Few would still adopt the view taken by British military historian John Keegan that the First World War was ‘a curiously civilised war’ that saw ‘little massacre or atrocity’.Footnote 1 Nonetheless, many historians continue to regard prisoner killing as having been an absolute exception during the Great War, something that was ‘episodic’ (Alan Kramer)Footnote 2 and happened only ‘in isolated cases’ (Benjamin Ziemann).Footnote 3 One reason for this assessment might be the fact that the subject has rarely been examined empirically. The only in-depth study to date – an unpublished PhD thesis from 2006 – concluded, however, that the killing of prisoners and potential prisoners was in fact ‘the most frequent atrocity’ committed by British infantry soldiers on the First World War’s western front, and one that happened there ‘in significant numbers’.Footnote 4
More than 5 million British soldiers served in the First World War, the vast majority of them in the main theatre of war on the western front. The biggest troop contribution to the conflict made by any of the self-governing Dominions and by far the biggest contribution made by any British imperial possession (including India) to the European theatre were the almost 620,000 Canadians who enlisted in the Canadian Expeditionary Force.Footnote 5 Aside from Paul Hodges’s aforementioned PhD thesis on the British, only two other studies have addressed in some degree of detail prisoner killings committed at or near the front by the British and Canadian Expeditionary Forces: Tim Cook’s article on the Canadians, also from 2006, and Brian Feltman’s article on the British from 2010.Footnote 6
Compared to the works by Hodges, Cook and Feltman, this article offers a new and original approach in two important respects. Firstly, this is the first study directly to compare the two largest armies of the British Empire on the western front. Secondly, it is based on a much wider range of different types of primary source: British and Canadian letters, private diaries, memoirs, newspaper articles, unit war diaries, operational orders, after-action reports, and training manuals. By contrast, Feltman’s source material comprises overwhelmingly the testimonies of German soldiers and a handful of British memoirs. Although the source material consulted by Hodges (for the British) and Cook (for the Canadians) is broader than Feltman’s, it does not include unit war diaries or after-action reports. This comprehensive survey of the primary sources, in turn, provides a more rounded and nuanced picture. Among other significant finds, it identifies a substantial additional number of prisoner killings not previously reported in the secondary literature. Among these is the earliest documented case of a Canadian battlefield prisoner killing, which predates the previously recognised first instance by an entire year. For these reasons, this article goes well beyond the existing scholarship on the topic.
The article is structured into four thematic sections. The first and most substantial examines common motivations among soldiers and officers for killing prisoners and potential prisoners on the battlefield and, in the case of the latter, for issuing corresponding orders to take no prisoners. This is followed by sections on temporal peaks in British and Canadian prisoner killing; the importance of dehumanisation (and the role of regional bias); and, finally, the role and perspectives of senior commanders and the lack of sanctions or court-martial proceedings for the murder of captive enemy soldiers. In drawing some conclusions at the end of the article, I also briefly consider the actions of two further armies on the western front: the French and, especially, the German.
Before addressing battlefield prisoner killing in more detail, it is worth providing a brief overview of the legal situation as of 1914. The authoritative handbook for British soldiers was the Manual of Military Law, first issued by the War Office in 1884. In February 1914, on the eve of the First World War, a new, sixth edition was published. Compared to the previous edition from 1907, the 1914 edition contained an entirely new chapter entitled ‘The Laws and Usages of War’. At 132 pages in length, the new chapter was by far the longest in the Manual.Footnote 7 It incorporated relevant provisions from the recent Hague Convention respecting the Laws and Customs of War on Land, signed on 18 October 1907, according to which ‘it is especially forbidden – … To kill or wound treacherously individuals belonging to the hostile nation or army; … To kill or wound an enemy who … has surrendered …; … To declare that no quarter will be given; … To employ arms … calculated to cause unnecessary suffering’.Footnote 8 Article 1 of the Hague Convention required the contracting parties to issue instructions to their armed forces conforming to the regulations concerning the laws and customs of war on land.Footnote 9 The 1914 edition of the Manual of Military Law was accordingly very clear in its prohibitions. In line with the Hague Convention, it was expressly forbidden, for instance, ‘to employ arms … calculated to cause unnecessary suffering’, including expanding bullets, ‘to declare that no quarter will be given’ or ‘to kill or wound an enemy who having laid down his arms, or having no longer means of defence, has surrendered’. Importantly, the passages on the killing of surrendered combatants included the following clarification: ‘War is for the purpose of overcoming armed resistance, and no vengeance can be taken because an individual has done his duty to the last but escaped injury …’ Torture was likewise prohibited; interrogations of prisoners had to be ‘humane and not compulsive’.Footnote 10
Prisoner killing, the issuing of orders to take no prisoners, and the use of expanding bullets and torture were thus clearly defined as excessive, unacceptable and illegal forms of violence in the authoritative handbook for British soldiers on the eve of the First World War. The Manual of Military Law was also valid for Canadian troops, who fought under British command until June 1917, and it was distributed to units of the Canadian Expeditionary Force.Footnote 11 As Tim Cook has observed, there was nonetheless ‘a grey area for soldiers attempting to negotiate these rules. Was a soldier automatically a prisoner when he put up his arms, or did he have to first be accepted as a prisoner to receive the protection afforded by international law?’ Although Cook is right to argue that the former is how the Hague Convention is normally interpreted, it is undoubtedly an exaggeration to claim that the latter was ‘usual practice’ on the Great War battlefield.Footnote 12 If this had been the case, the number of German soldiers captured, for instance, by the British (around 500,000) would surely not have been so high.Footnote 13 Nonetheless, the moments immediately before and after capture, when soldiers were still at or near the front, were certainly the most dangerous time for prisoners and potential prisoners, and killings by British and Canadian troops in such situations – despite their illegality – constituted a remarkably widespread phenomenon. As the English poet and First World War officer Robert Graves wrote in his memoir: ‘The most obvious opportunity [for atrocities] was in the interval between surrender of prisoners and their arrival (or non-arrival) at headquarters. And it was an opportunity of which advantage was only too often taken.’Footnote 14
Motivations
The contents of the Hague Convention and the Manual of Military Law suggest that the British government was at least serious about being seen to be observing the laws of war in treating German captives humanely, but ‘a noteworthy minority of British soldiers and officers’ was less interested in heeding the laws of war or in punishing comrades who maltreated defenceless prisoners.Footnote 15 The practice of prisoner killing appears to have ‘evolved more or less spontaneously among front-line troops’.Footnote 16 Although it is impossible to reconstruct the precise reasons for many such acts, four common motivations can be identified from the available sources: first and foremost revenge, followed by practical considerations, self-preservation and the receipt of orders designed to stimulate aggression. The first documented case of prisoner killing by the British was committed within a month of the start of the war. In response to a German officer shooting and killing a doctor tending to a wounded man, members of the 2nd Battalion, Royal Irish Regiment,Footnote 17 ‘captured about 16 prisoners who put their hands up, but they shot the lot, and small blame to them’; the artillery captain describing the events in his diary entry for 28 August 1914 appeared to approve of these actions.Footnote 18 This was the unit’s first engagement of the war.Footnote 19 The motivation here was clearly to take revenge for an act committed by the other side and deemed illegitimate, namely the shooting of a doctor tending to a wounded man. Similarly, Richard H. Joyce, a lieutenant leading a company of the 58th Battalion, 9th Canadian Infantry Brigade, used the discovery of the body of a padre and several Canadian wounded with fresh bayonet injuries earlier the same day as justification for personally turning a machine gun on about fifty Germans ‘trying to surrender’ at Mont Sorrell on 13 June 1916.Footnote 20
