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| Executions
The question of pardons for those Servicemen
executed in World War One for desertion has been in question again recently.
Questions put to the Ministry of Defence have resulted in the following
explanation as to why these soldiers have not been
pardoned.
Considerations of pardons, in the formal legal
sense, requires evidence and unfortunately very little of the evidence which was
available to the courts at the time survived.
It has been suggested that those executed were
suffering from unrecognised shell shock or combat stress. Shell shock was much
better known and treated during WW1 than has often been realised. Many thousands
of cases were diagnosed and treated in special shock centres and after the war
some 60,000 men received pensions as psychiatric cases. Nevertheless, the
knowledge available then was not up to modern standards and it accepted now that
some injustices may have occurred.
Very few men were executed for cowardness. Most of
those who were had been found guilty of desertion, an offence which could have
very serious consequences for a man's colleagues. Most people who went absent
were charged with the offence of AWOL which did not carry the death penalty. Of
those found guilty of desertion, which was a capital offence overseas, most were
given lesser sentences and of those who were sentenced to death for this and
other offences, 89% did not have their confirmed by their Commander-in-Chief and
were not executed.
The statement concluded that if formal legal
pardons were considered it was unlikely that any of those executed would be
recommended for a pardon. The minister did not want to take a course which,
while it might possibly have pardoned a few, would have left all the rest
effectively condemned again after 80 years. This he did not think would be
either humane or compassionate. Neither however did he feel that to do nothing
would be an acceptable course.
He therefore set out what could be done. All those
who were executed have been recognised as victims of war. Those responsible for
the country's War Memorials and Books of Remembrance have been asked to add the
names of the executed men, so that they can in future be remembered among their
fallen comrades. The stigma of their execution has been removed from them and
their family's. Finally, the death penalty has now been abolished for those
military offences where it still existed in the Armed
Forces.
Between 1914 and 1920 some 20,000 personnel were
convicted of military offences under the British Army Act for which the death
penalty could have been awarded, of these 306 men were executed. |