Between 1914-1918, 302 British and Commonwealth soldiers were executed for military offences committed while on active service on the Western Front (Babington, 2002), and these remain a source of controversy that continues to cast a long shadow. As shocking as that figure might be, the executions represent only around ten percent of the 3,076 men sentenced to death (in fact some 20,000 offences that could have attracted the death sentence were committed over this same period).
These statistics show therefore, that some of those executed were undoubtedly unlucky to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, when those further up the command chain saw a need to make an example of them, thereby making it somewhat of a lottery for those concerned and hence inherently unfair. There are many aspects where these executions are concerned, and below, briefly, is just one of them.
Soldiers have always had a natural reticence to speak to their families about the fighting that they had been involved in and the horrors that they had witnessed. If speaking about killing the enemy was so difficult, then how much harder it would have been for them to speak about witnessing or taking part in the execution of one of their own, perhaps even someone that they had known or had enlisted with in one of the so called ‘Pals battalions’. If they were fortunate to be on leave, or had survived the war, then the relatives of a man who they knew had been executed, may have asked awkward questions in an effort to find out how a loved one had died as they frequented the same shops, factories and public houses.
In November 1917 the War Cabinet decided, despite considerable opposition from the higher echelons of the Army, that the families of those executed were to be informed that their loved ones had died on active service. Up until that point many commanding officers had preferred to record the fate of those executed as “killed in action”, which had the effect of preserving the man’s right to his service medals and his family’s right to allowances.
The family of Private Bertie McCubbin, of the 17th Sherwood Foresters was understandably upset to be informed that he had been killed by a “gunshot”. Unbeknown to the family, he had in fact been executed on the 30th July 1916 having been sentenced for cowardice, a fact his mother only discovered after one of his friends returned from the front line and told her the truth. As his niece, Mrs Doris Sloan, recalled "she went insane with grief. She never received his medals and never received a pension because he was shot as a coward.”
Until 1917, the Army Record Office, which was dependent on information from the front, had on the occasions when it had been informed that a man had been executed, simply and bluntly informed families that their loved one: “...was sentenced after trial by court martial to be shot for desertion…and the sentence was duly carried out on…”
The families of the men executed were left devastated, in many cases ashamed, and sometimes ostracised within their communities. The effect on the family of Lance-Corporal Peter Goggins was devastating as his mother had a breakdown and his wife of six months simply disappeared. The wife of another executed man went to her local post office in 1916 and was met with: “We don't give pensions to the widows of cowards.” As a result she was left destitute, with a three-year-old and a four-month-old child to feed.
Occasionally the consequence of families being misinformed that a loved one had been killed in action, led to other members of the man’s family joining up to seek revenge on the Germans. One soldier recalled how the misery of the comrades of a man executed was made worse when they later discovered that the man’s father had joined up to fight the Germans to avenge his son, when perhaps those to blame were in fact nearer to home.
David Johnson is the author of Executed at Dawn: British Firing Squads on the Western Front 1914-1918. The BBC have purchased the rights to David’s previous book The Man Who Didn’t Shoot Hitler: The Story of Henry Tandey VC and Adolf Hitler in 1918.