Probably the greatest example of this in modern times is the French Army Mutinies of 1917 during World War One. Most history books offer only small and brief accounts of the event but they are a lot more complex than they appear.
The French army going into World War One was one that was divided socially. Most soldiers were very uneducated and often from rather poor or middle class working backgrounds. Scandal's such as the Dreyfus affair shook the nature of the French army. Lasting over ten years, the scandal revolved around Officer Alfred Dreyfus who was accused of spying and leaking state military secrets to the German Embassy in Paris. To make a long story short, Dreyfus was convicted on false evidence, mostly because he was of Jewish descent. Over a decade later he was acquitted but a lot of damage was already done. Many common soldiers viewed the scandal as French military leadership willing to overturn traditional French liberties of equality and throw the common man under the bus than own up to its own mistakes.
Fast forward to the actual war and France had managed to lock the Germans in a stalemate but not without a large amount of casualties. Battles like Verdun yielded 400,000 casualties alone and offensives like the Nivelle offensive in 1917 that promised a swift and decisive end to the war just resulted in more dead. The constant and ever growing amount of dead men made soldiers believe that the generals did not care how many men were dying on the front and would just keep sending more. Men would even bleat like sheep when marching towards the Front as if they were sheep being lead to the slaughter.
Other issues that plagued the French Poilu and coupled with their discontent with the high casualty count that eventually caused their revolt was a lack of neglect on the well being of the soldiers away from combat. Lack of home leave for soldiers which had gradually been stripped more and more as the war went on, abysmal billet conditions away from the front with men not getting beds or being forced to sleep in barns, lack of showers, poor rations, poor pay coupled with rising prices of goods, and poor medical care for the wounded. Overall, men in the French army felt a collective feeling of neglect and that they were treated different even though they were the ones enduring combat.
The mutinies themselves are interesting as they were not a large collective mass as one would think. While they did happen on a large scale, and the General's believed that the majority of the army besides a handful of divisions could not be relied on for combat, they happened in almost complete isolation from one another. Soldiers rarely knew of similar actions of disobedience in other units and most demonstrations never reached more than 100 men at a time. While there was one instance of soldiers hijacking a train to petition the legislature in Paris to end the war, most demonstrations were a smaller scale and mostly non-violent. Most demonstrations happened behind the front and were usually soldiers about to be sent back to the frontlines. Demonstrations included singing, firing their rifles in the air, getting drunk, refusing to move, and yelling at officers. A important note was that officers were still respected and only a handful of accounts exist that express any violent actions taken by men towards officers. A famous look that became a symbol of the mutineers was sitting with one's arms crossed and simply refusing to move. A few units rebelled for multiples days straight but many would fall back in line the next day once the alcohol wore off. In total the mutinies lasted from early May to late July/ early August, with their peak in June/July and effective made the majority of the French army a non-existent fighting force for the summer of 1917.
Command and Generals such as Philippe Pétain eventually regained control over the army, mostly by submitting to many of the demands of the Poilu. In this respect, the mutinies were more like a labor strike than a coup against command as they simply wanted their demands met as they felt they were treated as less than people during the war. Home leave was reinstated and conditions away from the front in billet's was improved as well as the food and medical care. To address the issues of soldiers feeling like they were being sent to the slaughter, the French army remain virtually on the defense for the remainder of the war and did not undertake any large scale offensives on their own, instead relying heavily on the new American forces to push for anything offensive.
This has actually been a topic I have done extensive research on for my studies as a graduate student and has become one of my focuses as I specialize in the French Army during World War One.
Sources:
Primary:
Barthas, Louis, and Edward M. Strauss. Poilu: the World War I Notebooks of Corporal Louis Barthas, Barrelmaker, 1914-1918. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015.
Desagneux, Henri. A French Soldier's War Diary 1914-1918. Pen and Sword Military, 2014.
Bloch, Marc, and Carole Fink. Memoirs of War: 1914-1915. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
Secondary:
Greenhalgh, Elizabeth. The French Army and the First World War. Cambridge University Press, 2014.