An eagerness to avenge slain comrades was a common motivation for killing prisoners, regardless of whether the comrades in question had themselves been the victim of an atrocity or not. After the capture of a small group of German prisoners in early March 1916, a soldier in the 9th Battalion, Duke of Wellington’s (West Riding) Regiment, ‘put a bayonet in the first prisoner’s eye and loosed off’. Recounting the incident in a letter, a lieutenant from the same unit added ‘he had lost a brother in the war so perhaps he was justified’.Footnote 21 On another occasion in August 1918, an officer in the 2nd Battalion, Scots Guards, gave explicit permission when asked by a sergeant for leave to shoot the captured members of a German machine-gun post; the reason the sergeant gave was to ‘avenge my brother’s death’.Footnote 22 In September 1917, an officer in the Tank Corps helped to disarm a lance corporal who – screaming ‘You bastards, you killed my brother’ – was firing his revolver at a German party of ‘some half dozen prisoners who were carrying two stretchers with wounded’, though no one was hit.Footnote 23 On 15 September 1916 at Courcelette, during the second phase of the Battle of the Somme, Frank Maheux, a Québécois soldier in the 21st Battalion, 4th Canadian Infantry Brigade, witnessed ‘a chum of mine’ killed beside him. Though the Germans put up their hands to surrender when they realised they were beaten, Maheux ‘saw red’ and, as he wrote in a letter home, ‘dear wife it was to[o] late’.Footnote 24
Sometimes it was not relatives or friends but esteemed officers or simply comrades in general who were avenged. To avenge two officers who had allegedly been ‘murdered by the Huns’, the commanding officer of the 1st Battalion, Dorset Regiment, instructed his men on 30 June 1916: ‘No prisoners for the Dorsets.’Footnote 25 A lieutenant in the 5th Battalion, Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders, recorded in July 1918 how the occupant of a German machine-gun post had ‘continued to fire until we were almost on top of it’, then ‘stuck up his arms in the Kamerad act’; he received ‘no quarter from a Glaswegian using his bayonet’, who ‘had seen his comrades shot down’.Footnote 26 Writing to his family in August 1918, one officer in the Canadian Field Artillery conceded: ‘The Huns are brave – I know that now…. I can think of no one braver than the man who stays behind with a machine-gun, fighting a rear-guard action and covering his comrades’ road to freedom.’ At the same time, the officer acknowledged that a German machine-gunner ‘knows that he will receive no quarter from our people and will never live to be thanked by his own. His lot is to die alone, hated by the last human being who watches him.’Footnote 27 The available evidence suggests that machine-gunners were rarely given quarter, at least by this stage in the war.Footnote 28
In addition to prisoner killing as an immediate response to fresh atrocities committed by the other side, as seen above, prisoners might also be killed as revenge for earlier enemy atrocities. The aforementioned instructions issued on 30 June 1916 by the commanding officer of the 1st Battalion, Dorset Regiment, not to take prisoners were in fact a reinforcement of an order already given more than a year earlier, on 2 May 1915. In response to heavy losses due to German gas attacks, during which ‘our dear boys died like rats in a trap’, the ‘Dorset Regiment’s motto now is, “No Prisoners”. No quarter will be given when we again get to fighting.’Footnote 29 It is the first recorded example, nine months into the Great War, of a British unit issuing an order to take no prisoners (the second being the follow-up instructions of 30 June 1916). This illustrates the spontaneous nature of prisoner killing during the opening months of the conflict and beyond.
Revenge for German gas attacks was also the reason cited by George Stonefish, a First Nations private in the 1st Battalion (Ontario Regiment), 1st Canadian Infantry Brigade, for his unit not taking more German prisoners at Givenchy on 15 June 1915. Writing five days later to a friend back home in southern Ontario, Private Stonefish stated:
You know, we could have taken lots of prisoners but did not want to as we wanted to get some of our own back for what they did on April 23rd [at the Second Battle of Ypres], and I tell you we certainly made up for it alright and will give them some more of their medicine when we get back. We only took six of them alive, so you can tell for yourself alright.Footnote 30
Stonefish was referring to the first large-scale use by Germany of poison gas on the western front. In turn, the 1st Battalion responded with the earliest known example of battlefield prisoner killing by Canadian troops. A local Ontario newspaper, The Chatham Daily Planet, printed the private’s letter in full – without particular comment and without anonymising its author – on 10 July 1915.
On other occasions, it was less personal and thus more abstract events, such as the sinking of the British ocean liner Lusitania by a German submarine on 7 May 1915 (‘Someone shouted, “Remember the Lusitania!” and it was all over with Jerry’)Footnote 31 or German atrocities in Belgium (‘One has only to think what these Huns did to the Belgians & I say that when you catch one kill him slowly, but make sure you are doing away with him’),Footnote 32 that were the trigger for acts of vengeance in the form of prisoner killing. There can be little doubt that the reported atrocities of the Germans were used by British and Canadian soldiers to justify reciprocal atrocities, thereby contributing to a radicalisation of violence on the ground.Footnote 33 Ernest Shephard, a company sergeant-major in the 1st Battalion, Dorset Regiment, reflected in his diary in mid-May 1915 on German ‘frightfulness’ and how best to respond to it:
What is my opinion of [the] state of affairs at present? That this fierce fighting is the beginning of the end; the enemy realising that he cannot win by fair means; is now launching every implement of ‘frightfulness’ against us. This murderous gas, the murder of passengers of ocean-going boats (particularly the Lusitania)[,] the destructive and useless (from a military point of view) bombarding of occupied towns[s] (Dunkirk). The Zeppelin so-called raids. All these things point to the enemy being in desperate straights [sic] and trying to win thro’ by these methods, or in any case doing all the damage possible…. Surely no man can read of this Lusitania affair without the desire to avenge the poor dear little kiddies and helpless women who were lost… … No such measures as Germany employ are wanted except as to gas. This we are entitled to use, and should now do so to our utmost.Footnote 34
Likewise in May 1915, George L. Ormsby, a sergeant in the 15th Battalion (48th Highlanders), 3rd Canadian Infantry Brigade, wrote to his wife that he had been informed of how Germans at the Second Battle of Ypres had ‘captured one of the 48th sergeants and the boys found him crucified to a door with bayonets through his hands & feet’.Footnote 35 In his interwar memoir, the aforementioned Robert Graves wrote that the Canadians’ motive for violence against prisoners ‘was said to be revenge for a Canadian found crucified with bayonets through his hands and feet’.Footnote 36 Though ‘this atrocity was never substantiated’ (Graves), it proved to be a powerful rumour.Footnote 37 Two days after relating the crucifixion story to his wife, Sergeant Ormsby informed her of the widespread fury at the sinking of the Lusitania and his unit’s resulting disinclination to take German prisoners:
We have just heard that the Lusitania has been sunk and nearly 1500 lives lost. What a cowardly act. Our chaps & in fact the whole army is furious. I am afraid there will be very few prisoners taken by our boys…. I am in the machine gun section now. When they asked for volunteers I could not resist the temptation of joining. With this weapon we will be able to mow down the brutes in thousands.Footnote 38
It was with this mindset that the sergeant went into his very first engagement of the Great War, at the Battle of Festubert.
