** During the Indian Mutiny of 1857, mutinous native levies were blown from the mouths of cannon. A further 18 indigenes involved in the plot were hanged in India. * Following the 1915 Singapore Garrison Mutiny by Muslim soldiers of the 5th Light Infantry against British rule in India, that was actively encouraged by Germany, British soldiers carried out the execution of the 37 ring-leaders by shooting 21 in public. The list of the recorded British so-called 'mutinies' - though some would be more properly labeled as 'strikes' or ' collective indiscipline' - is rather short and may be summarised as follows.
British mutiniesįrom 1914 to 1920, only 1,800 British servicemen were court-martialed for mutiny with, incredibly, the Western Front accounting for only 42 such charges. In practice, capital punishment has usually been reserved for the so-called 'ring-leaders' of mutiny in time of war. The definition of mutiny in the British Armed Services as set down in Mutiny Act of 1689 (and still valid as part of the 1913 Army Act), was astonishingly broad: 'Organised act of disobedience or defiance by two or more members of the armed services'.
Incredibly, because of, or perhaps despite, this well advertised sanction, only three British servicemen were executed for mutiny during the Great War. Consequently, all British service-men in the Great War were, from their first day of service, made only too aware of the penalties associated with mutiny, leading, ultimately, in time of war, to death by firing squad**. The Indian Mutiny (1857) was for a long time in the back of the minds of military figures of authority at all levels, from Army Commander to battalion NCO recalling all the horrors and uncertainty that that mutiny wrought on the British Army. Throughout British military history, mutiny has always been considered as a particularly dangerous threat to the conduct of war. In this short article, the British experience with the seeds of mutiny on the Western Front are considered. On the Eastern Front and in Asia*, political and revolutionary movements gave the mutinies there an entirely different causation and effect. And, particularly, given the horrendous casualties and terrible conditions in the trenches, why this did not happened on the Western Front as it did so catastrophically for the French and Germans.
#Mutiny act professional
Many historians of the Great War, both professional and amateur, have used much ink and paper in the discussion of why, uniquely among the major Powers, the British Army never faced serious mutiny in the Great War. Why the British Army did not mutiny en masse on the Western Front during the First World War
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