A crucified solider, fake news Horrific First World War tale originated in Black Country
IT was the wartime urban myth that sank so deep in the public’s mindset that a bronze statue was commissioned to mark the savagery.
The reality was that the First World War reports of a Canadian soldier crucified by the “brutish Hun” were probably fictitious. It was a tall tale conjured up to harden our resolve during the conflict, to paint the enemy as monsters – and it worked.
But now historians Richard Pursehouse and Lee Dent have discovered this slice of “fake news” had its roots in the Black Country.
The Canadian victim began life as a British soldier, and the original story-teller was a Tipton dispatch rider.
The world’s press eagerly snapped up Corporal Sidney G Stanton’s account of the enemy’s barbarity, even though there was not a scrap of evidence to back it up.
The story certainly had legs. Having been crucified in the Great War, the soldier – either Canadian, British or French, depending on which paper you read – suffered the same fate in the Second World War.
That just shows propaganda tactics changed little over the years.
Richard and Lee, members of the Wolverhampton Western Front Association, came across the Black Country links while researching Belgian refugees housed in our area.
They uncovered a grisly newspaper interview with Corporal Stanton, a dispatch rider attached to 2nd Army HQ Staff. He was interviewed on September 3, 1914, while on leave at his home in Sedgley Road West, Tipton.
The former West Bromwich Borough Council employee told the press pack: “The Huns had captured a fellow dispatch rider, and after crucifying him with the aid of lances for nails, they had poured petrol from the tank of his machine over his body and set fire to him.”
The victim was not named, with newspapers claiming this was done to spare relatives more upset. Historians have failed to find a shred of evidence to back Corporal Stanton’s claims.
“At first, we thought the report referred to a crucified Canadian soldier that had surfaced in May 1915, a story dismissed after the war as an urban myth,” admits Richard.
Corporal Stanton’s claims soon spread like wildfire. The tortured Tommy repeatedly changed nationality and rank. The Canadian papers even reported that three men were crucified. There were only two in the American national newspapers and just the one, according to British journalists.
At Ypres in 1915, there were reports that officers of the Dublin Fusiliers had tripped across the crucified soldier. French newspapers said the victim was a French colonial.
Much later, a Canadian researcher alleged the victim’s name was Sergeant Harry Bond – or Harry Band in some reports. Again, there is no hard evidence to suggest that either Sergeant Bond or Band was crucified.
The soldier, officially missing in action, was put in the frame after a Lance Corporal CM Brown informed a British nurse of his supposed fate.
The murdered man was also identified as Sergeant Thomas Elliott of Brantford, Ontario. Bemused Elliott was forced to write to his pastor, informing him that he was very much alive.
And the testimony of two English soldiers who swore they saw a body “fastened by bayonets to a barn door” was rubbished when it emerged that no Germans had never occupied the area described.
Private Barrie, of the 13th Battalion, also waded into the storm, alleging he saw a man in British uniform in the village of St Julien on April 24, 1915, attached to a post by eight bayonets.
Interestingly, reports of the mutilated Canadian surfaced only days after a German submarine sank passenger liner coast of Ireland.
Under the headline ‘Torture of a Canadian Officer’, The Times reported: “Last week a large number of Canadian soldiers wounded in the fighting round Ypres arrived at the base hospital at Versailles.
“They all told a story of how one of their officers had been crucified by the Germans. He had been pinned to a wall by bayonets thrust through his hands and feet.
“Another bayonet had been thrust through his throat and, finally, he was riddled with bullets.
“The wounded Canadians said that the Dublin Fusiliers had seen this done with their own eyes and they had heard the officers of the Dublin Fusiliers talking about it.”
The London Gazette stated: “Now, I have reason to believe, written depositions testifying to the fact of the discovery of the body are in possession of the British Headquarters Staff.
“The unfortunate victim was a sergeant. As the story was told to me, he was found transfixed to the Lusitania off the wooden fence of a farm building. Bayonets were thrust through the palms of his hands and his feet, pinning him to the fence. He had been repeatedly stabbed with bayonets and there were many punctured wounds in his body.
“I have not heard that any of our
They all told a story of how one of their officers had been crucified by the Germans... The Times