Numerous soldiers’ letters alluding to Allied atrocities have survived in spite of the imposition of censorship on correspondence dispatched from the front lines. To guarantee that militarily sensitive information did not fall into the wrong hands, to identify instances of subversion and to assess the morale and well-being of troops, letters from the front line underwent a process of censorship. However, only rank-and-file soldiers were subjected to enforced censorship; officers were expected to censor their own letters. Some soldiers attempted to circumvent the military censors either by using civilian postal services or by giving private correspondence to men going home on leave, for it to then be posted in England.Footnote 39 For example, one private in the Royal Sussex Regiment, writing from France on 21 January 1915, started ‘the longest letter I have ever written’ to his girlfriend (and later wife) by noting ‘this letter will be posted in England’.Footnote 40
A further argument often used to justify the killing of prisoners or potential prisoners was that enemy captives would be a burden on their captors. The Manual of Military Law addressed just such cases when it stated: ‘A commander may not put his prisoners to death because their presence retards his movements or diminishes his means of resistance by necessitating a large guard, or by reason of their consuming his supplies.’Footnote 41 It was an unwillingness to share rations with captives that provided the context for one of the largest massacres of German prisoners, carried out by members of the 2nd Battalion, Royal Scots, at Hooge in June 1915. As a member of a neighbouring unit observed:
The Royal Scots took about 300 prisoners, their officer told them to share their rations with the prisoners and to consider the officers were not with them, the Scots immediately shot the whole lot, and shouted ‘Death and Hell to everyone of ye s—’ and in five minutes the ground was ankle deep with German blood.Footnote 42
There is some evidence to suggest that British troops were regularly informed that they would have to share their rations with captured enemy soldiers, though it is not entirely clear whether this information was designed to encourage humane treatment of prisoners or to discourage their capture in the first place. While still training in England, one officer in the Royal Engineers heard the following in early December 1915 from ‘fellows who have already been out in Flanders’: ‘Before any decent sized attack, orders are issued to the effect that if any prisoners are taken they will be fed from our own men’s rations.’Footnote 43 One instructor at a British training camp at Étaples reminded his trainees: ‘Remember, boys, … every prisoner means a day’s rations gone.’Footnote 44 At least some Canadian units were given similar instructions. At the Battle of Vimy Ridge in April 1917, for instance, a platoon officer in the 13th Battalion, 3rd Infantry Brigade, informed his men: ‘Remember, no prisoners. They will just eat your rations.’Footnote 45
Other practical concerns that encouraged the killing of prisoners or potential prisoners were sometimes cited by those involved. In his notes ‘from recent fighting’ by II Corps, dated 17 August 1916, General Sir Claud Jacob urged that no prisoners should be taken, as they would only hinder ‘mopping up’.Footnote 46 A report of a raid carried out by members of the 10th Canadian Infantry Brigade on the night of 12/13 February 1917 described the fate of occupants of dugouts forced out by the use of phosphorus bombs by the 46th Battalion: ‘Owing to the very high parapet of trench and difficulty of leading these men as prisoners, it was found necessary to kill them.’Footnote 47 In a letter to a friend, dated 3 March 1917, Captain John Eugene Crombie of the 4th Battalion, Gordon Highlanders, wrote that ‘the instructions are that these poor half-blinded devils should be bayoneted as they come up’ from a dugout, because ‘it would be difficult to spare men if you took them prisoners’.Footnote 48 In a similar vein, after the 50th Battalion, 10th Canadian Infantry Brigade, overran German positions at the Battle of Vimy Ridge in April 1917, many of the unarmed prisoners who emerged from their dugouts were not taken alive because the ‘number of men required to herd them back to the P.O.W. Cages could not be spared’.Footnote 49 Writing in his private diary on 21 June 1918, Lieutenant A. G. Virtue of the 61st Battery, Canadian Field Artillery, quoted a single line from a report of a raid north of Fampoux carried out the previous night by members of the 13th (Service) Battalion, Royal Scots, and supported by his own battery: ‘“We took 50 (?) prisoners but as we found this number encumbered our withdrawal we brought only 7 of them back.”’ Lieutenant Virtue himself added: ‘Such is war.’Footnote 50
Alongside practical concerns and a desire for vengeance, plain self-preservation was a third prominent motivation for killing prisoners. There were numerous stories of fake surrenders, in which unsuspecting soldiers were gunned down after responding to a disingenuous white flag. This quickly led to a widespread disbelief in what had hitherto been the most clear-cut signal of laying down arms and capitulation. Duplicitous use of the white flag by German soldiers was already referred to in early examples of British wartime propaganda, for example the first issue of Kaiser Bill’s Weekly Liar, a newsletter jokingly ‘written’ by the Kaiser to his subjects, dated 18 September 1914.Footnote 51 Five days later, a sergeant in the 2nd Battalion, King’s Royal Rifle Corps, was already referring in his diary to ‘the old white flag trick’.Footnote 52 Further deadly white flag incidents were recorded by one British captain in September and October 1914.Footnote 53 In November 1914, a German soldier at the wire of the 2nd Battalion, Royal Irish Rifles, who ‘dropped his wire-cutters and made a friendly motion with his hand, intending surrender’, was killed, with the shooter citing a white flag incident some weeks earlier as justification.Footnote 54 After encountering Germans in a trench waving white flags to surrender and then opening fire, the next time soldiers of the 3rd Canadian Infantry Brigade ‘took no notice and practically exterminated the garrison’ at Amiens on 8 August 1918.Footnote 55 At Cagnicourt on 2 September 1918, two members of a German machine-gun crew in the process of being encircled ‘stood up with raised hands’, upon which a lieutenant leading a platoon of 3 Company, 14th Battalion (Royal Montreal Regiment), 3rd Canadian Infantry Brigade, rose to accept the surrender and was shot dead. His avenging men stormed the position and, as the battalion’s war diary openly acknowledged, ‘the crew[,] needless to say, did not live long, after this cowardly act’.Footnote 56 The Canadians did not stop there; an after-action report reveals that they in fact ‘killed every member of two crews and also killed a large number [of German soldiers] that were coming from CAGNICOURT to surrender’.Footnote 57
A final common motivation for killing prisoners was the receipt of orders designed to stimulate aggression. Some officers appeared to believe that issuing a ‘take no prisoners’ order would enhance the aggression and, therefore, the fighting capability of their men.Footnote 58 On 8 April 1917, the day before the Battle of Arras, Major Herbert E. Trevor, acting lieutenant-colonel and commanding officer of the 9th (Service) Battalion, Essex Regiment, proudly informed his father, a general, by letter that he had told his men ‘in confidence that there was only one Good Bosch [sic] & that was a dead un so I think they will take my tip. If we can only give the Hun a real good licking I think he will be inclined to cave in.’Footnote 59 There can be little doubt that such orders were frequently implemented and thus actually led to an increase in prisoner killing. Private Arthur Hubbard of the 1/14th (County of London) Battalion, London Regiment, related in a letter to his family in early July 1916 that he had received ‘strict orders not to take prisoners, no matter if wounded’. He went on to describe how his ‘first job’ had then been ‘to empty my magazine on 3 Germans that came out of their deep dugouts, bleeding badly’; the soldiers ‘cried for mercy, but I had my orders’.Footnote 60 The night before a 26 September 1916 assault at the Battle of the Somme, the commanding officer of the 15th Battalion, 3rd Canadian Infantry Brigade, finished his briefing by saying ‘I don’t want any prisoners’; one private in the battalion then personally witnessed ‘the execution of several Germans in battle and afterwards’.Footnote 61
