Battle Police on the Western Front

Military Police, c1916

NAM. 1980-09-76-7

In this talk Colonel Jeremy Green OBE will examine the role played by the notorious ‘Battle Police’ during the First World War.

This talk is part of the National Army Museum’s regular Lunchtime Lectures series.

One of the most enduring and damning stories about Britain’s Military Police during the First World War is that they were stationed routinely in the rearward-most trenches on the Western Front in order to threaten, or to actually shoot, any soldier who refused to go ‘over the top’ when so ordered; the notorious ‘Battle Police’.

Even though there are few, if any, credible accounts of the killing of soldiers by these ‘Battle Police’, the notion of such apparently pitiless and unthinking agents of military authority lurking in the trenches, and embodied in the Military Police, still resonates and has entered the popular imagination as yet more evidence of the particular ‘horrors’ of the First World War.

Now, as the nation commemorates the centenary of that conflict, this received wisdom has gained something of a second wind. It is, therefore, timely and appropriate to ‘put the case for the defence’.

Colonel Jeremy Green OBE, who will put that case, is Regimental Secretary of the Royal Military Police and Director of the Royal Military Police Museum.

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