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 ...
1. US was neutral. German warships could enter the harbor, buy fuel, whatever, just get out within a certain time (48 hours?). (See slso, “Admiral Graf Spee” in Montevideo.)
2. US declared war on Germany in 1917. Word got to Guam before soldiers got to Europe.
3. There was a German warship in the harbor. It could have been engaged by US ships or shore batteries and wouldn’t have had a chance.
4. A boat full of US Navy went out to, I guess, talk to the Germans to get them to surrender and be interned. Meanwhile a boat from the ship started toward them.
5. On order or being trigger-happy, a US Sailor fired a warning shot across or over the German boat.
IIRC, the Germans surrendered with no more shots, but scuttled the ship in a deep part of the harbor.
If only Britain, and subsequently, the US, had stayed out of it, both would be much stronger today.
SMS Cormoran rests 110 feet (34 m) below the water of Apra harbor on her port side. A Japanese cargo ship, the Tokai Maru, which was sunk during World War II leans up against her screw. Together the ships are one of the few places where a diver can visit a sunken vessel of World War I next to a sunken vessel of World War II.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scuttling_of_SMS_Cormoran
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.