Category Archives: First World War

First World War, History, Second World War, United States, Warfare

History is littered with examples of chemical and biological attacks…

…Damascus suffered an appalling gas attack in which hundreds died, but other incidents in history have been much worse.

IT was a singularly evil chemical weapons attack, but tragically the hundreds killed in Damascus just two weeks ago were the latest victims in a long history of the use of poison gas to kill soldiers and civilians. This entry is an examination of past atrocities where many exacted an even greater toll:

IRAQ AGAINST THE KURDS… Saddam Hussein’s regime used chemical weapons to remove Kurds from around 40 villages in northern Iraq. On March 16, 1988, he carried out the most deadly attack, dropping poisons including mustard gas, sarin and VX on the town of Halabja. Men, women and children choked to death in the indiscriminate attack.

The atrocity prompted the United Nations Chemical Weapons Convention in 1997, an international pact banning production, stockpiling or use of chemical weapons. Only seven nations (including Syria) are not signatories. The death toll in Halabja was reported as being up to 5,000.

IRAN-IRAQ WAR, 1980-88… Hussein used sarin and mustard gas against Iran to tip the war in Iraq’s favour and forced Tehran to negotiate. But newly declassified CIA documents revealed recently the US knew about the use of chemical weapons but refused to act because Washington feared an Iranian victory. Up to 20,000 people were killed in the 8-year war.

VIETNAM… Between 1965 and 1975, in the bitter war against North Vietnam, the US dropped millions of tons of incendiary napalm to defoliate dense forests in which enemy fighters were hiding. The jelly-like substance ignited and stuck to skin, burning through muscle and bone, causing hideous injury and often death. America also dropped 50 million tons of Agent Orange, a super-strength chemical herbicide, to destroy all plants. But poisonous dioxins seeped into the soil and water supply, entering into the food chain and leading to severe health problems and disabilities for generations. More than a million people perished, as well as 400,000 Vietnamese children born with birth defects were recorded due to exposure to Agent Orange.

HITLER… Hitler refrained from using chemical weapons in battle but millions of Jews were transported to extermination camps, notably Auschwitz in Poland, and were suffocated in gas chambers using cyanide-based Zyklon B. Some six million Jews died in the Holocaust, plus gypsies, homosexuals, the disabled, and Soviet prisoners.

WORLD WAR TWO… Between 1937 and 1945, Japan launched both chemical and biological attacks while invading China. Emperor Hirohito authorised use of toxic gas on more than 2,000 occasions. In 1941, members of a secretive Japanese research and development facility (Unit 731) airdropped fleas contaminated with the bubonic plague on the Chinese city of Changde. Tens of thousands were reported killed.

ITALO-ABNYSSINIAN WAR… Ignoring the 1925 Geneva Protocol banning chemical or biological agents in war, Mussolini’s Italy unleashed mustard gas during its invasion of Ethiopia in 1935. Retaliating for the killing of one of its pilots, the air force dropped up to 500 tonnes of poison. An estimated 15,000 perished.

FIRST WORLD WAR… Known as the ‘chemists’ war’ for introducing deadly poison to combat. In 1915, at Ypres, Belgium, Germany opened thousands of canisters of chlorine upwind of Allied troops, condemning many to an agonising death. By 1918 chemical weapons had proliferated on both sides – including phosgene, cyanide and mustard gas. Horrified by the effects, 15 countries signed the Geneva Protocol. Around 90,000 were killed and more than one million people were injured.

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Arts, Books, Britain, First World War, History, Military

Book Review: ‘Die Hard, Aby!’…

DIE HARD, ABY!

… For sufferance is the badge of all our tribe (William Shakespeare)

RECENT BOOKS, many by Pen and Sword such as Shot at Dawn, have highlighted the often shocking cases of young British soldiers in the Great War being executed by their own side. All too frequently their trials were cursory, the evidence flimsy and the defence wholly inadequate. Such scandals has appalled right-minded people of all political persuasions, not least as there is strong evidence that the authorities turned a blind-eye to under-age boys serving illegally on the Western Front.

Die Hard, Aby! is a book that examines in depth the shocking case of a Jewish boy, Abraham Bevistein who enlisted in the Middlesex Regiment at the age of seventeen. By all accounts an exemplary young soldier, Aby was wounded in action and hospitalised.

