12. The September Rising (1): London
The British army and Churchill's Volunteer Corps wasted no time reconquering the blocked streets and buildings of London. For that they used heavy guns and a few Medium Mark A Whippet and Mark V tanks, against which the rebels had no possible defense. The sudden attack led to many of the insurgents to surrender, to the surprise of the government, of the commanders of the Volunteers Corps and of the leaders of the rebellion. Some of the volunteer units then moved to take revenge on the prisoners, and a small battle among loyalist forces ensued. Since its very creation, some volunteer units were nothing but death squads that had been used to terrorize some villages. Then, on October 5th, just as the main strike was reconquering London, when some buidlings were cleared, their occupiers were shot on the spot.
When those executions took place again on the following days, the officers and soldiers of the regular army units that were fighting in London were shocked by the sheer brutality and ferocity of the executioneers and, in a few occasions, they reacted by confronting the death squads. In one of those incidents, Captain Oswald Mosley, a veteran of the trenches, was executed along a few dozens of his men after the regular forces discovered the madness that Mosley's volunteers, the Mosley Brigade (around 600 men), had unleashed in the East End of London. According to some witnesses, Mosley's men had rampaged through the streets, killing and plundering allown the way, slauthering those unfortunate enough to be in their path. So, Mosley and some of his men were put against a wall in Cable Street and executed there by a firing squad. All in all, around fifty members of the Brigade were either shoot or beaten to death by the enraged soldiers that witnesssed the horror.
As a few more incidents similar in nature to this one took place, Churchill`s Volunteers Coprs were withdrawn from the cities and the regular army ended the supression of the revolt that, by that time, was broken and finished. The political career of Winston Churchill, who just before the events had stated that "Someone has to be the bloodhound. I won't shy away from the responsibility", was not to recover from this and by 1932 he had completely withdrawn from politics (1). His memory is still stained today by those events.
The "September Rising" (even if most of its events took place in October) claimed 156 lives in London. Among them was John Mclean. His body, which was found floating on the Thames, was delivered to a morgue on November 1st.
(1) He would die in 1946 from a stroke.