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Trin Tragula posted:100 Years Ago Lieutenant Guy Chapman posted:When the Major, as president of the court, turned to me to demand my sentence, I replied, “Oh, death, sir, I suppose.” 
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Mar 30, 2015 16:56
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quote:Our good president looked at us from the top of his six feet and groaned “But my boys, my boys, you can’t do it!” Jesus Christ.
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Mar 30, 2015 17:01
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quote:It was only after a moving appeal by the president that we allowed ourselves to be overborne and to punish the old ruffian by reduction in rank to Corporal in the place of executing him; but we both felt that Major Keppel had somehow failed in his duty. my dad posted:Jesus Christ.
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Mar 30, 2015 17:06
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Jesus Chr--- What they said.
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Mar 30, 2015 18:32
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Ask Us About Military History: Oh, Death, Sir, I Suppose
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Mar 30, 2015 19:19
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Oh, hello Trin, what intriguing tale of WW1 history have you for us this tim.. Oh.  Holy poo poo that's messed up.
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Mar 30, 2015 20:11
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Tias posted:Oh, hello Trin, what intriguing tale of WW1 history have you for us this tim.. Oh. The early 20th and late 19th centuries in Europe were a very, very different time for the military.
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Mar 30, 2015 20:59
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Pretty much the trigger a few years back for me turning "hey, I'm kind of interested in the First World War more than other wars" into "no actually I want to know EVERYTHING ABOUT THIS" was picking up Blindfold & Alone in a second-hand bookshop, turning to exactly that page completely at random, and getting very angry very quickly. That's him!!!!!!! There!!!!!!!!!! That's the man!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Incidentally, I found out a couple of months ago that as far as Gary Sheffield knows, nobody has any idea how many men of the Indian Army were executed (and if he doesn't know, it's rather unlikely that anyone else does). The oft-quoted figure (of either 306 or 340-something, depending on if you're including men convicted of murder) should more accurately be quoted as 350/390-ish to account for the Singapore mutineers, and that number then taken more as an opening bid than anything else. (There's one sepoy who appears during Blindfold & Alone, but his name for some reason isn't in the appendix with everyone else.)
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Mar 30, 2015 21:05
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That "Oh, death, sir, I suppose" story sounds like it came from a WWI version of Catch-22.
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Mar 30, 2015 21:12
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Shouldn't the military legal code have said "Death...or whatever punishment seems fitting according to the judgement of a court-martial"? I know the Articles of War used by the Napoleonic Royal Navy usually stuck that into most offenses, essentially allowing an officer to pick and choose between any punishment between a stern talking-to or execution as he sees fit. Fakeedit: I just went and dug up an online copy of the Manual of Military Law, 1914 edition. In Part 2: The Army Act, Section 19 (Drunkeness), page 398 for anyone curious, it states: quote:"The offense of drunkenness, whether on duty or not on duty, shall on conviction by court-martial be liable, if an officer, to be cashiered, or to suffer such less punishment as is in this Act mentioned, and if a soldier, to suffer imprisonment, or such less punishment as is in this Act mentioned, and, either in addition to, or in substitution for, any other punishment, to pay a fine not exceeding one pound." So how the devil did they go from a fine not exceeding one pound to death? I can only imagine a couple of pages got glued together and the young idiot didn't notice in his rush or something.
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Mar 30, 2015 21:18
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Can the accused appeal in this period? Can the dude next highest up the food chain pardon him?
