Military Executions

Prolegomenon: Historical Background

The origins of military executions worldwide are lost to antiquity, yet for centuries such executions have remained a stable but underdeveloped topic in the fields of military history and jurisprudence. In England, the first laws concerning military executions were written by kings in their instructions for various expeditions, including the orders issued by Richard I for the Crusades in A.D. 1190. Over the centuries, laws regarding the power of courts martial to impose the death penalty for ordinary crimes and for such uniquely military matters as mutiny have fluctuated widely. As the U.S. Supreme Court has recognized, “the first comprehensive articles of war were those declared by Richard II at Durham in A.D. 1325. and Henry V at Mantes in A.D 1429.” (Loving v. United States 1996:761). Except during times of political disorder, these rules lost force after the hostilities ended because they were not fixed codes. The American Congress enacted the first U.S. Articles of War in 1789.

From one perspective, military executions are nothing more than part of the hard facts of warfare. The deaths of thousands of enemy soldiers and noncombatant prisoners at the hands of their captors during the First, Second, and Third Crusades are illustrative.1 Another approach to the subject, the one I take in this chapter, focuses onintramilitary executions—that is, killings carried out by a military body against its own members. An analysis ofextramilitary executions would examine the execution deaths of enemy soldiers and civilians. In July 1945, for example, the U.S. Army executed five German POWs Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, for the murder of a fellow prisoner (Green 1995).

Although military organizations and governments have found it important to document the use of capital punishment within the military, it is far more interesting to examine thehow andwhy of military executions. In this chapter I strike a balance between these two perspectives, because it is nearly pointless to discuss one without the other. The death of Christ as a prisoner is a useful beginning example.

It is quite clear that biblical scholars agree that Christ was put to death by crucifixion under the military authority of Pontius Pilate. It is also agreed that soldiers contributed to Christ's humiliation before his death—they placed the crown of thorns on his head, lashed him, and gambled for his garments. There is less agreement on the symbolic meaning of his death. Was it strictly a military exercise by the Roman Empire in what was then essentially an “outback” region? If so, it is rather difficult to see what military purpose was achieved by killing one man who had no army. Thehow andwhy of Christ's death, however, are laden with several messages. One message was the reaffirmation, to the public and to the Roman Empire itself, that the empire still had the power to impose order by killing non-Romans. The slow and painful death by crucifixion was also a public and ignominious degradation ceremony—long reserved for the execution of criminals—that put Christ in the same league as thieves and murderers (Brown 1994:945–47). By publicly crucifying Christ, the Roman Empire told others, including Christ's followers and potential followers, what might happen to them while simultaneously, although only temporarily, repairing the tear in the empire's social fabric caused by Christ and his followers (Lilly and Ball 1982). Today it is arguable that although Christ died as a direct result of military decisions, his death was more importantly the most significant symbolic development in a growing religious movement.

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