In his memoir, Brigadier-General Frank Percy Crozier, commander of the 9th (Service) Battalion, 107th (Ulster) Brigade, at the Battle of the Somme, referred both to less immediate enemy atrocities and the inconvenience of escorting enemy prisoners to the rear when citing possible motivations for prisoner killing:
The German atrocities (many of which I doubt in secret), the employment of gas in action, the violation of French women, and the ‘official murder’ of Nurse Cavell all help to bring out the brute-like bestiality which is so necessary for victory…. The British soldier is a kindly fellow and it is safe to say, despite the dope [propaganda], seldom oversteps the mark of barbaric propriety in France, save occasionally to kill prisoners he cannot be bothered to escort back to his lines.Footnote 62
The different motivations explored above varied not only between soldiers but also across ranks, shaping distinct patterns of behaviour. Rank-and-file British and Canadian soldiers appear to have killed German prisoners overwhelmingly out of revenge. Among officers, by contrast, motives – whether for issuing orders or actively engaging in the act of prisoner killing – were more varied. Thus, while revenge was not uncommon, less emotion-based motives, such as practical considerations and self-preservation, also played a role for officers. There is no evidence to suggest that officers had a moderating effect on their men when it came to giving no quarter, as one might expect; quite the contrary. Writing in 1916 while serving as assistant chaplain general to the Third Army, Reverend Thomas Wentworth Pym commented that the ‘attitude of personal antagonism to the enemy is, of course, more noticeable in the senior officers’.Footnote 63 Stephen Graham, who had served as a private in the elite Scots Guards, noted in his 1919 memoir: ‘Although the British soldier had a “sneaking” admiration for the German as a good fighter, this admiration was generally eliminated through the inspiration of officers and N.C.O.’s. The regimental tone absolutely forbade admiration of anything in connection with Germans.’Footnote 64 As a result, continued Graham, the impression pervading the British army was: ‘A good soldier was one who would not take a prisoner.’Footnote 65
Peaks in illegal killing: the Somme and the Hundred Days Offensive
The Battle of the Somme from July to November 1916 was the largest offensive the British army had launched to that date. By mid-1916, the bulk of the British army comprised locally recruited Territorial Force units, Kitchener’s ‘New Army’ volunteers and Dominion formations. This expansion drastically altered the face of what had been a small professional force two years earlier. By the start of the Somme offensive, the British Expeditionary Force had thus been transformed into Britain’s first-ever citizen army.Footnote 66 The Battle of the Somme in fact represented a peak in the trajectory of instances of illegal killing and constituted a decisive moment in the British army’s treatment of German prisoners.Footnote 67 Coincidence or not, from 1916 onwards, the British and Canadian forces ‘developed an attack doctrine that embraced a greater decentralization of command’.Footnote 68 The year 1916 also saw the emergence of the British army’s doctrine of an aggressive front line to push forward wherever possible and rearward lines to mop up and consolidate.Footnote 69 The separation of the tasks of infiltration and mopping up disrupted the notion of a clear line of fighting from which those captured could be sent back to a defined area ‘behind the lines’.Footnote 70
Thirty years after the end of the Great War, General Sir Charles Broad divulged to historian and fellow officer Basil Liddell Hart that the 34th Division, an infantry unit of the British army composed of Kitchener volunteers from around Newcastle, sent back so few German prisoners on 1 July 1916, the opening day of the Somme, that prisoners taken by neighbouring corps had to be ‘borrowed’ in order to provide work for the division’s interrogation officers. Broad, who was on the staff of III Corps at the time, acknowledged that the lack of prisoners was not necessarily an indication that few Germans had tried to surrender. When it became apparent that the 34th Division had not implemented an order to fill in its reserve line of trenches, the men who were sent to examine the position ‘found it had been filled with the bodies of German prisoners – who had been taken there and killed in cold blood’.Footnote 71
In addition, virtually all documented instances of orders to take no prisoners date from the eve of the Somme or thereafter.Footnote 72 This underscores the spontaneous nature of prisoner killing during the first two years of the Great War in particular. As Brian Feltman has noted, attempts to dehumanise the enemy had increased over the course of almost two years of brutal warfare. Reports of atrocities in Belgium and France appeared to justify the portrayal of Germans as barbaric Huns, and rumours of the murder and mutilation of British and Canadian prisoners by German soldiers reinforced the former in their belief that they could expect no quarter. A steady and persistent dehumanisation of the enemy was accompanied by a reluctance to treat prisoners with mercy.Footnote 73 To quote one chief petty officer, who was attached to the 29th Division and deployed as far away as the Gallipoli Peninsula: ‘One has only to think what these Huns did to the Belgians & I say that when you catch one kill him slowly, but make sure you are doing away with him.’Footnote 74 Use of the epithet ‘Hun’ was commonplace among British troops during the First World War. A lexicon compiled while the war was still being fought defined the ‘Hun’ as follows: ‘The cruelest animal known. Will soon be extinct. The term is derived from “The Huns of Attila,” an ancient tribe of barbaric people from whom the present day Germans claim to be descended. In our opinion it is too good a name for Fritz.’Footnote 75
While the number of ‘take no prisoners’ orders in circulation rose sharply on the eve of the Somme and in the weeks and months thereafter, the experiences of the previous two years meant that some units killed prisoners during this period without corresponding orders. For instance, a major on the staff of the 16th (Irish) Division recalled a conversation at Ginchy on 9 September with a member of the subordinated 1st Battalion, Royal Munster Fusiliers:
I asked if his battalion had made many prisoners. He replied ‘Yes’; but added that once or twice the Germans had tried treacherous tricks. One party advanced as if to surrender, shouting ‘Kamerad! Kamerad!’ and when about twenty yards off opened fire. I asked the Munster man what then took place, and he replied, ‘We knocked them over till further orders.’Footnote 76
This exchange, together with other incidents cited earlier, suggests that soldiers who engaged in prisoner killing generally did not have to worry about being sanctioned or court-martialled by superior officers. In the words of Robert Graves, himself an officer: ‘Nearly every instructor in the mess knew of specific cases when prisoners had been murdered on the way back [to the rear].’Footnote 77
Even instances where the circumstances of the killing were particularly grim appear not to have resulted in prosecution. The following is an excerpt from one of a series of letters written during the First World War by Lieutenant Guy Nightingale, a British officer in the 1st Battalion, Royal Munster Fusiliers, and sent home to his mother. This particular letter is dated 8 October 1918, little more than a month before the end of the war:
Went into the heart of Cambrai this afternoon. Most interesting. We were the first troops in Cambrai. It’s pretty well knocked about, but I got quite a lot of souvenirs. I got the Colonel’s tin hat today – with a bullet hole through it. We found a few Boche in the cellars & killed them all. One old fellow came out waving a white flag & shouting “Kamarad!” [sic] but as he came out of a Hospital, & was fully dressed, we shot him in the stomach & he died. We took a topping photo of him shouting for mercy!Footnote 78
Although a German complaint sent two months later to the Swiss Legation in London (and forwarded to the British secretary of state for foreign affairs) appears to refer to the same or a related incident,Footnote 79 Nightingale was never prosecuted.