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Mar 30, 2015 21:20
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Tomn posted:Fakeedit: I just went and dug up an online copy of the Manual of Military Law, 1914 edition. In Part 2: The Army Act, Section 19 (Drunkeness), page 398 for anyone curious... Drunkenness is one of those nasty little military crimes (like desertion, incidentally) for which the punishment is ordinarily a smack round the earhole, but when committed on active service, it's potentially punishable by death. Page 21 illustrates the principle: quote:33. An important distinction is made by the Act, in that certain Offences and pages 270 and 271: quote:Every person subject to military law who commits any of the following offences, that is to say, Emphasis mine. It's easy to see how a nervous, harrassed, mildly shell-shocked, and under-pressure subaltern, could flip to that page with a major waiting on him, and zero in on the words "...be liable to suffer death". "Or such less punishment, Chapman!" "But it says 'death' here, sir..." (Nobody was shot for being drunk in the trenches, but five men were executed for either sleeping at or quitting their post. An uncountable number more were lucky and escaped with a clip round the earhole and some ripe words from the sergeant.) HEY GAL posted:Can the accused appeal in this period? Can the dude next highest up the food chain pardon him? There was no right of appeal, but any sentence of death was automatically subject to confirmation by the Commander-in-Chief of the man's force (in the BEF that's French or Haig, at Gallipoli it's Sir Ian Hamilton, etc), and it was also required that every officer with responsibility for the man, from the Colonel up to the Army Commander, write to the Chief with their opinion on whether or not sentence should be confirmed. (Cue reports along the lines of "This man is a mental degenerate and is militarily useless", in literally those terms.) A shade over 3,000 death sentences (again, discounting Indians) were passed, and all but 346 (ish) of them were commuted to some other punishment. This happened often enough for fake promulgations to almost to be a running joke at Orders of the Day. "Private Thomas Atkins, 4th Battalion, Blankshire Regiment, was found guilty by Field General Court-Martial of desertion and sentenced...to DEATH!!!!!" (Dramatic pause.) "Commuted by the Commander-in-Chief to six months imprisonment, suspended for the duration, and three months' Field Punishment Number One." If the man was not British, the sentence also had to be confirmed by his country's Governor-General. More than 100 Australians were sentenced to death for military crimes, but none of the sentences were confirmed. This caused all sorts of hilarious petty squabbling between the War Office and various general staffs on one side, and the Australian government and the Governor-General on the other, who flatly refused to confirm sentences in direct opposition to his government's policy, despite some at times pretty intense pressure about undermining discipline and morale.
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Mar 30, 2015 22:06
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I have a question. During, say, the era of pike and shot, up through the end of the Napoleonic Wars, what was the fate of prisoners of war? Did they ransom them? Press them into military service or labor? Just hold them in some sort of imprisonment?
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Mar 30, 2015 22:15
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Tomn posted:So how the devil did they go from a fine not exceeding one pound to death? I can only imagine a couple of pages got glued together and the young idiot didn't notice in his rush or something. One thing often forgotten: After Christmas 1914, the military kind of panicked on all sides because of the soldiers suddenly being so amiable to their enemy. And so military law suddenly got a whole lot harsher.
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Mar 30, 2015 22:27
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Trin Tragula posted:"Or such less punishment, Chapman!" "But it says 'death' here, sir..." Ah, that makes more sense. Yeah, that sounds more like the usual military loophole: "Maximum penalty of death, minimum penalty of whatever you want, use your own judgement and go hog-wild." The subaltern's state of mind must have been a hell of a thing to see, though, if he insisted on thinking that death should have been the appropriate penalty even later on when writing it into his diary. By the way, in the case of the five guys you mentioned who got shot for sleeping at their post, was there anything unusual about their cases that caused them to fall into ill-luck where others just got shook awake and told to smarten up? Trin Tragula posted:This caused all sorts of hilarious petty squabbling between the War Office and various general staffs on one side, and the Australian government and the Governor-General on the other, who flatly refused to confirm sentences in direct opposition to his government's policy, despite some at times pretty intense pressure about undermining discipline and morale. Ah, so THAT'S why the Australians were so famously insolent to authority.
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Mar 30, 2015 22:31
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The manual is actually pretty practical on drunkeness:quote:Nothing can justify a soldier striking or offering violence to a superior, and great care is therefore enjoined to be taken to avoid bringing drunken soldiers in contact with their superiors. Mere abusive and violent language used by a drunken man, as the result of being taken into custody, should not be used as a ground for framing a charge of using threatening or insubordinate language to a superior officer (c). If a court-martial be required at all, discipline will generally be upheld by merely bringing the man to trial either for drunkenness (if he is liable to be tried) or for an offence under s. 40, treating the language as in the nature of riotous conduct only, and to that extent aggravating the offence. ie. part of your job as an officer is not to gently caress up and create a situation where someone has to be punished more harshly in order to maintain general discipline.
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Mar 30, 2015 22:36
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Tomn posted:Ah, that makes more sense. Yeah, that sounds more like the usual military loophole: "Maximum penalty of death, minimum penalty of whatever you want, use your own judgement and go hog-wild." Assuming the juror knew the case would be reviewed by the staff, it probably didn't bear that much of a significance for him - perhaps he just thought it wasn't the major's responsibility to make call on the ersatz punishment.
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Mar 30, 2015 22:37
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Trin Tragula posted:
My grandpa told me how he saw a guy get shot for sleeping while on guard duty and I always thought this was because of  so that's interesting to hear.
