With the Royal Navy tied up at Jutland for much of World War I, surplus naval reservists were formed into a Royal Naval Division to fight in the trenches; the Hood Battalion was one of the division's most distinguished units.

Hood Battalion

History

Sellers, Leonard

Americas

Pen_and_Sword

Leonard Sellers asks whether justice was don e to those who faced the firing squad. He tells the story of Edwin Dyett, one of only 3 officers executed between 1914 a nd 1918, whose story was used in the novel The Secret Battle , by A.P. Herbert. '

For God's Sake Shoot Straight: The Court Martial and Execution of Sub Lt. Edwin Dyett

Military

PEN SWORD BOOKS

Eleven incompetent foreign spies were shot i n the Tower of London during World War 1. The event is one t hat establishment figures would prefer to forget but this bo ok covers a key area of espionage largely untouched by other historical accounts. '

Shot in the Tower

Europe

Pen & Sword

"It is a soldier's tale cut in stone to melt all hearts" Thus Winston Churchill in his introduction to AP Herbert's novel The Secret Battle, a book inspired by and quite clearly based upon the execution of Sub-Lieutenant Edwin Dyett of the Nelson Battalion, 63rd (Royal Navy) Division on 5 January, 1917, for desertion in the face of the enemy. This moving and thought-provoking book cuts a path through the cloud of secrecy which for years has enveloped all the documents relating to First World War courts martial, to tell the tragic tale of the death of one such young man and the truth behind his conviction.

Death for Desertion: the Story of the Court Martial and Execution of Sub Lt. Edwin Dyett

Biographies & Memoirs

Leaders & Notable People

Leo Cooper

The Royal Naval Division, of which the Hood Battalion formed part, was raised at the beginning of the First World War and was made up of officers and men of the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, stokers of the Royal Fleet Reserve and seamen of the Royal Naval Reserve. Its ‘father’ was Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty; Mr Asquith, the Prime Minister, christened it ‘Winston’s Little Army’. It was quite unlike any other formation in that these were soldiers who adhered to all the traditions and the practices of the Royal Navy, or if you like, sailors who went to war as soldiers. The Hood Battalion also attracted numerous officers of the highest caliber, among whom may be mentioned ‘Oc’ Asquith, the Prime Minister’s son, Patrick Shaw-Stewart, said to be the most brilliant young man of his generation, Bernard Freyberg, and, most famous of all, the poet Rupert Brooke, who was to die so tragically in a foreign field. The Hood Battalion saw some of the fiercest fighting of the First World War, particularly at Antwerp, in the Gallipoli Campaign and then again on the Western Front at the Ancre, at Gavrelle, and at Passchendaele. Len Sellers, whose interest in the Hood Battalion was first aroused when he discovered that his great-uncle had served with them, lets the participants tell their own story, having expended prodigious labor in unearthing the many firsthand accounts of the Hood’s exploits included in this book. It is indeed a tale told by heroes.

The Hood Battalion

The first reaction to Leonard Sellers fascinating account of the spies who were executed in the Tower of London during the First World War is likely to be one of amazement at their ineptitude. Not one of them seems to have had any proper training or any idea of how to set about the job. This, of course raises the intriguing question: how many others were there who did know what they were up to and managed to escape detection? However, thanks to the more liberal attitude now prevalent regarding access to hitherto ‘sensitive’ material and to years of dogged research by Len Sellers, the remarkable, but somehow pathetic, stories of the eleven foreign agents who were caught and subsequently shot in the Tower for espionage can now be told. In these days when a mind-boggling array of equipment is available for the assimilation and transmission of supposedly secret information their antics strike one as little short of farcical, but for their efforts, inspired, it seems, more often by greed than patriotism, these men paid the ultimate price and paid it in the most historic site in Britain.Whether they deserved their fate, or indeed the niche in history which this book gives them, is for the reader to decide. What cannot be denied is that their collected histories make remarkable reading.

Shot in the Tower: The Story of the Spies executed in the Tower of London during the First World War

Historical

Pen and Sword Military

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