Has any Army just refused orders in history?

[bleedingheart]

I am not a military historian, however I am wondering...has any Army in time refused to comply with orders...? I don't mean just a small group, but the generals and all the folks down the line.

Has any organized military group just gotten so fed up with their civilian leadership that they stopped fighting and just walked away?

What is would stop the men and women in Iraq if en masse they all decided to leave????

[flowomo]

1. angry armies generally don't just "walk away"....

they take over the government.

[HamdenRice]

2. US Army in France 1946 and US Army in Vietnam

I realize that you are really asking about the organized officership refusing to obey orders, but citizen armies have refused orders through massive unorganized disobedience.

After VE and VJ day, there were incidents, rarely recorded or mentioned, in which GIs in Paris rioted demanding to go home because the war was over. They did not want to be an occupying force, and this sped up the return of most GIs. Surprisingly, the HBO/History Channel docudram, "Band of Brothers," hints at this state of disorder in its last episodes.

And of course toward the end of the Vietnam war, soldiers refused to go out on patrols once it was clear the US was winding down its efforts.

That's the advantage of a citizen army.

[bleedingheart]

8. I never heard about the WWII incidents until this thread

[HamdenRice]

10. Corrected the date -- it was 1946

I read about it some time ago. Here is an article that discusses it, but unfortunately you can only read the first page from this proprietary data base:

http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0021-8723(196612)53%3A3%3C555%3ATA%22O1%3E2.0.CO%3B2-H

[The Magistrate]

3. In The Great War, Ma'am

The armies of Czarist Russia did essentially that.

In the spring of 1917, there were widespread mutinies in the French Army, though they did not encompass the whole organization, and the mutineers declared generally that they would defend the line but would not attack. the dobject of the men's ire was not the civilian leadership, though, but their generals.

[fasttense]

7. I was thinking about Russia too. n/t

[blm]

4. It happened in Russia - but that was the army refusing to confront its own

citizens.

[Bandit]

5. Wasn't there just a US platoon that refused to drive a convoy

mission a few months back. I know it isn't an Army but it is an official unit.

[KansDem]

12. If I recall correctly...

The platoon members didn't believe the trucks were safe (up to acceptable standards), and therefore didn't feel obligated to drive them.

[leveymg]

14. See Stanley Kubrick's "Paths of Glory"

about the causes of the mutinies within the French Army in World War One. Great film, important history lesson.

The Russian Army deserted in large numbers at the same time, and there were widespread armed mutinies against the Czar. See Sergei Eisenstein's "Battleship Potemkin" (1925), another must see.

[ThomWV]

6. The French Army Temporarily Went On Strike During WW-I

It was more a protest about the inequality of treatment between officers and enlisted (or conscripted) men than it was about the war itself though. Some called it mutiny, but as I recall the history only a couple of men were hanged (or shot I suppose) for it although thousands participated.

[whistle]

9. Russian army in 1917 where the soldiers sickened and demoralized

...from lack of provisions, munitions, weapons, etc. many Russian soldiers just crawled out of the trenches and walked away from the fighting going back to their homes.

<snip>
World War I — Russia

Russia entered the first world war with the largest army in the world, standing at 1,400,000 soldiers; when fully mobilized the Russian army expanded to over 5,000,000 soldiers (though at the outset of war Russia could not arm all its soldiers, having a supply of 4.6 million rifles).
<.....>
Then by October 1917
<.....>
Defeat: The loses Russia suffered in the world war were catastrophic. Between 900,000 and 2,500,000 Russians were killed. At least 1,500,000 Russians and possibly up to more than 5 million Russians were wounded. Nearly 4,000,000 Russian soldiers were held as POWs (Britain, France and Germany had 1.3 million POWs combined).

Economically Russia was devastated. 8,000,000,000 rubles in war debts were outstanding, strangling the national economy of its breath. Inflation soared; the gold reserves (then backing the currency) were nearly empty, revenues were exceedingly low while reconstruction costs were huge. Russia was on the verge of complete collapse.

<more> http://www.marxists.org/glossary/events/w/ww1/russia.htm

[NNN0LHI]

11. By 1970, the U.S. Army had 65,643 deserters

http://www.libcom.org/history/articles/vietnam-gi-resistance/index.php

1970 - The rebellion grows

By 1970, the U.S. Army had 65,643 deserters, roughly the equivalent of four infantry divisions. In an article published in the Armed Forces Journal (June 7, 1971), Marine Colonel Robert D. Heinl Jr., a veteran combat commander with over 27 years experience in the Marines, and the author of Soldiers Of The Sea, a definitive history of the Marine Corps, wrote:

“By every conceivable indicator, our army that 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. Elsewhere than Vietnam, the situation is nearly as serious… Sedition, coupled with disaffection from within the ranks, and externally fomented with an audacity and intensity previously inconceivable, infest the Armed Services...”

Heinl cited a New York Times article which quoted an enlisted man saying, “The American garrisons on the larger bases are virtually disarmed. The lifers have taken our weapons away...there have also been quite a few frag incidents in the battalion.”

“Frag incidents” or “fragging” was soldier slang in Vietnam for the killing of strict, unpopular and aggressive officers and NCO’s (Non-Commissioned Officers, or “non-coms”). The word apparently originated from enlisted men using fragmentation grenades to off commanders. Heinl wrote, “Bounties, raised by common subscription in amounts running anywhere from $50 to $1,000, have been widely reported put on the heads of leaders who the privates and SP4s want to rub out.” Shortly after the costly assault on Hamburger Hill in mid-1969, one of the GI underground newspapers in Vietnam, GI Says, publicly offered a $10,000 bounty on Lieutenant Colonel Weldon Hunnicutt, the officer who ordered and led the attack.

“The Pentagon has now disclosed that fraggings in 1970 (209 killings) have more than doubled those of the previous year (96 killings). Word of the deaths of officers will bring cheers at troop movies or in bivouacs of certain units.” Congressional hearings on fraggings held in 1973 estimated that roughly 3% of officer and non-com deaths in Vietnam between 1961 and 1972 were a result of fraggings. But these figures were only for killings committed with grenades, and didn’t include officer deaths from automatic weapons fire, handguns and knifings. The Army’s Judge Advocate General’s Corps estimated that only 10% of fragging attempts resulted in anyone going to trial. In the America l Division, plagued by poor morale, fraggings during 1971 were estimated to be running around one a week. War equipment was frequently sabotaged and destroyed.

[HamdenRice]

16. 25% were addicted to heroin and other drugs

Last night I watched the surprisingly good VH1 special about drugs in America. They had a segment on Vietnam, which was flooded with heroin as part of the CIA's alliance with Thai drug lords. According to the experts on the show, about 1/4 of the GIs were addicted by the early 70s, and hence many had made themselves unfit for combat.

[LostinVA]

13. The French military re: rioters at the Bastille n/t

[elehhhhna]

15. Roman army on occasion...

but they were paid pro's who were usually on strike over wages (spoils) owed and conditions. IIRC the British Navy had some problems like this in the 1800's/early 1900s.

[melm00se]

17. yup

anytime there is a military coup...