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Mar 31, 2015 06:37
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IM_DA_DECIDER posted:My grandpa told me how he saw a guy get shot for sleeping while on guard duty and I always thought this was because of
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Mar 31, 2015 07:35
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(Kind of ) related to that, I read somewhere that during the '40 offenses German soldiers were taking so much Pervitin that in some cases the supply of the stuff got priority over ammunition transport. Is there any truth to this?
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Mar 31, 2015 08:54
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Sleeping at one's post, or quitting it without orders, is often crunched together in the statistics. There were 6,567 men tried by Field General Court Martial for sleeping at or quitting their post. (Apparently I blobbed earlier and there were actually 9 men executed; 5 was the number of men executed for disobeying a lawful order.) Of these, 82 were sentenced to death for quitting their posts (with 7 carried out), and 449 were condemned for sleeping at their post with only 2 carried out. (Quite a lot of these would have been exhausted Australians on Gallipoli who would have been saved by the Governor-General in any case.) Here we run into something extremely annoying. The full set of papers still exists for every man who was actually executed; record of trial, sentence, and representations made to the Commander-in-Chief about whether sentence should be confirmed. However, in almost all cases, only the records of trial, sentence, and refusal of confirmation exist for men who were sentenced to death and then reprieved. This makes it impossible to compare cases and get a really good handle on the sort of circumstances that might see a man reprieved, because the submissions made by his officers to the Chief are all missing. The two men shot for sleeping at their post belonged to the 6th South Lancashires, and they seem to have been exceptionally unfortunate. Serving in Mesopotamia in February 1917, Privates Thomas Downing and Robert Burton were acting as forward sentries in the middle of the night. Downing had been on duty for 1 hour 45 minutes, Burton for 45 minutes. They were found sitting down in their trench, and the sergeant gave them a good kicking. Reading between the lines, their first piece of bad luck appears to have been that their sergeant was doing his rounds in the company of a second lieutenant. They were court-martialled the next day and appear to have defended themselves, not disputing the evidence against them and attempting to plead mitigation as best they could. (Unsurprisingly, not very well.) Many executed men had terrible records, long conduct sheets full of red ink. Quite a few of them had already received a death sentence and been reprieved. Downing and Burton were model Kitchener volunteers with three years' good conduct. Their colonel made fulsome representations to their good character, which the divisional commander agreed with; but Brigade and Corps commanders appear to have had a giant stick up their butts about the need to Set an Example, and they were shot two weeks after their offence, possibly together. As for the cases of quitting post, the ones that the book covers in detail are all very odd, even in the context of military executions being a very odd thing to begin with; from the decision to charge them at all, through the decision to charge them with quitting post instead of something else, the way the trials were conducted, the submissions to the Chief, the whole lot. It'd take the whole day to write them up. (Buy the book! And a large bottle of whisky.)
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Mar 31, 2015 11:35
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Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth politics are a continuation of war by other means, so this qualifies as military history: June 25, 1633. At the Warsaw Sejm called to crown Wladyslaw IV Vasa (elected a year before) the King of the Commonwealth, the deputaci of the Crown Tribunal elect Jan Stanislaw Sapieha, the Great Marshall of Lithuania, as their "chief director". His duties include giving a speech welcoming the new King on behalf of the Tribunal. As a witness, the Great Chancellor of Lithuania Albrycht Radziwill, puts it, Sapieha did it "in a hilarious way": "into oblivion went in his speech the King, his arrival, dignity and honour." Less hilarious: June 28 Sapieha threw a feast and invited everyone. Again, back to Radziwill: "There was no order (...). Food was so scarce that one filled one's stomach more with wit than dish. The Marshall, in the veritable madness he suffered from, threatened that now was the time to set gunpowder on fire, for it would be so much fun when so many vacancies open after we all fly maimed and without wings." Upon inspection it turned out that, uh, if you looked under the floor, "there were placed two barrels of gunpowder. We concluded that in the future it will be better not to take part in such tragic revelries."
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Mar 31, 2015 12:07
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If you had the poo poo luck of being born in Ireland you were 5 times more likely to be executed for a crime than your British counterpart.
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Mar 31, 2015 12:22
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IM_DA_DECIDER posted:My grandpa told me how he saw a guy get shot for sleeping while on guard duty and I always thought this was because of Well there is a very real  contingent to that, presuming your gramps was in the German army. When poo poo started going bad in 43 and ramping up even worse in 44 and 45, Germany executed TONS of its own soldiers for poo poo much of which wasn't even punishable by death in noal military courts. Stuff like "defeatism" etc.