An occasional exception to this general rule of turning a blind eye can be seen in cases where the murder of a prisoner was accompanied by excessive cruelty, so that it was less the ‘dispatching’ of an enemy and more the infliction of suffering on the doomed man that was to the fore. Sergeant William Summers’s recollections of his deployment with the 7th (Service) Battalion, Border Regiment, illustrate how grisly prisoner killing could be. Following the capture of Zenith Trench on 2 November 1916, at the tail end of the Somme, Summers’s unit had two sergeants ‘brought up for cruelty’. One of them was accused of ‘cutting a German’s head off with a shovel’, the other of ‘putting his heel into the face of a German lying wounded on a stretcher and pressing down until he killed him’.Footnote 80 On another occasion, while marching a number of German prisoners to the rear lines, a Canadian soldier dropped a grenade into the greatcoat pocket of one of the captives, which dismembered him seconds later.Footnote 81 In his memoir, Robert Graves recalled hearing the following first-hand account:
A Canadian-Scot: ‘I was sent back with three bloody prisoners, you see, and one was limping and groaning, so I had to keep on kicking the sod down the trench. He was an officer. It was getting dark and I was getting fed up, so I thought: “I’ll have a bit of a game.” I had them covered with the officer’s revolver and I made ’em open their pockets. Then I dropped a Mills’ bomb in each, with the pin out, and ducked behind a traverse. Bang, bang, bang! No more bloody prisoners. No good Fritzes but dead ’uns.’Footnote 82
The English poet Siegfried Sassoon, a fellow officer in Graves’s regiment, the Royal Welch Fusiliers, may have been referring to the same incident when he wrote in a letter to the editor of the Cambridge Magazine on 12 November 1917: ‘Only the other day an officer of a Scotch regiment … was regaling me with stories of how his chaps put bombs in prisoners’ pockets & then shoved them into shell-holes full of water. But of course these things aren’t atrocities when we do them.’Footnote 83 Neither expediency, nor self-preservation, nor even a desire for vengeance offers a satisfactory explanation for such bloodthirsty acts. They are rather evidence not only of the dehumanising effects of war, but also of how battlefield killings cemented social bonds among soldiers through a form of macabre comic relief.
If the Battle of the Somme represented a clear surge in battlefield prisoner killings and corresponding orders for both the British and the Canadians, the second half of 1918 represented a second peak, especially for the latter. The Hundred Days Offensive (8 August to 11 November) that ended the war witnessed no fewer than ten separate instances of prisoner killing by Canadian troops. This may have resulted in part from the increase in flexibility and decentralisation during the fast-moving battles of 1918.Footnote 84 Other factors, however, were doubtless also at play here. Four weeks earlier, on 12 July, Lieutenant-General Arthur Currie, commander of the Canadian Corps, had given a speech during an inspection of the 4th Canadian Infantry Brigade at Lattre-Saint-Quentin. A corporal in the 19th Battalion in attendance at Currie’s speech wrote in his diary: ‘He said that we did not want any prisoners, which meant kill them all.’Footnote 85 It is possible that Currie’s open-air speech (during heavy showers) was misinterpreted.Footnote 86 However, his speech came only two weeks after the sinking of the Canadian hospital ship Llandovery Castle by a German torpedo on 27 June and the reported machine gunning of survivors struggling in the water.Footnote 87 Brigadier-General George Tuxford, commanding officer of the 3rd Canadian Infantry Brigade, later admitted that he ‘gave instructions to the Brigade that the battle cry on the 8th of August should be “Llandovery Castle,” and that that cry should be the last to ring in the ears of the Hun as the bayonet was driven home’.Footnote 88 Just as the sinking of the Lusitania had provoked British (and Canadian) soldiers two years earlier, the fate of the Llandovery Castle enraged the Canadians and instilled a desire to avenge the victims.
Dehumanisation and regional bias
As we have seen, the brutality of initial engagements at the Somme did little to dampen the intensification of atrocities in the weeks and months that followed.Footnote 89 Writing to his wife in late September 1916, Lieutenant-Colonel Frank Maxwell, commander of the 12th (Service) Battalion, Middlesex Regiment, implied that an aversion to taking prisoners was common in his regiment. While describing the offensive at Thiepval Ridge, Maxwell noted that the Germans fought valiantly. Yet not even worthy opponents, it seems, were guaranteed mercy in defeat:
The ground was of course the limit itself, & progress over it like nothing imaginable. The enemy quite determined to keep us out as they had so many before. And I must say that they fought most stubbornly & bravely, and probably not more than 300–500 put their hands up. They took it out of us badly, but we did ditto, and – I have no shame in saying so, as every German should in my opinion be exterminated – I don’t know that we took one. I have not seen a man or officer yet who did anyway.Footnote 90
In describing to his wife one of the largest massacres of potential German prisoners on record, Maxwell’s words implicated both their author and the soldiers under his command. Even in his official report on the fighting of 26 September, however, Maxwell felt sufficiently sure of his actions (and, presumably, the stance of his superiors) to admit openly to having killed German soldiers who had put up their hands and surrendered:
Practically every Ger[m]an seen by Middlesex Men was killed – an exception being made in the case of a small party which had no arms. The majority were killed at or in the vicinity of the large number of dug-outs. Some fought well, chiefly with bombs, others put up their hands and offered watches, etc.Footnote 91
The same month that Lieutenant-Colonel Maxwell was voicing the conviction that ‘every German should … be exterminated’, Major-General Richard Turner, commander of the 2nd Canadian Division, wrote in his diary that ‘the men were not looking for prisoners, and considered a dead German was the best’.Footnote 92 The aforementioned Major Herbert E. Trevor, commanding officer of the 9th Battalion, Essex Regiment, likewise told his men on the eve of the Battle of Arras in April 1917 ‘that there was only one Good Bosch [sic] & that was a dead un’.Footnote 93 The sentiments expressed by Maxwell, Turner and Trevor were merely three manifestations of an attitude that prevailed more broadly in the British and Canadian armies. Writing in 1919, the aforementioned Stephen Graham, who had served as a private in the Scots Guards, observed:
That the driving-power of the army arose from courage and voluntary sacrifice was the first illusion to fall. The second was that of chivalry. It seems that in former wars one granted to the enemy a great deal of human dignity. Though he was a foe, he was a fellow-creature, and was saved by his Redeemer as much as we were. But the opinion cultivated in the army regarding the Germans was that they were a sort of vermin like plague-rats that had to be exterminated.Footnote 94
