20000 BRITISH AND COMMONWEALTH SOLDIERS WERE CONVICTED OF CHARGES CARRYING THE DEATH PENALTY DURING WWI.

 20,000 British and Commonwealth soldiers were convicted of charges carrying the death penalty during WWI.

Of these, 3,000 were sentenced to death and 306 finally executed. Most of these soldiers were conscripts although a detailed breakdown is beyond the scope of a brief article on Quora.

There is insufficient information available to draw a broad conclusion concerning the public attitude toward the executions during the war.

After the war, however, bereaved families started inquiries into the circumstances of their relatives' conviction and execution which eventually raised grave doubts regarding the British system of military justice.

While doubtless some of those shot were in fact wilfull deserters, there is also ample evidence that many were victims of cruel circumstance.

This movement grew into a decades-long popular campaign to redress perceived miscarriages of justice and obtain pardons for those wrongly executed.

The British government steadfastly resisted the public pressure. In 2001, the Shot at Dawn memorial listing those executed by firing squad, 

was dedicated at the National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire as a gift to the bereaved families by the sculptor Andy DeComyn.

Finally, in 2007, the British government amended the Armed Forces Act to enable issuing pardons to the executed men.

This is carefully couched, though, in language stipulating that such pardons would not invalidate “any conviction or sentence".

This is cold comfort, and much too late, for families who continue to live in the shadow of those long-ago firing squads.