From http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/bre...-1225779208788

Diggers 'got VD to avoid fighting'

September 24, 2009

AUSTRALIAN military history is replete with tales of heroic World War One diggers who endured and died in frightful conditions.

Then there's another group who did everything they could to escape the front line, including feigning assorted illnesses, madness and shellshock, shooting themselves in the hand, chewing cordite to create fever and deliberately catching venereal disease.

Soldiers also resorted to injecting knee joints with petrol, cutting their gums and inserting soap to create frothing associated with epilepsy and eating explosives to simulate jaundice.

Australian War Memorial historian Ashley Ekins said the prolonged strain of trench warfare, sustained artillery bombardment and routine death meant some succumbed to shellshock while others took matters into their own hands.

He said the methods developed by soldiers for malingering, shirking or "swinging the lead'', in the military parlance of the day, were staggering in their variety and inventiveness.

Addressing a conference on war wounds at the Australian War Memorial, Mr Ekins said this was a problem afflicting every army in World War One to varying degrees.

Some nation's soldiers were far worse.

In two weeks in October-November 1914, more than half the 1800 Indian soldiers admitted to hospital were suffering gunshot wounds to the hand.

Australia's official histories generally downplayed the extent of this problem.

Medical records, which would have given a far clearer indication, were destroyed during and after the war.

Mr Ekins said the official figure was 700 medically reported cases while 467 soldiers were court martialled over self inflicted wounds.

"But based on the evidence from other sources these reported and charged cases appear to represent the tip of a very large iceberg,'' he said.

"Malingerers constituted, like shell shock victims, a significant minority of the total strength of the Australian force.''

Mr Ekins said soldiers started hurting themselves to escape the front line while on Gallipoli, often shooting themselves through the palm of the left hand.

That and many other practices continued right through the war, escalating during the final successful Western Front battles.

One such soldier, on the face of it, was Corporal Raymond Redmond, court martialled over a self-inflicted gunshot wound shortly before the 1918 battle of Villers-Bretonneux.

Mr Ekins said by that time Redmond had been at war for almost three years and had been wounded in action twice before.

He was found not guilty, although he was convicted of separate charges of being absent without leave.

In July 1998, France announced it would confer its highest medal, the Legion d'honneur, on surviving allied veterans with more than 60 Australians receiving this award.

But three old diggers, including Corporal Redmond, were denied this honour because of their disciplinary records.

"Francis Redmond died two days after Anzac day 1999, aged 104, hopefully, to my mind, never aware that he was refused the Legion d'honneur,'' he said.
The trenches of the Western front is where the term 'live and let live' came about.

'Live and let live' was the code of many units stationed there, with regards to how they behaved with 'enemy' units on the other side of no-man's land. Raids and scouting missions in 'quiet sectors' were only carried out under explicit orders of higher command, but demotivated units found ways to keep from disrupting the defacto peace; notes would be delivered to 'enemy' lines warning that their superiors had ordered an attack, which would be reluctantly carried out,but the time of the attack was given so that the 'enemy' could take shelter first. Numerous instances of famished German soldiers crossing no-man's land to dine with allied soldiers happened.

'Live and let live' became such a problem for the rear echelon British brass that British units designated for raids were ordered to deliver a small amount of German barbed wire as proof that they had actually visited the German lines during a nighttime raid, since many units opted to simply sit in craters in no-man's land rather than risk harm. Some British units even acquired rolls of German barbed wire to provide for a long supply of bogus 'evidence' of raids that were never carried out.

This sort of thing didn't happen when the more elite units, Scottish or Prussian for e.g., were in a sector on one side or another.