Dehumanising the enemy as ‘vermin’,Footnote 95 ‘plague-rats’ or ‘reptiles’Footnote 96 while issuing calls for their extermination surely implied an expectation that such calls would indeed be heeded. It could come as no surprise, then, if a policy of ‘no quarter’ was, at times, the inevitable outcome. The impact of this revilement was by no means lost on the fighting men themselves. Robert Case, a second lieutenant in the 3/3rd Field Company, Royal Engineers, wrote to his family from France in late September 1916:
To think that in August 1914, one looked to find a certain degree of sport in the war. At present, 90% of the officers and men out here would be ready to shoot a Hun in cold blood with as little compunction as one would kill a fly. And a very worthy spirit too, I think, under the circumstances.Footnote 97
Writing from France to a friend in early March 1917, Captain John Eugene Crombie of the Gordon Highlanders explained precisely what this meant in practice and its implications for the British themselves:
Without going into details, for ‘mopping up’ a captured trench i.e. bombing out the remaining inhabitants, you have parties of nine men specially equipped. When you come to a dug-out, you throw some smoke bombs down, and then smoke the rest out with a smoke bomb, so that they must either choke or come out. Now when they come out they are half blinded and choked with poisonous smoke, and you station a man at the entrance to receive them, but as you have only got a party of nine, it would be difficult to spare men if you took them prisoners, so the instructions are that these poor half-blinded devils should be bayoneted as they come up. It may be expedient from a military point of view, but if it had been suggested before the war, who would not have held up their hands in horror? The fact is, that if we decide to beat the German at his own game, we can only do it by being more Prussian than the Prussian; if we hate all that is Prussian, we shall become all that we hate.Footnote 98
The author of these poignant reflections on the dehumanising impact of war died of wounds seven weeks later in France, at the age of 20.Footnote 99
Crombie’s reference to ‘the Prussian’ is significant. Many British troops drew a distinction between Germans from different regions, and it was the Prussians – ‘the most belligerent of all the Jerry troops’Footnote 100 – for whom the British reserved their greatest animosity. The Saxons, by contrast, were considered to be ‘a better brand than the usual Hun’,Footnote 101 ‘not so bad as the Prussians’,Footnote 102 ‘more human than other Teutons’Footnote 103 and ‘the best of all the States in Germany’.Footnote 104 It is perhaps not surprising, then, that it was Saxon troops who were credited with initiating a dialogue with the British during the celebrated Christmas truce of 1914 and that this unofficial series of ceasefires had the most success in areas where British troops faced Saxon regiments. One officer in the Queen’s Westminster Rifles wrote: ‘After our talk I really think a lot of our newspaper reports must be horribly exaggerated. Of course, these men were Saxons – not Prussians.’Footnote 105 However, some soldiers who took part in the truce – probably welcoming an opportunity to lay down arms for a day – could not forget German atrocities in Belgium. Private William Tapp of the 1st Battalion, Royal Warwickshire Regiment, wrote in his diary on Christmas Day: ‘I cannot bring myself to shake hands with them, as I know I shouldn’t if they were in our country, I have not forgotten Belgium and I never did like the word German.’Footnote 106 Furthermore, the truce did not take place on all sections of the front.Footnote 107 One private in the Royal Sussex Regiment wrote to his girlfriend on 21 January 1915: ‘I suppose that you have read of our people and the Germans exchanging gifts on Xmas Day, well dear let me tell you once and for all that there is absolutely no truth in it at all, … we are far too bitter against each other to be chummy.’Footnote 108
Senior commanders: their role and perspectives
If some officers at varying levels of command ranging from platoon up to corps level encouraged prisoner killing or issued explicit ‘take no prisoners’ orders, what was the position of the most senior commanders? The aforementioned General Charles Broad acknowledged that the killing of prisoners ‘was apt to be encouraged by some high commanders’, and singled out the commander of the Fifth Army, Hubert Gough, for having ‘set a bad example in the way he declared in favour of chucking bombs down dug-outs even when the occupants wanted to surrender’. The killing of prisoners was not only tolerated in Gough’s army: attempts to promote mercy met with opposition. According to Broad, when one of Gough’s brigadiers took steps to prevent troops from throwing bombs into dugouts even when the occupants wanted to surrender, ‘Gough upbraided him for being too merciful, and insisted that the troops were right.’Footnote 109
A ‘do as you please’Footnote 110 approach towards prisoners gave those soldiers who may have been so inclined the freedom to commit battlefield murder. As Feltman has observed, commanders often failed to point out the counterproductive effect of prisoner killing and advise their men of the long-term consequences of their actions.Footnote 111 Writing in 1919, Stephen Graham lamented:
No one said to the men, ‘By refusing to take prisoners, by killing prisoners, ill-treating them, or killing wounded men, you make it only the worse for yourselves when it may be your lot to fall into the enemy’s hands. Remember he holds as many British as we do Germans.’ The stories of our brutality inevitably got across to the Germans, and made it worse for our poor fellows on the other side. No one said, ‘It is good to take prisoners; take as many as you possibly can. That tends to end the war. But by ferocious habits you are only making this war into a mutual torture and destruction society for all men between eighteen and forty-five. Out of cruelty comes cruelty. Out of mercy comes mercy.’Footnote 112
Although some senior commanders promoted prisoner killing, however, there is no evidence to support post-war German claims that such acts were ‘systematically carried out’ by ‘the majority’ of British troops ‘in full knowledge of their superiors’,Footnote 113 in other words official British policy. The aforementioned 7th Battalion, Border Regiment, would hardly have had two sergeants ‘brought up for cruelty’ in their killing of two German prisoners if their superiors had ordered that such crimes be carried out. The higher command’s reactions to cases of prisoner killing suggests that, though it was the exception rather than the rule, when it did occur the crime was accepted as part of life at the front and rarely seriously punished.Footnote 114 In fact, Field Marshal Sir John French, commander-in-chief of the British Expeditionary Force in France, wrote in his diary in May 1915: ‘I fear our men have got “blood lust” heavily upon them! … The outrages committed by the Germans have stirred them very deeply. It is said that they give very little “quarter”.’Footnote 115 While French did not necessarily condone prisoner killing by British troops, he was clearly aware of it and yet, apparently, took no action against it. This is suggestive of a military culture in which commanders tacitly or explicitly regarded prisoner killing as accepFootnote table 116 or even, in some cases, desirable.
