Drumhead court-martial
The drumhead court-martial of the Finnish 15th Brigade in July 1944
A drumhead court-martial is a court-martial that happens on the battlefield to hear important charges of crimes that happened during the battle.
The term is said to come from the use of a drumhead as an improvised writing table.[1]
Origins
The earliest recorded use is in an English memoir of the Peninsular War (1807).[2] The term sometimes is similar to summary justice. It has an implied lack of judicial neutrality, as noted in the transcripts of the trial at Nuremberg of Josef Bühler.[3]
Drumhead Court-martial Media
An example of an illustration from the Thirty Years' War showing a drum used as a table at military executions
References
- ↑ Definition from Brewer's Dictionary
- ↑ 'Court martial, n. 1.b. drumhead court-martial', Oxford English Dictionary Online (2009), citing Sir Charles Shaw, Personal memoirs and correspondence, comprising a narrative of the war ... in Portugal and Spain (1837), II, 449.
- ↑ Transcript Archived 2020-01-03 at the Wayback Machine at the Nizkor project
