Did anyone see the program last night about the 6 that were shot at dawn? It was another good program by Ian Hislop and friends, I was suprised not to find anything already posted about this.

This forum is not fulfilling its objective as I only ever see me when I log on. It really needs to work properly for people to use it. Very disapointed with the site, thought it was going to be a lot better than this. With a program like Not Forgotten there should be loads of people discussing the topic, where is everybody.

Sue

Hi Sue,
I taped the programme and have only just got around to watching it. I thought it was great. I expected it to be biased but Ian Hislop produced a remarkably even-handed discussion. I wasn't aware for example that Haig reprieved 9 out of 10 people due to be shot. As mentioned in the programme, desperate times require desperate measures and even the squaddies of that era seemed to support it. IMHO, there's far too much apologising and pardoning now when generally it's a pretty pointless gesture. You can't squueze the toothpaste back into the tube.

Hi Sue,

Saw the programme as well, found it very informative, I would like to know why it seemed more ordinary soldiers were executed than officers. I am trying to find out about POWs in WW1, I wish they did a programme about that. I also agree that too much apologising is done.

You'll find a forum and all the people you could ever wish to talk about on the forum attached to this website,

http://www.1914-1918.net/index.htm

You'll enjoy it i promise.

The Channel Four website asks an interesting question which is repeated in the documentary ‘Not Forgotton’ – ‘Is it dangerous to rewrite history?’

So it comes as an unexpected surprise that the programme does exactly that and is less than even-handed.

Ian Hislop is unfortunately miss-informed in stating ‘It’s rarely mentioned that during the war, 1,000 British soldiers deserted every month.’ This he considered a significant problem resulting in the necessity to execute. A notion confirmed by Earl Haig.

It implies that over the fifty-one month period of the war that 51,000 soldiers deserted.

The facts are that monthly front-line active service desertions totalled only 111 soldiers. The total for the war was only 5,700 and not 51,000. Of these 245 were shot


Remarkably, because they were disallowed no executions took place at home in Britain despite there being 4.3 times more desertions than on the battlefield.


Read the facts on http://www.shotatdawn.org.uk especially on the page entitled The New Contemptibles.