Importantly, prisoner killing appears to have been linked to the emotions and pressures of the battlefield. Incidences of ‘hot-blooded killing’ far outweighed the number of premeditated killings ‘in cold blood’. The aforementioned Reverend Pym commented openly in 1916:
People will tell you of this or that battalion which ‘will take no more prisoners,’ and they argue from it an intense and lasting hatred. Intense at the moment, perhaps. Blood is up; mercy has not been shown, so mercy shall not be given. But the English clerk and the English working-man, generally speaking, will not after the war harbour the enmity that some of the officer-class profess to be laying in store.Footnote 117
Historian Alexander Watson likewise concludes that hatred most commonly ‘manifested itself as a temporary but intense emotion during and after an attack’.Footnote 118 Indeed, as Captain Julian Grenfell of the 1st Royal Dragoons wrote to his parents in early November 1914, it was sometimes precisely when prisoners were taken that one ‘felt hatred for them as one thought of our dead’.Footnote 119 It is not surprising that the vast majority of killings took place on the battlefield itself, though British and Canadian soldiers also occasionally shot prisoners while escorting them to the rear.Footnote 120 The example cited earlier, in which German prisoners were killed after the town of Cambrai had already fallen to the British, appears to be exceptional. Although ‘individual shootings’ in the POW camps in the United Kingdom happened ‘throughout the war’ when guards fired on captives, these were isolated cases and highly uncommon. As historian Panikos Panayi has made clear, British personnel in the camps generally adhered to the rules established by the Hague Convention, and German prisoners on British soil ‘rarely experienced deliberate mistreatment’.Footnote 121
Documentary evidence has survived for scores of separate instances of prisoner killing by British and Canadian troops deployed against German forces on the western front between August 1914 and November 1918, with the number of dead ranging from individual enemy soldiers to several hundred victims at once.Footnote 122 Examples exist of prisoner killing by enlisted men, NCOs and officers, acting either in groups or alone, and furthermore of officers at platoon, battalion, regimental and even corps level either encouraging prisoner killing or issuing explicit (mostly verbal) orders to take no prisoners. On occasion, different units fighting alongside each other killed prisoners during the same battle. After ‘eight hours of shell fire’ near the village of Hooge, east of Ypres, in June 1915, members of the 1st Battalion, Honourable Artillery Company, shot ‘a great number’ of German soldiers who had ‘offered themselves as prisoners’, while members of the 2nd Battalion, Royal Scots, fighting alongside them shot ‘about 300 prisoners’ in a veritable massacre.Footnote 123 For certain units, ‘take no prisoners’ orders or actual prisoner killing are documented for different stages of the First World War. As mentioned earlier, the Dorset Regiment’s motto as of early May 1915 was ‘“No Prisoners”. No quarter will be given when we again get to fighting.’Footnote 124 On the eve of the Somme more than a year later, the commanding officer of 1st Battalion, Dorset Regiment, instructed his men once more: ‘No prisoners for the Dorsets.’Footnote 125
In other cases, exhortations by officers to give no quarter or even concrete orders to that effect were verifiably followed by corresponding actions. Before leaving Bramshott training camp in Hampshire in August 1916, Major James Lewis R. Parry, second-in-command of the aforementioned 50th Battalion, 10th Canadian Infantry Brigade, warned the troops: ‘I don’t want any angels in my Battalion, when you get to France; and I don’t want you to take any prisoners! I hope you understand!’Footnote 126 At Hill 120 during the Battle of Vimy Ridge in April 1917, a member of the machine-gun crew boasted: ‘Some of those Heines never reached our Cages. My Webley .455 did a very good job!’ When recalling this incident many years later, a signaller with ‘D’ Company concluded that ‘the lad had strictly followed the stern warning of Major Parry’.Footnote 127 Practical considerations may also have played a role; as noted above, when the battalion overran German positions at Vimy Ridge, many of the unarmed prisoners who emerged from their dugouts were not taken alive because the ‘number of men required to herd them back to the P.O.W. Cages could not be spared’.Footnote 128 On 1 November 1918, during the Battle of Valenciennes, ‘Many M.G. [machine-gun] nests were rushed and silenced, their guns captured and the crews given no quarter.’Footnote 129 Captain A. J. Slade, commanding ‘D’ Company, reported on this action: ‘It was impossible to avoid taking so many [prisoners] as they surrendered in batches of from 20 to 50, but some very useful killing was also achieved.’Footnote 130 For this single Canadian battalion, then, one order to take no prisoners and three separate instances of prisoner killing can be identified.
The case of the 2nd Battalion of the Scots Guards is perhaps even more striking. Two separate instances of prisoner killing by members of this battalion are known for the Battle of Festubert in May 1915: a captain shot two captive officers following ‘an argument on the battlefield’, while ‘a crowd of Scots Guards’ bayonetted a ‘Hun’ who had exited a dugout holding up his hands.Footnote 131 As mentioned earlier, during fighting in August 1918, an officer in the 2nd Battalion gave explicit permission when asked by a sergeant for leave to shoot the captured members of a German machine-gun post.Footnote 132 In fact, the acting transport officer of the battalion reflected on 1 September: ‘The Battalion killed a lot of Bosches [sic], the order being “No Prisoners,” so they did in everybody, including the blokes who put up their hands …’Footnote 133 In his 1919 memoir, Stephen Graham, who had served as a private in the 2nd Battalion, offered a possible explanation for the recurrent nature of prisoner killing or orders to that effect in this particular unit: ‘“Thank God, this battalion’s always been blessed with a C.O. [commanding officer] who didn’t believe in taking prisoners,” says a sergeant.’Footnote 134
The only known instance of General Headquarters intervening in the question of when to accept enemy surrenders occurred in the run-up to the critical first day of the Somme. On 28 June 1916, Lieutenant-General Sir Launcelot Kiggell – chief of staff to General Sir Douglas Haig, successor to John French as commander-in-chief of the British Expeditionary Force – issued an order, to be read to all troops, that served to impress upon the men the importance of being absolutely certain that the morale of potential prisoners was broken before accepting their surrender. The relevant passage of his instructions reads as follows:
It is the duty of all ranks to continue to use their weapons against the enemy’s fighting troops, unless and until it is beyond all doubt that these have not only ceased all resistance, but that, whether through having voluntarily thrown down their weapons or otherwise, they have definitely and finally abandoned all hope or intention of resisting further. In the case of apparent surrender, it lies with the enemy to prove his intention beyond the possibility of misunderstanding, before the surrender can be accepted as genuine.Footnote 135
Kiggell’s words of warning indicated his knowledge of prior German tricks that had cost British soldiers their lives, and it seems natural that he would remind troops of the battlefield’s potential dangers on the eve of a major battle.Footnote 136 It is reasonable, therefore, to view the order as a justifiable warning to his troops rather than a direct order to commit war crimes. Kiggell’s exhortation to err on the side of caution when accepting surrenders was subsequently enshrined word for word in a training manual issued down to battalions, batteries and squadrons by the General Staff in January 1918.Footnote 137 This provided an official loophole that could be exploited when it came to the treatment of potential prisoners. As we have already seen, however, an official loophole was rarely required for British and Canadian soldiers to engage in prisoner killing, not least in response to ‘white flag incidents’.
Conclusions
Brian Feltman remarked in 2010 that ‘it remains impossible to determine how widespread prisoner killing’ was in the British Expeditionary Force.Footnote 138 Paul Hodges had nonetheless concluded four years earlier that ‘it is possible to come to an approximate estimate of the frequency of the killing of prisoners’ on the battlefield. Although he was not able to put ‘a precise quantitative figure on it’, he argued that the regularity and extent of reporting suggest that battlefield prisoner killing ‘was a notable phenomenon with numerous victims’, even if the ‘number of perpetrators that could potentially have created this level of reporting could well have been relatively low’.Footnote 139 From his examination of British soldiers’ memoirs, letters and diaries, Hodges found, furthermore, that ‘one in four’ texts written by soldiers and based on a lengthy experience of the western front contain ‘at least one eyewitness report of the killing of prisoners or potential prisoners’. He added that for certain elite units and particularly heated periods of close combat, the likelihood of finding a reference increases to almost ‘three in four’.Footnote 140
My own examination of letters, private diaries, memoirs, newspaper articles, unit war diaries and after-action reports has identified a substantial additional number of prisoner killings not previously reported in the secondary literature. It furthermore suggests that the number of British soldiers’ accounts containing at least one eyewitness report of the killing of prisoners or potential prisoners may in fact have been closer to one in two. While the British committed well over half of the instances of battlefield prisoner killings (and were responsible for more than two thirds of the ‘take no prisoners’ orders) verified for these two armies on the western front, they were deployed in far greater numbers. The Canadians therefore appear proportionately more likely than the British to have killed German prisoners.Footnote 141 Robert Graves observed that the Canadians were the troops with ‘the worst reputation for acts of violence against prisoners’.Footnote 142
The comparative angle is thus instructive here because it brings out the full extent of the issue, as well as a great deal of variation that remains as yet unexplained. As this is the first study directly to compare two armies on the western front, further research will be required to determine why the Canadian army was even more uncompromising than the British army in its treatment of captive enemy soldiers on the battlefield. After all, the Canadian Expeditionary Force fought alongside the British and operated under a unified command structure; most of the key staff appointments were filled by British officers and, until the final months of the war, a majority of the soldiers were British-born.Footnote 143 Regional differences in behaviour also existed within the British army itself. According to my survey of the primary sources, Scottish regiments were overrepresented among documented cases of battlefield prisoner killing by British units. Further research might shed light on the role of regional factors.
