As the sun rose over the rooftops of a small French village behind the lines on the Western

front, a volley from a dozen soldiers rang out, and a British Tommy tied to a post fell dead.

This week we look at the story of those men who were shot at dawn.

Back in the 1980s, the chairman of our local Sussex Western Front Association branch, Julian Sykes,

gave a talk on the research that he was doing for a book that he was working on with fellow author Julian

Patowski about the men who had been executed in the First World War. They had discovered a file

that had just been released by the Ministry of Defence into what was then the Public Records Office,

the National Archives today, that listed all of the soldiers who had been executed by name, gave their

units, gave their date of execution, and the reason that the execution took place. For the first

time since the war, this evidence had been made available, and this spurred the two Julianns on

to write the book shot at dawn which

became one of the first proper comprehensive guides to the military executions in the british army

in the first world war it was a subject then nearly forty years ago that was not widely talked about

and very little was known about it. Judge Babbington,

and I'll put details of some of these books onto the podcast website, had written a book

for the sake of example slightly earlier, but he'd not named any names. That was one of the

conditions of him being given access to the papers for these men. The papers, the documents

describing their trial and the crime that they've been committed and the details of the subsequent

execution were then still surviving and were eventually transferred to the Public Records Office

and they are available to view and do research with and indeed quite a few websites

out there now have transcribed some of the documents and put them online. But like I say then,

it was quite a new subject. The whole story of men executed in the Great War to a degree

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