In a situation where an officer orders a soldier to go secure a position and the soldier refuses, can the officer pull out his sidearm and shoot the soldier? Does it matter if they are under fire?
This is about the American Army.
no
Why? What purpose would that serve?
To make sure the next man follows the order.
“Misbehavior before the enemy” is a capital offense in the US military, so I believe your solider could be sentenced to death if they were under fire. But he’d have to actually be sentenced by a Court Martial, just shooting him on the spot would be illegal (and probably unconstitutional).
I think the last person in the US military actually put to death for a crime that wasn’t murder was in WWII, though, so I think in general the military doesn’t seek the maximum sentence in such cases.
Or shoots the officer.
Can he? Yes.
May he, without being subject to charges? Likely not.
It is not legal to do so, no. An officer can take the Soldier and put him in custody, take away his weapon, handcuff him and call the MPs, who will take him away to await court martial (if the offense is bad enough.) If an officer shoots a Soldier for disobeying an order, the officer would be tried for murder.
What Simplicio and JMan said. At whatever point it becomes practically feasible the officer shall order the disobeying soldier arrested and taken to HQ for processing and punishment – that is, unless Ptv. Hellnoway is actually posing a direct and imminent threat to the lives of his comrades, (e.g. aggressively aiming his weapon at his squad leader). Then it becomes a situational call as to what is proportionate response.
What about all those officers with pistols in the trenches to make sure you “went over the top” in WWI? Did that actually happen, and was it legal?
Private John Bennett, in 1961, for rape and attempted murder. He was also the last person to be executed by the military. Everyone on the military death row now is there for murder, though.
Eddie Slovik was the last soldier executed for a purely military offence. He was shot for desertion in 1944. He was also the first deserter executed since the Civil War. All other military executions (141) carried out by the US Army during WWII were for rape and/or murder.
I asked a co-worker of mine who was a captain in the air defense artillery about this and he said that the only time you could summarily shoot one of your men was if he was going over to the enemy. Then you can do to him what you would do to any other enemy soldier. It occurs to me that you don’t have to be the soldier’s CO to do that.
FWIW,
Rob
I read To the Last Man a few months ago,a history of the Dunkirk evacuation and there was a bit about I believe a Guards unit(though I could be wrong)just out from the Brits perimeter that saw a diplomatically,unnamed outfit pull back to just ahead and to the right of them.
The unit was"in bits"from being in continious close contact fighting for the previous four days on the move,the real killer not being from fear and stress which would in itself have been severe but the total lack of sleep(Apart from micro sleeps).
A messenger was sent to the new outfit to tell them that any man who fell back from a particular tree would be shot.
Their officer protested that they were physically incapable of carrying on the fight for much longer and were running out of ammunition but the order stood.
A little while later an officer and one other attempted to enter the perimeter,presumably to get permission to fall back and were both shot dead,which I thought a trifle harsh myself.
I expect any moment now a surge of Mil.Historians to post"ah that was such and such and the Sherwood Foresters or what ever.2
I hope so cos I hate being so vague.
It didn’t happen, at least in the British/Imperial militaries. The officers were expected to lead the charge, so the bloke with the Webley revolver and the whistle was usually one of the first to get machine-gunned by the Germans.
I’ve been told that the best procedure for many soldiers involved in obviously suicidal attacks was to simply run like hell for the nearest shell-hole, jump in, fire as much of their ammunition off as they could in the general direction of the German lines, then wait until dark and crawl back to their own trenches, make up a vague hand-waving story about how they’d been separated from their unit, shot some Boche, and had barely escaped with the skin of their teeth, and if anyone needed them they’d be having a brew-up with the boys from the East Lancashires.
The Russian military were known to shoot people who tried to run away, and there’s a reason why the term pour l’encouragement des les autres isn’t in English- The French were known to randomly shoot people [del] whose lack of faith they found disturbing[/del] troublemakers, to prevent them from stirring the already discontent soldiers up any further and causing even more serious problems.
The Germans, as far as I know, never engaged in the practice of shooting their own soldiers for not climbing out of trenches and charging at Vickers guns; FWIW 95% of the “Atrocities” attributed to the Germans during WWI were figments of the media’s imagination, designed to try and encourage popular support for a war that neither the British, the French, or the Germans had any real reason to be involved in with each other- especially given that the British and the Germans had no particular quarrel with each other.
In fact WWI nearly ended on Christmas Day, 1914 (and again in 1915)- the British (and French, in 1915) and the Germans climbed out of the the trenches in many places, exchanged gifts in No Man’s Land, and even played soccer with each other. The fertiliser hit the ventilator when the Brass found out, but there was a very real possibility that the troops on both sides would simply lay down their arms and say “We’re not going to fight them anymore. Sod the lot of you.”
WWII was considerably clearer about why everyone was fighting the Germans, of course…
While many attacks WERE wiped out before the troops had cleared our own wire some large scale attacks did make it as far as the enemys support lines and even further but faltered on the breakthrough and then fell back because the terrain was like the surface of the moon with mud(All the historic field drains having been destroyed by shelling the watertable was high)making it nigh on impossible for exploitation troops and logistics to get through though no doubt many did find “A Better 'ole”
Pour l’encouragement des les autres was written I believe by Sarte about the Royal Navy,The British on ocassion shoot one of their Admirals to encourage the others,referring to Admiral Byng who when pursuing an enemy fleet with his own managed to let them get away by following standard Naval Fleet orders too rigidly.
He was Courtmarshalled and shot on his own quarterdeck,he himself giving the order to fire.
Voltaire, to be precise. He was writing about Admiral Byng, indeed. The quote comes from his novel Candide. The quote is, by the way, “pour encourager les autres”.
<<In Portsmouth, Candide witnesses the execution of an officer by firing squad; and is told that “in this country, it is wise to kill an admiral from time to time to encourage the others” (Dans ce pays-ci, il est bon de tuer de temps en temps un amiral pour encourager les autres).>> (wikipedia dixit).
And the reason for shooting Admiral Byng was for “not doing his outmost” in a naval battle against the French near Minorca (which was at the time a British possession). Minorca was later lost to the French, after Byng had been already put under arrest. The outrage in Britain at the defeat was such that a convenient scapegoat was needed, and found, in Byng.
Just my 2 eurocent!
Even though the practice in its modern sense may have sprung from an event in the Royal Navy, the idea of randomly shooting people who were thought to be causing trouble or shirking their duty was applied with more regularity in the French trenches during WWI, especially around the time of the Verdun Mutiny…
Yes spot on :smack:
And, if one stretches a bit the definition, it can be said to come from far, far earlier times.
Elimination of “troublesome elements” in an army can be argued to be well documented in the Roman legions. That is where the word “decimation” comes from, after all: “decimatio, -onis: elimination of 1 in every 10 members of a military unit because of insubordination or other disturbance”.
Lots were cast and those marked for execution were beaten to death by their own comrades. It is said that, although the choice of those who died was supposed to be random, shrewd commanders would “massage” the casting of lots to make sure that only the real trouble-makers (leaders of a mutiny attempt, for instance) would be “marked by the gods”. Julius Caesar is supposed to have done that.
Just my 2 eurocent!