War Diaries Talk

FIELD PUNISHMENT NUMBER 1.

  • marie.eklidvirginmedia.com by marie.eklidvirginmedia.com

    http://talk.operationwardiary.org/#/subjects/AWD0001p1y
    The above page is an order regarding discipline during WW1. I have read about this Field Punishment No. 1 in WW1 war books. I did not think it would come up when tagging the diaries. Apparently it was eventually abolished in 1923. On several occasions the Australian soldiers sabotaged this punishment.

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  • ral104 by ral104 moderator, scientist

    Sounds like it was quite heavily used as a punishement - over 60k recorded cases. Not quite as barbaric as earlier forms of punishment, such as flogging, perhaps, but still uncomfortable I'd imagine.

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  • marie.eklidvirginmedia.com by marie.eklidvirginmedia.com

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field_punishment - Details of Field Punishment on this wikipedia site. -

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  • DZM by DZM admin

    Interesting. I wasn't familiar with this.

    As these sorts of things generally do, this sent me down a rabbit hole of reading about how various countries treat/have treated conscientious objectors. Really interesting stuff.

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  • josiepegg by josiepegg

    I have been reading a really interesting book - "Executed at Dawn" by David Johnson. This looks at executions from the point of view of the people who had to carry them out. Field punishments are also mentioned.

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  • marie.eklidvirginmedia.com by marie.eklidvirginmedia.com

    I posted this article 10 months ago regarding Field Punishement No. 1.

    http://talk.operationwardiary.org/#/subjects/AWD0001p1y The above page is an order regarding discipline during WW1.

    I have read about this Field Punishment No. 1 in WW1 war books. I did not think it would come up when tagging the diaries. Apparently it was eventually abolished in 1923. On several occasions the Australian soldiers sabotaged this punishment. Link for this article on Wikipedia with a drawing of Field Punishment No. 1 is shown on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field_punishment

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  • ral104 by ral104 moderator, scientist

    David Underdown from TNA will know a lot more about this than me, but I believe many of the ~350 men who were officially executed probably suffered from conditions that would now be recognised and treated - shellshock, essentially.

    I think in general the men who carried out the sentences were drawn from those at the depot, often recovering from wounds before returning to the front.

    I'm not sure how many additional men would have been summarily executed by their officers for cowardice in the midst of battle. I think this was much more prevalent in the French Army than the British, though.

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  • josiepegg by josiepegg

    The book suggests that there were inconsistencies in how the sentences were carried out - executions and field punishments. Different numbers of men in firing parties and apparently random pardons. The men in the firing parties also then suffered from what we would now identify as post traumatic shock. Whilst tagging diaries I have occasionally come across mention of soldiers shot at dawn.

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  • David_Underdown by David_Underdown moderator

    Tehre are a variety of factors to be considered, capital punishment was a fact of life in general then, and so "accepted" (even today opinion polls tend to show a majority of the British public in favour - I am personally not one of them), and some of those executed were for offences that would have attracted the death penalty in civilian courts too (eg murder and rape). Yes the procedure was different, and lacked some of the protections of a civilian court, but this was in part due to the conditions of war, realistically you can't take the alleged offender and all witnesses out of their unit for weeks to have a full trial. Only 10% of death sentences were confirmed by the chain of command and carried out, the vast majority were suspended, and eventually commuted. Some were undoubtedly unlucky as they happened to commit their offence while discipline in their unit (and this could be the wider brigade and division) was considered to be poor, and so someone was to be made an example of. It's always hard to judge someone's mental state after the fact, though undoubtedly some were suffering shell shock. There are transcripts of some court martial proceedings at https://blindfoldandalone.wordpress.com/ and also fuller explanations of general procedure - unfortunately the project has ground to a halt - it is instructive to read them (though obviously distressing too). In the eyes of many of those serving then, their chief crime was letting down their mates, if someone fell asleep on sentry duty it was his fellow soldiers who might be killed if surprised by a trench raid.

    So far as Field Punishment No 1 (and the very slightly less severe No 2, where you were not attached to a fixed object between the other parts of the punishment), it was originally introduced as a more humane alternative to flogging in the 1850s or 1860s (from memory, I think it was after the Crimean War at any rate) - corporal punishment was of course still common in schools at this time. There was a strong feeling that those who had behaved badly shouldn't be able to escape the danger of active service by simply being sent to prison. That same feeling coloured the treatment of conscientious objectors - many felt that it shouldn't be a comfortable alternative, the conscience had to be tested, rather than it simply being an easy way to escape service. This extended quite widley in different ways too, one man I've researched was convicted by a civilian court while still in the UK of selling off army blankets, and as a result dishonourably discharged (and sentenced to severl months imprisonment with hard labour). Their are letters in his surviving file from very senior officers saying, essentially, can't we just send him to France where good men are getting killed. In fact, after being released from gaol, he re-enlisted, lying about his previous service and served out the rest of the war, eventually dying in 1998. I've wondered if their was any collusion in his re-enlistment, he stated that he did have previous service, with a reseve cavalry regiment (he'd actually been ordnance corps), I presume this was to explain the fact he already knew drill, which would have been hard to hide, and that he had been discharged and a brief period for being "unlikely to become an efficient soldier" - probably explained as being unable to get on with riding. He'd been a bus conductor before joining up the first time, so a conviction for dishonesty would certianly have prevented him from returning to that job after the war.

    The severity of punishments issued under summary action by the unit OC was strictly limited by military law, and also depended on the rank of the officer, those under the rank of major could not issue the longer sentences/harsher punishments available to majors and lt-colonels (the latter being grouped together in military terms as field officers). In most cases the man could also opt for a court martial rather than take the summary punishment.

    I'm not sure there are any authenticated cases of British officers shooting their men "pour encourager les autres", but it's equally impossible to rule it out entirely.

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  • ral104 by ral104 moderator, scientist

    Thanks, David. It is interesting to consider the prevailing attitudes at the time, isn't it?

    I hadn't come across the blindfoldandalone blog before - excellent resource, although pretty disturbing as you say.

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