-Smith, Leonard V. Between Mutiny and Obedience. Princeton University Pres, 2016
Williams, John. Mutiny, 1917. 1. 1st ed. Vol. 1. Heinemann, 1962.
Watt, Richard. Dare Call It Treason: The True Story of the French Armies Mutinies of 1917. Dorset Press, 2001.
- Murphy, David. Breaking Point of the French Army: the Nivelle Offensive of 1917. Barnsley, South Yorkshire: Pen et Sword Military, 2015.
-Becker, Jean-Jacques. The Great War and the French People. Providence, RI: Berg, 1993.
- King, Jere Clemens. Generals and Politicians: Conflict Between France's High Command, Parliament, and the Government 1914-1918. Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, 1971.
Not a war, but an instance in which the military revolted against the command structure because of the ethics of an order.
Nikita Khrushchev raised the price of meat and butter in the USSR on June 1 1961, which by coincidence was the same day a previously enacted economic plan came into effect and raised factory worker quotas. This resulted in the workers at the Budyonny Electric Locomotive Factory in Novocherkassk banding together and complaining to their factory managers. When the managers refused to hear their complaints they began a general strike which quickly spread and resulted in the workers marching on the local police station and city hall.
Khrushchev called in motorized infantry led by General Matvey Kuzmich Shapochnikov to kill the striking workers. According to Soviet military historian Dmitry Volkogonov, General Shapochnikov told his troops to remove all the ammo from their rifles and tanks before they reached Novocherkassk, going on to proclaim "I don't see any enemy that we could turn our weapons against". Khrushchev instead called in a small detachment of a dozen Internal Troops of the Ministry for Internal Affairs, who used sniper and machine gun fire to kill 29 workers and wound 84.
General Shapochnikov was arrested and sent letters to the Soviet Komsomol and several Universities in an attempt to bring attention to the Novocherkassk Massacre, which led to his expulsion from the party in 1967 and a criminal case of Anti-Sovietism that was brought against him. He apologized for the incident and subsequently his case was dismissed. He was reinstated back into the party in 1988 by Gorbachev as a part of his Glasnost policy.
Of the incident Shapochnikov said:
"Personally, I am unable to conceal resentment or anger at those who committed these arbitrary and outrageous actions. I only regret not having been able to really fight this evil. In the fight against despotism and tyranny I did not have the ability to conduct a battle to the death. In the struggle with the evil that remains widespread and entrenched in the army, the tyranny of high-handedness, meanness, and hypocrisy, I did not have enough effective weapons, except the illusory belief that the truth, in and of itself, would win, and that justice would prevail."
Sources:
Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire (1993) by David Remnick
The Diary of General Shaposhnikov, May 1967
This is an interesting topic I came across when I fell into a rabbit hole re: America’s War in Vietnam. Popular media often portrays student protesters and unenlisted citizens as being the main force being protesting against the war in the 60’s and 70’s. However, there was a large-scale revolt amongst members of all American Armed Forces that is credited with leading to the breakdown of the military’s ability to wage war, in part resulting from ethical quandaries (Source 1). Desertion, drug use, AWOLs (Absent Without Leave), and fragging (a term coined by US military personnel during the Vietnam War, which means killing a fellow soldier or superior officer, typically using a fragmentation grenades) were not a new occurrence for the US military. However, Source 2 cites organized resistance as a “uniquely Vietnam-era phenomenon”. I’d say of the subpoints below, the GI movement and race sections have the most to do with soldiers disagreeing with the ethical ramifications of war, though ethics was not the only driving force behind the breakdown of the military at that time.
Tet Offensive
- Military morale dropped following the Test Offensive of 1968. This surprise attack against South Vietnam and its US allies is a massive blow to prior notions about potential US military success in Vietnam (Source 3)
- At this point, incidences of fragging steadily climbs (Source 4).
