Military insubordination seems like something that has been around as long as humans have been forced to fight, but I'm especially interested in the consequences of insubordination during the great scale wars such as WW1, WW2, Korea, Vietnam, Persian gulf etc.
How has military treatment of insubordinates changed through history? I would imagine a conflict of extreme trauma such as ww1 would have been rife with insubordination, and if so what was the response?
My expertise is Canada during the First World War so I will focus on that. I will leave it to other experts to contribute answers on other countries and conflicts.
Definition
During the First World War, the Canadian Expeditionary Force (CEF) followed British military law, in particular the Army Act and Manual of Military Law. A servicemember could be charged for insubordination under two sections of the Army Act:
It is important to distinguish between insubordination and mutiny. Insubordination was the act of an individual while mutiny (Section 7) was committed by two or more people and consisted of leading, taking part in or refusing to report a mutiny. As your question specifically mentions insubordination, I’ll focus on that.
Charging someone with insubordination
As noted above, a serviceman could be charged under Sections 8 and/or 9 of the Army Act for insubordination. If a soldier’s offence was similar to insubordination but didn’t quite fit into the definition, he could be charged under Section 40: acting to the prejudice of good order and military discipline. This charge could be used as somewhat of a catch-all and could be added alongside other charges.
The accused would be tried by a court martial consisting of at least three officers, who often lacked any legal training, and sometimes a “prisoner’s friend” to aid the accused in their defence. It wasn’t until 1917 that officers with some legal training, called Court Martial Officers, were assigned to monitor trials. Not all cases would have gone to trial, however. Those that were considered minor would be handled more informally within the unit by an officer.
Punishment
The severity of the punishment was based on the severity of the offence. If convicted under Sections 8 or 9, a soldier could be sentenced to death but his actions would have needed to be quite serious to warrant this punishment. In the CEF, no man was executed under these charges. Men were much more likely to be handed lesser punishments such as:
Sentences could also be reduced, commuted or suspended, often due to manpower shortages on the front, so a man might not serve his full sentence.
Steven Welch’s encyclopedia article on military justice provides some examples of recommended sentences for Section 8 and 9 offences. While these examples are from New Zealand, they are comparable to the Canadian experience as both forces were subject to British military law.
Marc-André Hémond’s MA thesis on courts martial in the CEF uses an example of a soldier charged under Section 9 and I managed to find his case file. The case is of Private Frank Ferll of the 14th Battalion; Frank Ferll was actually an alias – his real name was Guiseppe Antonucci. On 29 August 1917, Antonucci refused a sergeant’s orders to clean another soldier’s equipment, using profane language to do so. He was tried by court martial on 13 October of that year, charged with 1) neglecting to obey a lawful command given by his superior officer and 2) using insubordinate language to his superior officer. He plead not guilty to the first charge and guilty to the second. He was found not guilty of the first charge and guilty of the second. His sentence was one day of Field Punishment No. 2. According to his court martial and personnel files, there were three other instances where Antonucci refused to obey an order (among some other disciplinary issues):
However, it is unclear how representative Antonucci’s case is (see section below for reasons why).
How common was insubordination?
Unfortunately, this is very difficult to answer. While Library and Archives Canada has a database on courts martial of the First World War, its search function is pretty terrible and the digitised microfilms are often very difficult to read. It is also unclear if the database contains all courts martial files (it very likely does not; for example, only Antonucci's October 1917 offence appears in the database), making an accurate analysis of the CEF in its entirety essentially impossible. As well, no secondary sources I examined listed any statistics specifically regarding these charges. The best I could find was an analysis of discipline in Second Canadian Division infantry battalions by David Campbell and even Campbell acknowledges that his findings cannot be completely accurate due to unrecorded offences and incomplete records. In a sample of 308 other ranks' personnel files, 136 were charged with at least one offence between May 1915 and November 1918 for a total of 282 charges. Of these 282 charges, 8 were for disobedience (undefined by Campbell) and 7 were for striking, threatening or using insubordinate language. Grouping offences against Sections 6, 8, 9 and 10 of the Army Act under insubordination and disobedience, Campbell found 246 offences fell under this heading out of 1,362 offences tried within the Second Canadian Division. While this number can provide a rough idea, it is also not particularly accurate as Sections 6 and 10 are not offences specifically related to insubordination as per the Army Act. What these statistics ultimately point towards, though, is that insubordination (as per Sections 8 and 9 of the Army Act) considered serious enough to be tried by court martial was likely a limited occurrence in the CEF.