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well here is the answers belatedly: church went loooong today!
What I was looking for was the last time, ot the latest time decimation had been used by an army as a tool for dicipline. There are actually three instances in WWI that would have satisfied this answer: 1 Battle of the Marne, French Army. General Boutegourd had seven soldiers from the 327th regiment shot on 7 September 1914 without even a preliminary hearing for retreating during the Battle of the Marne. This particular organization had a lot more than seven men run from the battle. It would seem that the general had one individual group picked at random, and arbitrarly had seven of its memebers shot. This is a straight form of decimation, the use of selecting individual soldiers at random and shooting them as an example. It is the one , authoritative documented latest example of this I could find in study. 2. The British Army, 1914-1918: Decimation in the form of trials and sentances carried out. Between 1914 and 1918 the british tried 3000 men for crimes concerning the battlefied. Of the 3000 sentanced to death, 300 or so were actually put to death, the rest commuted in sentances. This is a broad form of decimation, in that one in ten have actually been put to death, although it occurred over a period of time and not confined to just one period on the battlefield. There is a great web site that defines the Shot at Dawn syndrome of the British Army here: http://www.shotatdawn.org.uk/ The last case of decimation occured in the french army during the great Mutiny, April 29, 1917. Although not proven, some 30 soldiers (out of a total of 30 to 40,000 mutineers) were shot after the mutinies had been put down. It would appear that the French and Italian armys, which were the last major Military organizations to have a decimation clause allowed in their code of military justice, outlawed the practice after WWI. Thank God for small favors. ![]() |
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