Arthur Harris

"Bomber Harris" redirects here. For the television film of that name, see Bomber Harris (television film).

Arthur Travers Harris
Official portrait (photograph) of Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris
Nickname(s)	Bomber Harris, Butcher Harris
Allegiance	United Kingdom
Service/branch	Royal Air Force
Years of service	1914–1945
Rank	Marshal of the Royal Air Force
Battles/wars	First World War Western Front Second World War British strategic bombing in Europe
Awards	Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath (1945) Officer of the Order of the British Empire Air Force Cross Mentioned in Despatches Order of Suvarov 1st Class(1944) Distinguished Service Medal (United States) (1946) Croix de Guerre with Palms Legion of Honour, Legion of Merit
Other work	Manager of the South African Marine Corporation

Marshal of the Royal Air Force Sir Arthur Travers Harris, 1st Baronet GCB OBE AFC RAF (13 April 1892 – 5 April 1984), commonly known as "Bomber" Harris by the press, and often within the RAF as "Butcher" Harris, was Air Officer Commanding-in-Chief (AOC-in-C) of RAF Bomber Command (from early 1943 holding the rank of Air Chief Marshal) during the latter half of World War II. In 1942 the Cabinet agreed to the area bombing of German cities. Harris was tasked with implementing Churchill's policy and supported the development of tactics and technology to perform the task more effectively. Harris assisted British Chief of the Air Staff Marshal of the Royal Air Force Charles Portal in carrying out the United Kingdom's most devastating attacks against the German infrastructure at a time when Britain was limited in its resources and manpower.

Harris's preference for area bombing over precision targeting in the last year of the war remains controversial, partly because by this time many senior Allied air commanders thought it less effective and partly for the large number of civilian casualties and destruction this strategy caused in Continental Europe. While the Butt Report correctly notes, "of those aircraft recorded as attacking their target, only one in three got within five miles (eight kilometres)" in 1940 and 1941, by 1944, many technical and training improvements had been implemented, not least H2S radar and the Pathfinder force. The argument Harris continued to adhere to an area bombing strategy due to the inaccuracy of his bomber force, despite the absence of evidence (or even attempts to gather any) of its effectiveness, is based on a misapprehension of the circumstances. He was not dissuaded from it by his seniors, Portal and Churchill, both of whom had access to better intelligence than Harris, nor were there serious misgivings about the campaign expressed by his seniors (or anyone in the Government) at the time.

Biography

Early years

Harris was born on 13 April 1892, at Cheltenham, where his parents were staying while his father was on home leave from the Indian Civil Service. He was educated at Allhallows School in Devon, while his brothers were educated at Sherborne and Eton. At the age of 16, not considered academically gifted by his parents, he was given the choice of "either army or the colonies." He chose the colonies and went to Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe and Zambia) in 1908, where over the next few years he flourished earning his living "gold mining, driving coaches [and] general farming".

First World War

In 1914 at the outbreak of the First World War, Harris joined the 1st Rhodesian Regiment as a bugler, and served with them in South Africa and in the German colony of South-West Africa (now Namibia). In 1915 he returned to England and joined the Royal Flying Corps, serving with distinction on the home front and in France during 1917 as a flight commander and ultimately CO of No. 45 Squadron, flying the Sopwith 1½ Strutter and Sopwith Camel. Before he returned to England to command No. 44 Squadron on Home Defence duties, Harris claimed five enemy aircraft destroyed and was awarded the Air Force Cross (AFC). He finished the war a major.

Inter-War years

After the war, Harris chose to remain in the newly formed Royal Air Force. In the RAF he served in different functions in India, Mesopotamia (now Iraq and Syria), and Persia (now Iran). He said of his service in India that he first got involved in bombing in the usual annual North West Frontier tribesmen trouble. In Mesopotamia he commanded a Vickers Vernon squadron. "We cut a hole in the nose and rigged up our own bomb racks and I turned those machines into the heaviest and best bombers in the command". Harris also contributed at this time to the development of bombing using delay-action bombs, which were then applied to keep down uprisings of the Mesopotamian tribes fighting against British occupation. With regard to this period, Harris is recorded as having remarked "the only thing the Arab understands is the heavy hand." In 1924 Harris was posted to England to command the first post-war heavy bomber squadron (No. 58). His commander in Iraq had been the future Chief of the Air Staff Sir John Salmond, who was also one of his commanders back in England. Together they developed "night training for night operations".