The GI movement picks up traction
- From about 1965 to 1967, there were some more individual acts of protest that gained national attention, such as the Fort Hood Three who refused to be deployed to Vietnam in 1966 (Source 5), and the court-martial of US Army doctor Howard Levy for refusing to train Green Beret medics headed for duty in Vietnam on the grounds of medical ethics and the desire to not abet war crimes (Source 6). 1968 sees more collective acts of resistance from US military personnel. In October 1986, the Presidio 27 (27 prisoners in the Presidio stockade in California) broke ranks during roll call and sat in a circle singing “We Shall Overcome” (Source 7).
- Underground antiwar coffeehouses and press. GI’s could find similar dissenters in underground GI coffeehouses which offered a safe space to organize and distribute underground GI newspapers (Source 8). Over 300 of these newspapers were published during the war, though they usually didn’t last long due to rapid turnover of service members (Source 1).
Race
- Source 9 is a comprehensive look at the life of an African American GI during the war. They were often denied conscientious objector status based on racial preconceived notions. They were also less likely to be promoted and were underrepresented in higher ranks. Compared to previous wars, they had a higher chance of seeing front-line combat (Source 9 and 10). By 1965, almost 25% of GI casualties were African American, though this number decreases by 1967.
- African American GIs faced conflicting feelings about this war. They were more able to relate to the disadvantaged people of color they were tasked with fighting and thus had a harder time rationalizing brutality against the Vietnamese (Source 11 and 12). Additionally, both the Civil Rights and Black Power movements were against the War in Vietnam, further contributing to this cognitive dissonance. Again, ethical ramifications of war crop up.
Drug Use
- In 1971, Col. Robert E. Heinl Jr.'s publishes a report entitled “The Collapse of the Armed Forces”. One of many things he notes is the rising number of drug investigations and discharges spanning from 1966 to 1971. At the beginning of his report, he states: "By every conceivable indicator, our army that now remains in Vietnam is in a state approaching collapse, with individual units avoiding or having refused combat, murdering their officers and non commissioned officers, drug-ridden, and dispirited where not near mutinous.”
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Source 1:
https://depts.washington.edu/antiwar/gi_mvmt.shtml
Source 2:
Hayes, James R. (1990) "The War Within a War: Dissent in the Vietnam-Era Military," Vietnam Generation: Vol. 2 : No. 1 , Article 3.Available at: https://digitalcommons.lasalle.edu/vietnamgeneration/vol2/iss1/3
Source 3:https://www.nationalgeographic.org/thisday/jan30/tet-offensive/
Source 4:
Ferguson, J. Michael. Review of Fragging: Why U.S. Soldiers Assaulted Their Officers in Vietnam, by George Lepre. Oral History Review, vol. 43 no. 1, 2016, p. 216-218. Project MUSE muse.jhu.edu/article/615544.
Source 5:
The Fort Hood three : the case of the three G.I.'s who said "no" to the war in Vietnam. https://content.wisconsinhistory.org/digital/collection/p15932coll8/id/54495
Source 6:
Strassfeld, Robert N., "Vietnam War on Trial: The Court-Martial of Dr. Howard B. Levy" (1994). FacultyPublications. 551.
Source 7:
PRESS RELEASEPresidio Commemorates 50th Anniversary of the Presidio 27 "Mutiny" at the Stockadehttps://www.presidio.gov/presidio-trust/press/presidio-commemorates-50th-anniversary-of-the-presidio-27-mutiny-at-the-stockade
Source 8:Parsons, David L. "Dangerous Grounds: Antiwar Coffeehouses and Military Dissent in the Vietnam Era”
Source 9:Fighting on Two Fronts: African Americans and the Vietnam WarBy James E. Westheider
Source 10:
African-Americans In Combathttps://www.pbs.org/opb/historydetectives/feature/african-americans-in-combat/
Source 11:
Allen, Irving M.. “Posttraumatic stress disorder among black Vietnam veterans.” Hospital & community psychiatry 37 1 (1986): 55-61 .Source 12:
Oxley, L. L. (1987). Issues and attitudes concerning combat-experienced Black Vietnam veterans. Journal of the National Medical Association, 79(1), 25–32.