to supply a few men each – wondering what would happen. As I expected everyone refused to do it and I wasn’t going to press the company commanders on the subject. I rang up Brigade and had a rather heated conversation about it and finally the poor chap was shot by someone else – perhaps a well-fed APM …
It should be noted in passing that Hart had been a habitual deserter, and knowing this, Stormont-Gibbs had made him his servant to keep him out of the front line, but he had deserted again and so this officer was being asked to form a firing squad for someone that he would have known reasonably well.
Captain Slack, MC, of the 1/4th Battalion East Yorkshire Regiment recalled in his memoirs an occasion in 1916 when he had to select a subaltern and ten men to form a firing squad (Macdonald, 1991):
I wasn’t present at the execution. I didn’t want to be. Neither was it a nice job for the ten men. I consulted with my Company Sergeant Major and he actually picked the ten and I didn’t go into details of how it was done, whether the man was put in a chair or blindfolded, or anything, a mark over heart – I didn’t go into details at all. I didn’t even ask the subaltern afterwards what happened. It was a horrible thing to have to do, but it had to be done. It had no effect on the men’s morale.
This recollection reveals a number of interesting points as there is a sense of ‘out of sight means out of mind’: Slack apparently played no part in this process, as he left the company sergeant major to select the men and did not seek to check the details of the execution or provide any support to the subaltern either before, during or after the event. It raises questions about the basis on which the company sergeant major made his selection and whether or not this was fair – were names perhaps placed in a hat and those whose names were pulled out were the unlucky ones? Or did the decision involve favouritism or the settling of scores? Slack was a brave man, as evidenced by his Military Cross, but does his handling of this situation reveal indifference, moral cowardice or someone who had at heart perhaps questioned the validity of military executions? And can it really be possible, given the experiences recounted in letter No.4, that the men concerned were left unaffected by their experience?
The most concerning aspect of what Captain Slack had to say about the condemned man was that ‘he was a halfwit’. Slack went on to acknowledge that, at this stage of the war, the latest drafts of soldiers represented ‘poor material’, but even so, he does not argue against the death sentence, although he did write to the soldier’s mother to inform her that her son had been killed in action.
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Sometimes those charged with forming a firing squad resorted to subterfuge, as reported in Thurtle’s letter No.1. On 26 September 1914, Private George Ward of the 1st Royal Berkshire Regiment was executed having been found guilty of cowardice. At the time, the men were out of the front line but were due to go back that night. The author of the letter takes up the story:
To get the firing party … they called for twelve men to carry tools. Now the men who carried tools at that time had the first chance of using them, so you see there were plenty of volunteers, but once on parade they quickly realised that their job was to shoot poor ‘A’.
Captain M.L. Walkinton of the Machine Gun Corps wrote in his diary of his shock at being ordered by his colonel t
o form a firing squad from his company for the execution of Private Patrick Murphy, 47th Battalion, Machine Gun Corps, on 12 September 1918. Murphy had been convicted of desertion on three separate occasions. This was a firing squad of six long-service men, with one of them having a rifle loaded with a blank round – the significance of which will be discussed in the next chapter. Walkinton observes, ‘although they all hated the job they loyally obeyed their orders.’
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On 23 March 1916, Private F. Charles Bladen, of the 10th Yorks and Lancaster Regiment, was executed for the offence of desertion by a firing squad drawn from his own battalion. The execution detail was made up of the regimental sergeant major, the provost sergeant, an escort of one NCO, and two men, together with a firing squad that included the condemned man’s platoon commander, Lieutenant A.W. Lamond, one sergeant and sixteen men, four of whom would have been the burial party. In this particular case very definite orders had been given that the men were not to be told in advance what they were about to be ordered to carry out, and the group was taken by bus to its billets close to the site of the execution.
Private Bladen was shot by a firing squad of twelve men, while Murphy, as discussed earlier, faced a firing squad of six men. There are other variations in the number of men who were in a firing squad and there is no evidence to suggest how these numbers were arrived at.
Captain T.H. Westmacott was the assistant provost marshal of the 1st Indian Cavalry Division and in order to gain instruction into the conduct of executions, he attended an execution on 14 April 1916 of Private Edward Bolton of the 1st Cheshire Regiment, who had been found guilty of desertion. Private Bolton was shot by a firing squad of twelve men, with six standing and six kneeling. He attended another execution on 21 July 1916 that had a firing squad of twenty-five men (five men from each squadron). On this occasion, although five bullets had gone through the disc pinned to the man’s chest, the man still continued to breathe, and so Westmacott had to shoot him through the heart with his revolver to finish the affair.
Private Frank O’Neill of the 1st Sherwood Foresters was executed on 16 May 1915 by a firing squad of six men, only two of whom had a loaded rifle. Private William Scotton, 4th Middlesex Regiment, faced a firing squad of eight men on 3 February 1915, and the rest of his unit was ordered to witness his fate, while Private William Turpic, 2nd East Surrey Regiment, faced a firing squad of twelve men on 1 July 1915.
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On occasions, soldiers at a base camp recovering from wounds that stopped them from fighting at the front – but which their officers thought did not preclude them from firing a rifle – were used to form a firing squad. To the pain and trauma of being wounded was then added the horror of shooting one of their own.
Sometimes an accused man would be taken to a military prison behind the lines where he would be tried. If convicted and the sentence was confirmed then it would be the responsibility of the prison commandant to provide a firing squad, in which case he might turn to the military police who guarded the prison or a military police unit nearby to provide a firing squad.