From 1927 to 1929, Harris attended the Army Staff College at Camberley where he discovered that at the college the army kept 200 horses for the officers' fox hunting. At a time when all services were very short of equipment, the army high command - which was still dominated by cavalry officers - clearly had a different set of priorities from technocrats like Harris, who quipped that the army commanders would only be happy with the tank if it could learn to eat hay and defecate like a horse. He also had a low opinion of the Navy, he commented that there were three things which should never be allowed on a well run yacht "a wheel-barrow, an umbrella and a naval officer". Bernard Montgomery was one of the few army officers he met while at the college whom he liked; possibly because they shared certain underlying personality characteristics.

His next command was of a flying-boat squadron where he continued to develop night flying techniques. From 1934 to 1937 he was the Deputy Director of Plans in the Air Ministry. He was posted to the Middle East Command in Egypt, as a senior Air Staff Officer. In 1936 Harris commented on the Palestinian Arab revolt "one 250 lb. or 500 lb. bomb in each village that speaks out of turn" would satisfactorily solve the problem. In 1937 he was promoted to Air Commodore and in 1938 he was a put in command of No. 4 (Bomber) Group. After a purchasing mission to the USA, he was posted to Palestine and Trans-Jordan and as an Air Vice Marshal in 1939 he was Officer Commanding the RAF contingent in that area.

Second World War

Harris returned to England in September 1939 to take command of No. 5 Group. In 1941 he was promoted to Air Marshal and Commander-in-Chief (C-in-C) of Bomber Command in February 1942. At the time, Bomber Command was making a negligible contribution to the war effort. This was due to the fact the British had simply not explored the concept of offensive bombing and had in no way prepared for it. Consequently its aircraft - principally the Fairey Battle light bomber, Handley Page Hampden, Vickers Wellington, and Armstrong Whitworth Whitley medium bombers - were deficient, and crews lacked sufficient experience and the skill to navigate long distances, drop bombs accurately, and return to home fields.

Harris immediately set about rectifying deficiencies with great energy; he had studied new theories of offensive bombing developed by Germany in Spain and in the early years of WWII and was convinced of the effectiveness of a concentrated aggressive approach. He then re-evaluated Bomber Command's tactics and set about improving standards of instruction and training. His enterprise incorporated the efficient deployment of the Short Stirling, the introduction of the next powerful four-engined heavy bombers such as the Handley Page Halifax and Avro Lancaster, and later the twin-engined de Havilland Mosquito light bomber. Also during this period, the roles of less-modern aircraft like the Wellington and Bristol Blenheim and Beaufort were reappraised.

Professor Frederick Lindemann (later ennobled as Lord Cherwell), appointed the British government's leading scientific adviser with a seat in the Cabinet by his friend, Prime Minister Winston Churchill, in 1942 presented a seminal paper to Cabinet advocating the area bombing of German cities in a strategic bombing campaign. It was accepted by Cabinet and Harris was directed to carry out the task. It became an important part of the total war waged against Germany.

Lord Cherwell's dehousing paper put forward the theory of attacking major industrial centres in order to deliberately destroy as many homes and houses as possible. Working class housing areas were to be targeted because they had a higher density and firestorms were more likely. This would displace the German workforce and disrupt and reduce their ability to work. Calculations showed Bomber Command would be able to destroy the majority of German houses located in cities quite quickly. The plan was highly controversial even before it started, but the Cabinet thought bombing was the only option available to directly attack Germany (a major invasion of the continent was years away) and the Soviets were demanding that the Western Allies do something to relieve the pressure on the Eastern Front.

Harris said at the start of the bombing campaign that he was unleashing a whirlwind on Germany.

The Nazis entered this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everyone else, and nobody was going to bomb them. At Rotterdam, London, Warsaw, and half a hundred other places, they put their rather naive theory into operation. They sowed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind.

In February 1945, Harris wrote "I do not personally regard the whole of the remaining cities of Germany as worth the bones of one British Grenadier". In his memoirs he writes "In spite of all that happened at Hamburg, bombing proved a relatively humane method".

At first, the effects were limited because of the small numbers of aircraft used and the lack of navigational aids that meant bombing was scattered and accuracy was poor. As production of better aircraft and electronic aids increased, Harris pressed for raids on a much larger scale, each to use 1,000 aeroplanes. In Operation Millennium Harris launched the first RAF "thousand bomber raid" against Cologne on the night of 30 May/31 May 1942. This operation included the first use of a bomber stream, which was a tactical innovation designed to overwhelm the German night-fighters of the Kammhuber Line.