Additional research will also be needed to establish how the conduct of the British and Canadian Expeditionary Forces compared to other armies deployed in the same theatre. The British and Canadians were certainly not the only armies on the western front who engaged in battlefield prisoner killing. Evidence exists that German forces likewise killed prisoners and issued ‘take no prisoners’ orders. Unlike the British (and the Americans),Footnote 144 the Germans did not fulfil the requirement, in Article 1 of the Hague Convention, to issue instructions to their armed forces conforming to the regulations concerning the laws and customs of war on land. There was no German equivalent of the British Manual of Military Law. In 1902, three years after the first Hague Convention, the War History Section of the German General Staff had issued Kriegsbrauch im Landkriege, but this was not an official manual, and it even contained recommendations on the treatment of prisoners that contradicted the provisions of the Hague Convention.Footnote 145 A paragraph devoted to ‘The Right to Kill Prisoners’ stated:
With regard to the right to kill prisoners, the following views apply. They may be killed:
1. if they commit crimes and are guilty of acts punishable by death under civil or military laws;
2. in the event of insubordination, escape attempts, etc., the weapon may be used even if the outcome is potentially fatal;
3. as a reprisal in urgent and compelling emergencies, whether as a reprisal against the same measure or against other excesses of the enemy army command;
4. in compelling emergencies, if other means of security are not available and the presence of the prisoners poses a threat to one’s own existence.Footnote 146
It is striking that the possibility of prisoner killing was even raised in a separate section on the right to kill prisoners, and clauses 2 and 3 opened the door to abuse by sanctioning prisoner killing under certain circumstances. In view of this, it is hardly surprising that instances of prisoner killing by German troops occurred, as in the British case, but also that German officers issued corresponding orders already in the first weeks of the war, in notable contrast to the British. On 21 August 1914, Brigadier Karl Stenger, commander of the 58th Infantry Brigade, deployed in Lorraine, issued a verbal order to kill captive and wounded French soldiers.Footnote 147 At least twenty wounded Frenchmen were killed on the basis of this order.Footnote 148 According to a soldier serving in the subordinated 112th Baden Infantry Regiment, the order was renewed in writing on 26 August at Thiaville: ‘No prisoners will be taken today. Wounded as well as captured Frenchmen will be finished off.’Footnote 149 (These orders were issued before the first documented case of prisoner killing by the British.) The same soldier later recalled the reaction of the troops: ‘Most of the soldiers were stunned and speechless, while others were delighted by this vile order, which violated international law.’Footnote 150
Evidence exists that French forces also killed prisoners. In May 1915, the sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska wrote from the western front to the American poet Ezra Pound, describing a recent skirmish with the Germans: ‘We also had a handful of prisoners – 10 – & as we had just learnt [about] the loss of the “Lusitania” they were executed with the [rifle] butts after a 10 minutes dissertation [sic] among the N.C.[O.] and the men.’Footnote 151 In July 1916, Neil Fraser-Tytler, an officer in the Royal Field Artillery, wrote in a letter to his father that men of the French 2nd Colonial Infantry Division south of the Somme ‘were very economical in the number of prisoners taken: they must believe in my creed that “The only good Boche is a dead Boche.”’Footnote 152 Only anecdotal evidence can be provided here for the German and French cases, which are yet to be the subject of in-depth research.
Prisoner killings and orders to take no prisoners violated both the 1907 Hague Convention and the 1914 Manual of Military Law; and yet both phenomena were by no means uncommon during the Great War. Furthermore, the execution of prisoners was a part of the discourse between soldiers and, as such, discussed in different contexts both during hostilities and after their cessation. Such accounts were passed on to family members in letters (evidently on the assumption that the candid reports of atrocities would be met with approval back home), they were recorded in diaries, they were absorbed into trench culture and they were recounted in memoirs. Execution stories surfaced in humorous submissions to wartime collections of soldiers’ writings and in trench newspapers.Footnote 153 This ‘culture of killing’Footnote 154 was also present in many soldiers’ songs and marching melodies sung collectively by British soldiers. For instance, the following was sung to the tune of the chorus of the popular music hall song ‘If It’s a Lady – Thumbs Up!’ (1914):
If it’s a German – Guns Up!
If it’s a German with hands up,
Don’t start taking prisoners now,
Give it ’em in the neck and say “Bow-wow.”
If it’s a German – Guns Up!
Stick him in the leg – it is sublime.
If he whispers in your ear,
“Kamerad! Kamerad!”
Guns Up – every time.Footnote 155
Though the killing of prisoners and potential prisoners could be described as transgressive violence, that is, ‘involving a violation of moral or social boundaries’,Footnote 156 the evidence points to a tacit or explicit acceptance of it on the part of British and Canadian commanders, especially when it took place in the ‘grey zone’ between combat and capitulation (and even immediately afterwards). Given the level of acceptance that commanders showed for these practices, the openness with which soldiers discussed them in their letters home to mothers, sisters and wives, and the almost complete absence of any disciplinary action against the perpetrators, it seems that – on some level – they were regarded as legitimate. In light of this, Alan Kramer’s reference to ‘undisciplined elements’Footnote 157 seems to be a value judgement: perhaps those troops who killed surrendering or defenceless soldiers were not ‘undisciplined’ at all, but merely regarded prisoner killing as legitimate. This applies in particular to revenge killings. In a letter home to his family in early September 1918, Lieutenant Coningsby Dawson, an Oxford-educated Canadian, testified to his anger and that of his men in the 53rd Battery, Canadian Field Artillery, when they came across a British tank officer, stripped naked, and bombed to death with grenades: ‘When I tell you that no prisoners were taken for the next twenty-four hours, I think you’ll applaud and wonder why the twenty-four hours wasn’t extended. The men said they got sick of the killing.’Footnote 158 Here, the author assumed that his admission of having given ‘no quarter’ would be met with not only understanding but indeed applause, and even that his family would be surprised that this policy had not lasted longer.
An exception to the acceptance shown to such practices might be acts of wanton cruelty, such as cutting off a prisoner’s head with a shovel or suffocating a wounded man with a boot heel. For such acts, there appears to have been less understanding. They might, therefore, have been regarded as illegitimate. Then again, the cynicism and sadism reflected in the letter quoted earlier in this article, in which a British officer candidly informed his mother how he and his comrades in Cambrai had taken ‘a topping photo’ of a German soldier holding a white flag and begging for mercy, before shooting him in the stomach, might suggest otherwise. Either way, there appear to be no cases of British or Canadian soldiers being court-martialled specifically for having killed prisoners in the Great War.
Author biography
Dr Alex J. Kay is Senior Lecturer in the Department of History at the University of Potsdam and lifetime Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. He specialises in the comparative study of genocide and mass violence, with a particular focus on Germany, Britain and the British Empire from 1914 to 1945.
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