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Mar 31, 2015 13:46
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My grandpa was a cook on a carrier in the Pacific. He stabbed a guy in the hand with a fork for taking two meats. That's my family's military experience.
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Mar 31, 2015 15:10
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Which carrier was it?
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Mar 31, 2015 15:22
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100 Years Ago The Ottomans are starting to turn up the heat again in Mesopotamia, the bungling for Gallipoli continues, the Battle of Woevre achieves nothing, and the newspaper has bought a gleaming new high horse to climb up onto when the Germans sink a passenger liner off the Welsh coast. Meanwhile, back in Glasgow, Mary Barbour's rent strike kicks into high gear as some idiot landlord attempts to evict the most sympathetic housewife in Scotland and creates an instant cause celebre. Guaranteed no incredibly morbid stories today! Probably. Probably no incredibly morbid stories.
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Mar 31, 2015 15:27
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Trin Tragula posted:Many executed men had terrible records, long conduct sheets full of red ink. Quite a few of them had already received a death sentence and been reprieved.
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Mar 31, 2015 15:28
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Cyrano4747 posted:Well there is a very real Yeah, when he told me his war experience (he was barely understandable at that stage), he said he was in Norway and then the south-east (Romania?) as some sort of combat engineer. I really wish I'd been able to understand him better. According to my mother he wasn't 'a real Nazi' because when the SS wanted him to join he chose the SA instead (oh mom  )Glorgnole posted:"What did your grandpa do in the war?" Well drat, this never occurred to me married but discreet fucked around with this message at 16:56 on Mar 31, 2015 |
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Mar 31, 2015 15:30
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IM_DA_DECIDER posted:Yeah, when he told me his war experience (he was barely understandable at that stage), he said he was in Norway and then the south-east (Romania?) as some sort of combat engineer. I really wish I'd been able to understand him better. "What did your grandpa do in the war?" "He was a goon."
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Mar 31, 2015 15:40
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Glorgnole posted:"What did your grandpa do in the war?" 
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Mar 31, 2015 15:44
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I think my great-aunt's first husband had some people shot for fairly minor crimes in WW2, but then again, he was a Partizan commissar, and the danger of undisciplined resistance units turning into bandits was very real.
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Mar 31, 2015 15:44
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I think one grandfather was in Panama, and the other was a conscript for some warlord in northern China, maybe Manchuria. I kinda wish I'd understood him better, but whatever it was, it shook him up really bad  He was always pretty strange, according to my mother.edit Any good and affordable books for that period?
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Mar 31, 2015 16:31
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SeanBeansShako posted:Which carrier was it? What meat was it.
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Mar 31, 2015 16:34
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Is there anyone who would be willing to do like a huge rear end effort post on like special forces, mainly those in the United States Armed Forces? Like what different groups are primarily tasked with and stuff like that? You can read wikipedia but it's not a particularly interesting read
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Mar 31, 2015 16:50
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Frostwerks posted:Is there anyone who would be willing to do like a huge rear end effort post on like special forces, mainly those in the United States Armed Forces? Like what different groups are primarily tasked with and stuff like that? You can read wikipedia but it's not a particularly interesting read I'd love to see something like this, but more from a historical POV - the origins of stuff like the Rangers, Special Forces, Marine Raiders, SEALs, etc. To be honest that's probably a lot easier than a more contemporary scope since some of those groups' more recent actions remain classified, while still covering a general overview of what their broad purpose was.
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Mar 31, 2015 16:55
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Speaking of wtf executions i like the one where the canadians let surrenderd germans trial 2 of their own and helped them in the execution of it. http://scholars.wlu.ca/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1121&context=cmh
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Mar 31, 2015 17:00
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Am I the only one looking for a phantom Kallikaa post? What the gently caress, now I see it. What a weird bug.
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Mar 31, 2015 17:12
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Disinterested posted:Am I the only one looking for a phantom Kallikaa post? Yeah, I've been experiencing the same thing with a few threads.
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Mar 31, 2015 17:13
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Kallikaa posted:Speaking of wtf executions i like the one where the canadians let surrenderd germans trial 2 of their own and helped them in the execution of it. This seems to have been par for the course at the end of WWII right? Like with the Allies using surrendered Japanese troops to maintain order before the colonial troops could return.
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Mar 31, 2015 17:26
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.