Harris was just one of an influential group of high ranking Allied air commanders who continued to believe that massive and sustained area bombing alone would force Germany to surrender. On a number of occasions he wrote to his superiors claiming the war would be over in a matter of months, first in August 1943 following the tremendous success of the Battle of Hamburg (codenamed Operation Gomorrah), and then again in January 1944. Winston Churchill continued to regard the area bombing strategy with distaste, and official public statements still maintained that Bomber Command was only attacking specific industrial and economic targets, with any civilian casualties or property damage being unintentional, but unavoidable. In October 1943, emboldened by his success in Hamburg and increasingly irritated with Churchill's hesitance to wholeheartedly endorse his tactics, he urged the government to be honest with the public regarding the purpose of the bombing campaign. To Harris, his complete success at Hamburg confirmed the validity and necessity of his methods, and he urged that:

the aim of the Combined Bomber Offensive...should be unambiguously stated [as] the destruction of German cities, the killing of German workers, and the disruption of civilized life throughout Germany.

It should be emphasized that the destruction of houses, public utilities, transport and lives, the creation of a refugee problem on an unprecedented scale, and the breakdown of morale both at home and at the battle fronts by fear of extended and intensified bombing, are accepted and intended aims of our bombing policy. They are not by-products of attempts to hit factories.

Starting in November 1943, however, Bomber Command began what became known as the Battle of Berlin: a series of massive raids on Berlin that lasted until March 1944. Harris sought to duplicate the victory at Hamburg, but Berlin proved to be a far more difficult nut to crack. Although severe general damage was inflicted, the city was much better prepared than Hamburg, and no firestorm was ever ignited. Anti-aircraft defenses were also extremely effective, and bomber losses were high; during this time the British lost 1,047 bombers, with a further 1,682 damaged, culminating in the disastrous raid on Nuremberg on 30 March 1944, when 94 bombers were shot down and 71 damaged, out of 795 aircraft.

With the leadup to the D-Day invasions in 1944, Harris was ordered to switch targets for the French rail network, a switch he protested because he felt it compromised the continuing pressure on German industry and it was using Bomber Command for a purpose it was not designed or suited for. By September the Allied forces were well inland, at the Quebec Conference it was agreed that the Chief of the Air Staff, Royal Air Force (Portal), and the Commanding General, U.S. Army Air Forces (Arnold), should exercise control of all strategic bomber forces in Europe. Harris received a new directive to ensure continuation of a broad strategic bombing program as well as adequate bomber support for General Eisenhower's ground operations. The over-all mission of the strategic air forces remained "the progressive destruction and dislocation of the German military, industrial and economic systems and the direct support of Land and Naval forces". The several months of rest and refit had been useful to Bomber Command, and they were now able to put up well over 1,000 aircraft per raid.

After D-Day (6 June 1944), with the resumption of the strategic bomber campaign over Germany, Harris remained wedded to area bombardment. Historian Frederick Taylor argues that, because Harris lacked the necessary security clearance to know about ULTRA, he had been given some information gleaned from ENIGMA, but not informed as to where it had come from. According to Taylor, this directly affected Harris's attitude concerning the effectiveness of the post-D-Day 1944 directives (orders) to target oil installations, as Harris did not know the Allied High Command was using high-level German sources to assess exactly how much Allied operations were impairing the German war effort. As a consequence Harris tended to see the directives to bomb specific oil and munitions targets as a high level command "panacea" (his word), and a distraction from the real task of making the rubble bounce in every large German city.

In The Collapse of the German War Economy, 1944-1945: Allied Air Power and the German National Railway, historian Alfred C. Mierzejewski argues that both area bombing and attacks against fuel plants were ineffective against Germany's coal- and rail-based economy, and that the bombing campaign only took a decisive turn in late 1944 when the allies switched to targeting rail-marshaling yards for the coal gateways of the Ruhr.

The most controversial raid of the war took place in the late evening of 13 February 1945. The bombing of Dresden by the RAF and USAAF resulting in a lethal firestorm which killed several tens of thousands of civilians. Raids such as that on Pforzheim late in the war as Germany was falling have been criticized for causing high civilian casualties for little apparent military value. The culmination of Bomber Command's offensive occurred in March 1945 when the RAF dropped the highest monthly weight of ordnance in the entire war. The last raid on Berlin took place on the night of 21/22 April, just before the Soviets entered the city centre. After that, most of the rest of the attacks made by the RAF were tactical missions. The last major strategic raid was the destruction of the oil refinery in Tønsberg in Southern Norway by 107 Lancasters on the night of 25/26 April.

Postwar

Within the post war British government, there was now some disquiet about the level of destruction created by the area bombing of German cities towards the end of the war. However, Harris was made Marshal of the Royal Air Force in 1946 and was also made GCB. He retired on 15 September 1945. He wrote his story of Bomber Command's achievements in Bomber Offensive. He was the sole commander-in-chief not made a peer in 1946. Bomber Command's crews were denied a separate campaign medal (despite being eligible for the Air Crew Europe Star and France and Germany Star) and, in protest at this establishment snub to his men, Harris refused a peerage. Disappointed by the criticisms of his methods, Harris moved to South Africa in 1948, and was the manager of the South African Marine Corporation from 1946 to 1953.

