The United States Army carried out 141 executions over a three-year period from 1942 to 1945 and a further six executions were conducted during the postwar period, for a known total of 147.
John S. A most interesting story. This book tells the story of the 96 American soldiers who were executed for various offenses during WWII.
During World War II, in all theaters of the war, the United States military executed 102 of its own soldiers for rape or unprovoked murder of civilians, but only Slovik was executed for the military offense of desertion.
There were no recorded British soldiers executed in the Second World War. Of the 306 Soldier's shot at dawn only one was from the DCLI, he was Private George Mills. He was Court Marshalled for the offence of desertion along with 7 other offences for theft, you can read more about him below.
The United States military has executed 135 people since 1916. The most recent person to be executed by the military is U.S. Army Private John A. Bennett, executed on April 13, 1961, for rape and attempted murder.
Database of convicted people said to be innocent includes 150 allegedly wrongfully executed.
Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia, but it would not be the last. Approximately five hundred Union and Confederate soldiers were shot or hanged during the Civil War for various crimes. That is more military executions than in all of our other wars combined.
That rule was taken seriously during the lead up to World War II and the conflict itself. At least 15,000 German soldiers were executed for desertion alone, and up to 50,000 were killed for often minor acts of insubordination.
However, other nations, especially China, contributed to the proceedings, and Australian judge William Flood Webb presided. In addition to the central Tokyo trial, various tribunals sitting outside Japan judged some 5,000 Japanese guilty of war crimes, of whom more than 900 were executed.
During World War II, six German saboteurs who secretly entered the United States on a mission to attack its civil infrastructure are executed by the United States for spying. Two other saboteurs who disclosed the plot to the FBI and aided U.S. authorities in their manhunt for their collaborators were imprisoned.
Only a few individuals are on the military death row, which is based at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. All were convicted of murder. There have been no executions in the modern era of the death penalty.
Second World War
Over 20,000 American soldiers were tried and sentenced for desertion. Forty-nine were sentenced to death, though forty-eight of these death sentences were subsequently commuted. Only one U.S. soldier, Private Eddie Slovik, was executed for desertion in World War II.
Rainey Bethea, executed August 14, 1936 at Owensboro, Kentucky, was the last public execution in America. He was publicly hanged for rape on August 14, 1936 in a parking lot in Owensboro, Kentucky (to avoid damage to the courthouse lawn by thousands of people who were expected to attend).
Over 500 men, representing both North and South, were shot or hanged during the four-year conflict, two-thirds of them for desertion. As the war continued into its later years the penalty of death was often overlooked in order to preserve the dwindling ranks of the Confederate army.
For an unlucky few, the charge of desertion meant that they would be executed as an example for the rest of the troops. From the many men on both sides who deserted, about 500 were executed. Confederate generals Stonewall Jackson and Braxton Bragg were notorious for executing any deserters in their armies.
Only 147 Union deserters were executed during the course of the war.
China is estimated to have endured the second-highest number of total casualties in WWII. As many as 20 million people died in China, including up to 3.75 million military deaths and 18.19 million civilian deaths.
The reasons for the Japanese behaving as they did were complex. The Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) indoctrinated its soldiers to believe that surrender was dishonourable. POWs were therefore thought to be unworthy of respect. The IJA also relied on physical punishment to discipline its own troops.
Russians also point to the fact that Soviet forces killed more German soldiers than their Western counterparts, accounting for 76 percent of Germany's military dead.
Farr was one of 306 soldiers from Britain and the Commonwealth who were executed for cowardice during the Great War.
German soldiers did however face drastic consequences if refusing legal orders during the war. One and a half million German soldiers were sentenced to imprisonment for refusing to follow an order and 30,000 were sentenced to death, of whom 23,000 were executed.
Of the 620,000 recorded military deaths in the Civil War about two-thirds died from disease.
Henry Wirz and Andersonville Prison. Henry Wirz, commander of the infamous Confederate prison at Andersonville, Georgia, was hanged on November 10, 1865, in Washington, D.C., the only Confederate officer executed as a war criminal.
Most deserters were sent to work camps for the duration of the war, while others were branded or tattooed so their crime was visible for all to see. It also was not unusual for deserters to be executed for their crimes.