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There is some anecdotal evidence that an order to form part of a firing squad was the only order that a soldier could refuse to obey, but it has not been possible to find any reference to this in the available regulations. In Arthur (2002), Corporal Bray talks of being warned that he was to be part of a firing squad to be detailed for the execution of Private Abraham Beverstein, of the 11th Middlesex Regiment, which was due to take place on 20 March 1916. That evening ‘an old soldier … told me that it was the one thing in the Army that you could refuse to do. So I straightaway went back to the sergeant and said, “I’m sorry, but I’m not doing this”, and heard no more about it.’
It is in all probability a myth and Bray was somehow lucky to have got away with it, because if refusal was an option why would anyone have taken part? Indeed, Private Kennedy (www.themanchesters.org) records a soldier voicing the view that they should not be asked to be a member of a firing squad and a staff officer replying:
I can understand your feelings. I am aware that it is an unpleasant duty for all of you. It isn’t pleasant for me either. But the responsibility is not yours. It lies elsewhere and you’ve got to obey orders. So I can make no exceptions. I’m afraid you will have to go through with it.
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It only takes one bullet to kill a man, and yet from the evidence discussed above, firing squads could vary in number from two up to a staggering twenty-five men. There is very little evidence, therefore, that if Guilford’s notes had been more widely disseminated they were being adhered to, though it is not clear who made the decision as to the size of the firing squad.
Various methods were used to form firing squads, ranging from chance through to the drawing of lots, asking for or bribing volunteers, or plain subterfuge. It does not seem in any way right that men should have been tricked into becoming part of a firing squad, but it happened. There does not seem to have been a set basis for selecting those to be in a firing squad and this, together with an abdication of responsibility by some officers to their sergeants, gave rise to opportunities for abuse in the form of favouritism, spite and the settling of scores.
More disturbing, though, is the thought that men, whose only offence had been to be found drunk, and who were typically subject to twenty-eight days’ field punishment, were being ordered to form a firing squad. This seems to add an extra tier of punishment that is well outside what was laid down in military law.
Military law, as it applied in the First World War, makes it clear that any field punishment should not be inflicted in such a way as to leave any permanent mark on the offender. When this particular regulation was drafted, the permanent mark being referred to would have been physical, because it was later in the war that mental trauma was accepted by the military. Taking part in an execution as a member of a firing squad would have had a psychological effect on those involved, which was against military law, was unethical and which was out of all proportion to any offences the soldier may have committed.
It seems equally remarkable that men who were recovering from wounds but were not yet deemed fit enough to be returned to their battalion or regiment should have been considered fit enough to participate as a member of a firing squad. This seems to add a further level of trauma to men who had already been through so much. Even allowing for the standards and norms of the time, 100 years later this still seems callous, unethical and simply wrong.
Amongst their comrades there was indeed a degree of empathy for those sentenced to death, and in many cases undisguised sympathy based upon a greater understanding of what had driven a man to desert as a result of their shared service and experiences. It would, however, be wrong to claim that all soldiers, whilst they might empathise with the condemned man, automatically sympathised with them, because many were viewed as cowards who deserved nothing less than being shot. This was a point that was made in Parliament during a debate on First World War soldiers (Pardons) on 18 January 2006 by Keith Simpson, MP, who had interviewed, in his words, several hundred veterans (Hansard, 18 January 2006):
One question, among many others, that I invariably asked them concerned their attitude towards the men who were executed in the First World War for desertion, cowardice and so on. The survivors of that war had an ambivalent attitude towards those executions. That is borne out by the archives at the Imperial War Museum, whether oral or written. It was possible to find large numbers of men who, at the time and in their old age, regarded the executions as wrong, vindictive and not achieving their objective of deterring people from running away, but equally I found large numbers of veterans who were bitter. They might not necessarily condone the fact that ultimately the men were executed, but they were bitter that some men decided to abscond and, as they saw it, did not do their duty and let their muckers down. That is an equally balanced view.
While some officers might maintain that the morale of th
e men selected to form a firing squad remained unaffected, this view was not necessarily shared by the men themselves, and the next chapter will consider this further from the viewpoint of those in the firing squad.
3
THE FIRING SQUAD
A Royal Commission of 1949, which examined a variety of execution methods for their decency and humanity, concluded that the firing squad did not possess even the first requirement of efficiency – namely, the certainty of causing immediate death. Dr John Collees went further in an article in the Observer on 25 April 1995, writing, ‘Dying from gunshot wounds effectively means bleeding to death, probably with the odd broken bone, and is therefore, only marginally preferable to stoning.’
The firing squad itself was in many ways recognised by the officers and the APM as the weakest part of the execution process, and often there were a number of bungled executions. There was always the possibility that members of the firing squad – whether from nerves, sympathy for the condemned or just poor marksmanship – would miss their target, with the unpleasant implication that the officer in charge would then have to finish the job off with a single revolver shot to the condemned man’s head or heart. An example of this was the execution of Private Joseph Byers, of whom more will be mentioned later, which was witnessed by Margueritte Six, the daughter of the farmer on whose land it took place near Locre. The firing squad had already executed one man, Private Andrew Evans, but its first volley of the second execution was fired over Private Byers’ head. Whatever the firing squad’s motivation, a further volley was required. Piet Chielens, the curator of the Flanders Fields Museum in Ypres, attributed the firing squad’s action to an unwillingness to shoot at Private Byers (Linklater, 1998).
Executed at Dawn Page 5