In 1953 Churchill, now Prime Minister again, insisted that Harris accept a baronetcy and he became Baronet. In the same year he returned to the UK and lived his remaining years in Goring-on-Thames, in The Ferry House.

In 1974, Harris appeared in the 12th episode of the acclaimed Thames Television produced documentary series shown on ITV The World At War (narrated by Laurence Olivier) entitled "Whirlwind: Bombing Germany (September 1939–April 1944)" in which he discusses at length the area bombing strategy that he had developed when AOC-in-C of Bomber Command.

Harris died 5 April 1984 at his home in Goring.

Legacy

Statue of Harris outside the RAF Chapel, St. Clement Danes

Arthur Harris died on 5 April 1984, just eight days before his 92nd birthday. His only son died without an heir in 1996, at which date the Baronetcy of Chipping Wycombe became extinct.

In 1989, five years after Harris's death, a one-off feature-length drama about Harris's tenure as AOC-in-C of Bomber Command was broadcast under the title "Bomber Harris" on BBC Television, with John Thaw portraying Harris in the title role.

Despite protests from Germany as well as some in Britain, the Bomber Harris Trust (an RAF veterans' organisation formed to defend the good name of their commander) erected a statue of him outside the RAF Church of St. Clement Danes, London in 1992. It was unveiled by Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother who looked surprised when she was jeered by protesters. The line on the statue reads "The Nation owes them all an immense debt." The statue had to be kept under 24 hour guard for a period of months as it was often vandalised by protesters.

Despite the near destruction of Caen (Normandy, France) by Allied bombing, and particularly Bomber Command's Lancasters and Halifaxes, Harris was made a Citizen of Honour of the city after the war . A street was even named after him in 2007 in the northern area of Caen, upon which 2,500 tons of bombs were dropped on 7 July 1944: it is today the avenue Général Harris (former avenue Nicolas Copernic), which symbolically becomes avenue Général de Gaulle in the contiguous commune of Hérouville-Saint-Clair . In Cambes-en-Plaine, another site of the battle of Caen, a park near the British war cemetery was also named square Général Harris on 7 June 2003 .

References

Notes

Bibliography

• Cross, Robin. Fallen Eagle. London: John Wiley and Sons Inc., 1995. ISBN 0-471-62079-3.
• Denson, John V. The Costs of War: America's Pyrrhic Victories. Piscataway, New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 1999. ISBN 0-765804-87-5.
• Garret, Stephen A. Ethics and Air Power in World War II: The British Bombing of German Cities. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1993. ISBN 0-31208-683-0.
• Harris, Sir Arthur. Bomber Offensive. London: Greenhill Books, first published 1947, reprinted 1998, 2005. ISBN 1-84415-210-3. (Harris’s account in his own words.)
• Havers, Robin. The Second World War: Europe, 1939-1943. Abingdon, Oxford, UK: Routledge, 2003. ISBN 978-0415968461.
• Longmate, Norman. The Bombers: The RAF offensive against Germany 1939-1945. London: Hutchinson, 1983. ISBN 0-09-151580-7.
• Pogue, Forrest C. United States Army in World War II European Theater of Operations The Supreme Command. Washington, DC: Office of the Chief of Military History, Department of the United States Army, 1954.
• Probert, Henry; "Bomber" Harris: His Life and Times. London: Greenhill Books, 2006. ISBN 1-85367-555-5. (A good rounded modern biography, neither defending or condemning Harris.)
• Shores, Christopher et al. Above the Trenches: A Complete Record of the Fighter Aces and Units of the British Empire Air Forces, 1915-1920. London: Grub Street, 1990. ISBN 0-94881-719-4.
• Sokolski, Henry D., ed. Getting MAD: Nuclear Mutual Assured Destruction, Its Origins and Practice. Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College, 2004. ISBN 1-58487-172-5.
• Taylor, Fredrick. Dresden: Tuesday 13 February 1945. New York: HarperCollins, 2004. ISBN 0-06-000676-5; London: Bloomsbury, 2004. ISBN 0-7475-7078-7.

Further reading

• Grayling, A. C. Among the Dead Cities: The History and Moral Legacy of the WWII Bombing of Civilians in Germany and Japan. New York: Walker Publishing Company Inc., 2006. ISBN 0-8027-1471-4. (Extensively discusses, in philosophical terms, Harris's rationale behind the area bombardment of German cities.)

External links

• Biography at spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk
• Personality Profile: Air Marshal Sir Arthur Harris
• Royal Air Force Bomber Command 60th Anniversary, Commanders
• The Destruction of Dresden - Die Zerstörung Dresdens
• Air of Authority - A History of RAF Organisation - MRAF Harris