Desertion Executions - Shooting Free Citizens for the Crime of Freely Choosing Not to Fight. For Freedom Of Course

Mike Victor

While re-reading historian Lee Kennett's excellent 1995 history of Sherman's invasion of Georgia Marching Through Georgia, told mostly from the viewpoint of common civilians and soldiers patched together  from letters, diaries, and contemporary newspaper articles, I was struck by this haunting passage:  

The pattern of desertions that spring [1864] was sufficiently disturbing for General [Joseph] Johnston to make a severe example.  Just before the campaign opened he had fourteen North Carolinians executed as deserters.  They were shot sitting blindfolded on their coffins, while several thousand of their comrades watched.

- page 50

Shooting your own men has to be one of the cruelest aspects of any war, but it's particularly oxymoronic in a war that each side felt was being fought for "freedom."  How can you kill a man who freely signed up to serve if he freely decides not to serve any longer?  Had he never signed up in the first place, or had he been wealthy enough to buy a substitute to avoid conscription, he would have lived a long and happy life.  

In fact, the idea of forcing free men to fight a war (for freedom) against their will, shooting them if they don't, has to be one of the cruelest paradoxes of a modern democratic society.  There was a reason that our country survived 86 years from the Declaration of Independence before forced conscription appeared.  Compelling someone - even someone who once formed a contractual obligation - to work against his will, to risk his life, or to be shot for not following through on a contract seems at some level a patently anti-democratic idea.  

Ironically, the South, with all of its blather about freedom and a loose confederacy of sovereign states (as opposed to the type of strong federal government and coherent single country against which they fought) was the first to institute a draft (in 1862).  Conscription followed in the North and led to rioting in many citizens, most famously in New York City, where Irish immigrants rightly feared that they would be forced to disproportionately bear the burden of war in a country whose "freedoms" they had not yet had the opportunity to enjoy.  

In her book Team of Rivals, Doris Kearns Goodwin relates how disturbed Lincoln was by the sound of deserters being shot by firing squad in the nation's capital.  He tried to pardon as many as he could, saving 9 lives at one time, but his reach only extended to the Army of the Potomac and only when it was encamped around Washington.  Many men were just summarily shot or hanged.  

More soldiers were executed for desertion - perhaps almost 350 - during the Civil War than during all other American wars combined.  500 were shot or hanged for various reasons, mostly desertion, in both the Union and Confederate military.[1]    In all of World War II, only 1 soldier was executed for desertion although 21,000 were tried and convicted (48 of 49 death sentences were commuted).  [2]

Private Eddie Slovik, after his January 31, 1945, execution for desertion. He was the last American executed for desertion.

There is a reason why then 28-year-old Stanley Kubrick chose to focus on a mass execution of an allegedly mutinous French WWI unit in his 1957 Paths of Glory, arguably the first truly anti-war movie (and perhaps the most sarcastically titled).  The horror and immorality of a democratic country murdering its own free citizens, citizens who have often "borne the battle" to use Lincoln's phrase of an earlier generation of soldiers and veterans, highlights the imperative not to fight these damn things and certainly not to start them.  

Desertion is a strange crime if indeed it's a crime at all.  Commanders must be able to maintain unit integrity and count on having their left wing advance or their center to hold, but every commander also knows that battles are psychological affairs with every unit having a breaking point beyond which it will pull back or disintegrate into a rout.  At some level, such behavior is a vote of confidence in the commander and the cause, and although it is inconvenient, think of how many fewer wars we would have if the free citizens who chose (or were compelled) to participate got to literally vote with their feet.  

The popular history of war is often one of brave, glorious men closing on each other, accepting their fate like protagonists in some ancient Greek tragedy, but a wealth of data - from the low percentage of front line soldiers who ever fire their weapons in combat, to the pattern and distribution of wounds, the ratio of wounded to killed soldiers and the vast number of soldiers in any conflict who are neither killed nor wounded to psychological studies conducted by the US Army in World War II showing 10% of any unit will become psychiatric casualties during the first hours of combat and after between 180 and 200 days of combat, up to 100% are psychologically ineffective [3] - shows us that the story is far less glorious and much messier.  

Confederate General James Longstreet, no slouch of a commander, estimated early in the Civil War that over one-fifth of his men (7,000 out of 32,000) had deserted.

Of course, desertion in the Civil War was more complicated than desertion in more modern conflicts, especially in the South, where men saw themselves as fighting for their state, not for any country made up of states, so a North Carolinian (such as any of the 14 killed in the single mass 1864 execution cited above) fighting in Georgia would have seen himself not as deserting but as leaving a foreign country to go home.   And in an age when the absence of a military-age man to drive a plow or bring in a harvest could have meant hunger, even starvation, for relatives back home, the moral calculus was far more complex than for a soldier today who fails to report for a deployment.  
This situation was even cloudier in the 22 men that Confederate General George Pickett (yes, the same Pickett who graduated last in his class and led the disastrous Pickett's charge at Gettysburg) shot or hanged, 11 in one mass hanging. These men were North Carolinians who had signed up with a secessionist militia which they understood to be a Home Guard. When the militia was ordered to join the CSA, they fled north and ended up as Union soldiers. When captured, Pickett did not consider them POW's but deserters and hanged them all on February 15, 1864. It's such an awful business.  As Sherman put it best, "It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, more vengeance, more desolation. War is hell.”

Notes: Millen Command Legacy:  A Tactical Primer For Young Leaders by Raymond A. Millen, page 343, citing Keegan, 328-9 and 335:  ""The first hours of combat disable 10 percent of the fighting force."  Combat exhaustion results from continuous combat exposure.  Psychiatric casualties could account for as many as 30 percent of the total casualties of a battle.  If handled immediately, 90 percent will return after a brief rest.  Most combat line soldiers are ineffective after 180 days of combat.  Their peak of effectiveness is 90 days.  After 200-240 days, they contribute little.  Doubler, 242-5.  From 1944 to 1945, psychiatric casualties accounted for one quarter of combat casualties.  A First Army report estimated that a soldier could endure only 200 days of combat before breaking down, 243.  Lindermann, 356.  According to some combat psychologists, the effectiveness of a soldier deteriorated after 30 days in continuous combat, and after 45 days the soldier becomes vegetative.  Total breakdown occurred between 200 and 245 days in continuous combat."