After what was probably a premature release, his battalion suffered a major bombardment and Aby reported sick. Declared fit for duty, he then made the fatal mistake of not returning immediately to the front-line. The authorities arrested and tried him. The conduct of that trial is examined in close detail and clearly flouts every convention of natural justice.

His execution by firing squad caused horror and utter disbelief to his family and those who knew him and readers who engage this masterly written book will, equally, feel outraged. Aby’s case featured, too, as a major part of the Channel 4 drama documentary Boy Soldiers of the First World War.

This superbly researched and, for many, highly emotive account of a specific case of grave injustice will likely fuel yet further the controversy over such executions. Die Hard, Aby! is sure to appeal to all who feel any sentiment for their fellow humans.

At the end of the book it will be for the reader to decide whether Abraham Bevistein has been afforded fair justice from the country for which he died – even after all these years.

FAIR JUSTICE?

Soldiers who were shot during the Great War have, at times, become an emotive and recurring, national argument and topic. As David Lister, the author of this compelling work ‘Die Hard, Aby!’ writes:

… It is a recurring, national itch that requires scratching at regular intervals.

There is possibly a nagging feeling by some that justice has not been done; others may just wish the subject would fade away, and pretty much feel that justice was done in the first place.

There are several books that address the issue but, even before the first of them had been conceived, interest on the subject has bubbled away under the surface from a time well before the cessation of hostilities in 1919.

The Thin Yellow Line was published in 1974. Its author, William Moore, drawing on questions raised in Hansard (House of Commons), had to make a good as a job of it as possible without recourse to official court-martial papers. Those had been closed to the public: marked ‘not for release’ until the expiration of 100-years.

A decade later, Anthony Babington’s For The Sake of Example was the first book published by an author who had been allowed to see the papers, still not yet, though, within the public domain.

75-years after the executions, the government relenting to public pressure, the war office documents were released earlier than first intended, enabling more research. At the time of the release, another publication Shot at Dawn (Julian Putkowski/Julian Sykes) had been made. This was the first book to report in detail of individual cases, as well as the first to record the names of those executed within the main-body of the text (as opposed to within a table or index).

All of these books lean towards the injustice of the situation, with the latter making a strong case for the ‘pardoning‘ of all those executed for military disciplinary offences, such as desertion or sleeping at post. Recently, though, works by Cathryn Corns and John Hughes-Wilson, produced there well-researched (but unsympathetic) publication entitled Blindfold and Alone. Here, the authors take the general stance that the executions were, for the most part, necessary and properly carried out.

For God’s Sake Shoot Straight (recently published as ‘Death for Desertion’) by Leonard Sellers tells the true story of Sub Lieutenant Edwin Dyett, one of only two officers shot for military offences during the First World War.

Die Hard, Aby! follows a logical sequence of events that trails in the wake of publications previously made available. Whilst Moore brought the issue of executions into the wider public domain and Babington examined the case in more depth, Die Hard, Aby! similarly seeks to examine the story of the enlisted men and in particular Abraham Bevistein, who like an estimated 15% of all fighting ‘men’, had signed-up as a soldier, under-age.

Lister sets out to tell the whole-story of Abraham Bevistein: where he was born, where he grew up and what, chain of events brought him to his fate. Abraham was a very ordinary boy amongst the hundreds of thousands of ordinary boys and men who died in the trenches and whose lives have not even left a footnote on the pages of history, other than a name merely scribed on a stone or a memorial panel.

Abraham has been recorded and mentioned in Hansard on occasions, now, spanning in excess of 75-years. His story exemplifies an injustice that has been allowed to endure for far too long.

David Lister’s book considers not that of the 306 men executed for military offences; but of one boy who suffered that end, Abraham Bevistein, who served under the name of “Harris” and whose gravestone even bears the name spelt incorrectly as ‘Beverstein’.

Much of Lister’s work speaks of Abraham’s times and the setting for his life. The writer acknowledges that with the passage of years, there is little to be found in records and archives of the life of one boy who grew-up in a poor part of London.

Abraham is followed from the Russian annexed land of his birth, across Europe and the North Sea and into a new land for which he chose to fight, and for which he ultimately died. A little is learnt of his school life, the regiment he joined and of the events that brought him to his untimely death.

The premise of Die hard, Aby! is a sad-case of an executed boy – taken up in Parliament – based on how letters from the front, scribbled on scraps of paper, were brought to the attention of the nation.

In a carefully choreographed story, based on real-life events, David Lister exposes brilliantly the injustice of Abraham’s untimely death by execution.

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