Posted on 09/07/2020 7:17:30 PM PDT by CheshireTheCat
The British military shot 306 soldiers for desertion or cowardice during World War I, but the very first of them was 19-year-old Thomas Highgate on September 8, 1914. This Kent farmhand and former seaman had enlisted back in 1913, before the world fell apart and that meant that even though Highgate was a trained up and ready to go when the Queen’s Own Royal West Kent Regiment deployed to France as part of the British Expeditionary Force. Young Master Highgate had the honor of participating in the first British engagement of the Great War, the Battle of Mons. The ensuing Retreat from Mons scrambled the BEF, sprinkling the French countryside with stragglers, though there is little evidence that these men represented a trend towards wholesale desertion as against the disorder inherent to the retreat. The horrors of trench warfare still lay in the (very near) future but perhaps British commanders who aspired to put the Hun to jolly rout were already shaken by the dawning reality of a long and inglorious slog.
“Everyone has a plan ’til they get punched in the mouth,” Mike Tyson once quipped. In Blindfold and Alone: British Military Executions in the Great War, Cathryn Corns and John Hughes-Wilson suggest that BEF Commander-in-Chief John French had become a bit unmanned by the punches the Germans had thrown at his beautiful army* and fired off the memo that would doom Thomas Highgate in an embarrassed panic...
(Excerpt) Read more at executedtoday.com ...
The real brutality of war....
Damn...
“Highgate having the benefit of only 47 minutes’ advance notice, just enough time to scribble a tear-jerking “will” leaving the remains of his salary due to a girlfriend in Dublin. His execution was published in army orders a few days later — a little warning to the rest of the team.”
What a disastrous stupid war. All sides were gung-ho and itching for war, but 4 years and 20 million deaths later, there were no winners. On a personal note, my great-great uncle was shot and killed by the Germans.
My quiet hardworking grandfather we not over the top seven times til he was shot in the hand. While in the trench for care, he got gassed (mustard gas).
Came back to Minnesota, never complained though his lungs sounded awful.
An unappreciated hero like 99% of our troops fighting against modern weapons with tactics developed hundreds of years prior. And
Darned iPhone and no glasses.
My grandfather grew up in Danzig, Germany. He fought the Russians on the eastern front, was captured, and because a Russian POW. He escaped and walked back to Danzig. I’ve got the memoir he wrote of his time as a soldier and POW.
> What a disastrous stupid war. <
Yes, indeed. It would have been better to leave the deserters alone, and instead shoot all the generals.
Damn that's fast. Poor kid. Today's heinous, cold-blooded killers are condemned in 1960, death sentence endorsed in 1970, appealed in 1980, appealed again in 1990, hullaballoo about which drug to use to kill the prisoner in 2000, and finally the condemned dies of old age in 2010.
We should have stayed out of it.
Reading the detail, he wasn’t a straggler, he was an intentional deserter.
“We should have stayed out of it.”
“He kept us out of the war”.
-Wilson’s re-election slogan...
Commissars were more efficient in enforcing compliance...
The guy took off his uniform and dressed as a French peasant while he was AWOL from his unit?
Good luck explaining that idea to a military judge in the middle of a real war zone.
If the Germans had caught him in peasant clothes, he would have been shot as a spy.
It might be of interest to note that the first shot fired by an American serviceman toward a German serviceman during WW1 took place in Guam.
That’s scary. What if the recoil made Guam tip over?
Merle Hay was reported to be the first American killed in WW1. There is a street and a large mall in Des Moines, IA named after him.
Merle Hay - Wikipedia
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merle_Hay
My grandfather was in the trenches as an army officer. He then transferred to the signal corps and was a observation plane pilot. Survived three plane crashes.
My great grandfather fought on the Somme in 1914, 1916 and 1940. My wife's great grandfather as a Pole volunteered for the German army in 1917 and was KIA outside Warsaw that year. His son fought against the Germans in 1939 and was a POW.
The Europeans entered the 20th century at the pinnacle of human progress and political power and threw it all away, turning a good part of Europe into a human slaughterhouse.
Now that is an amazing bit of historical trivia. How in the world did that happen?
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