Should British soldiers killed in 1916 get a memorial?

Red_Wake wrote: »

Do you dispute the documentation recording the jeering of the defeated rebels by Dubliners?

Or that they committed acts which are now considered war crimes?

Red_Wake wrote: »

Yes of course.

The one sided reporting of 1916 is crazy - people completely ignore the misdeeds of the volunteers, shooting unarmed policemen, using child soldiers, that if it were to occur in a modern conflict would be labeled a war crime.

The British Army, rather than the rebels, were responsible for most of the civilian fatalities. Being few, poorly armed and largely confined to garrisons, the rebels were in little position to inflict harm. While most British Army soldiers behaved professionally, there were vastly more of them and they were heavily armed, mobile and dispersed over a wide area. Many were young, inexperienced and inefficient. One British army captain, who described the Sherwood Foresters under his command as “untrained, undersized products of the English slums,” noted that many “had never fired a service rifle before.”[14] The scale of civilian casualties was also a consequence of the army’s use of artillery and heavy machine-guns and its crude tactics: “The head of the columns will in no case advance beyond any house from which fire has been opened, until the inhabitants of such house have been destroyed or captured,” Brigadier-General William Henry Muir Lowe (1861-1944) ordered. “Every man in any such house whether bearing arms or not may be considered as a rebel.”[15] This punitive response was, like so much else, shaped by wartime considerations which ensured that little thought was given to the political consequences of what came to be seen as a heavy-handed repression.

In areas where the military encountered stiff resistance, such as North King Street where fourteen soldiers were killed and another thirty-three wounded in a twenty-eight-hour battle for control of 150 yards, the army appeared to regard any remaining residents as legitimate targets.[16] General Sir John Maxwell (1859-1929), the British General-Officer-Commanding-in-Chief , was candid about this aspect of the fighting in one press interview:

These rebels wore no uniform, and the man who was shooting at a soldier one minute might, for all he knew, be walking quietly beside him in the street at another … Nearly everything had to be left to the troops on the spot … how were the soldiers to discriminate? They saw their comrades killed beside them by hidden and treacherous assailants, and it is even possible that under the horrors of this peculiar attack some of them “saw red.” That is the inevitable consequence of a rebellion of this kind.[17]
Maxwell’s comments reflected the confusion and frustration of street-fighting as British soldiers advanced through streets where they could be fired on by unseen snipers from almost any angle. They also highlight a revealing gulf between the rebels’ perception of their own conduct and the military’s view of the illegitimate nature of the rebellion and its methods. Significantly, it was the rebels’ belief that they had fought “in a fair and clean manner” that came to be widely shared by nationalist opinion.[18] As a result, the British authorities’ decision to execute leading rebels after the Rising was seen by many nationalists as akin to the shooting of prisoners of war.

conorhal wrote: »

You're right, Sands was a British MP, a statue in the houses of parliment will be sufficient.

Your Superior wrote: »

You don't get a statue for not eating your dinner.

Kermit.de.frog wrote: »

What are you doing on an Irish forum then? Is there not a Boards equivalent in the UK where you can discuss these matters?

And FYI the relatives have asked for a memorial.

suicide_circus wrote: »

If the British tax payer wants to fund such a memorial and pay the £200m annual rent for the site on which it stands, I for one won't stand in their way.

Guy:Incognito wrote: »

Did they die there?

Laois_Man wrote: »

Since when is that the criteria

Henry Havelock and James II are maybe the most pominent statues in Travalgar Square. They died at war in India and in France respectively

Where did Lord Mountbatten die and where's his statue?