| Sir Arthur Harris, Bt | |
|---|---|
Official portrait (photograph) of Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris |
|
| Nickname | Bomber Harris, Butcher Harris |
| Born | 13 April 1892 Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, England |
| Died | 5 April 1984 (aged 91) Henley, Oxfordshire, England |
| Allegiance | United Kingdom |
| Service/branch | Royal Air Force |
| Years of service | 1914–1946 |
| Rank | Marshal of the Royal Air Force |
| Battles/wars | |
| 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 Suvorov 1st Class(1944) Distinguished Service Medal (United States) (1946)[1] 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 (13 April 1892 – 5 April 1984), commonly known as "Bomber" Harris by the press, and often within the RAF as "Butcher" Harris,[N 1] was Air Officer Commanding-in-Chief (AOC-in-C) of RAF Bomber Command (from early 1943 holding the rank of Air Chief Marshal)[3] 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 and population.
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[4] and partly for the large number of civilian casualties and destruction this strategy caused in Continental Europe. While the Butt Report found that in 1940 and 1941, only one in three attacking aircraft got within five miles (eight km) of their target,[5] many technical and training improvements such as H2S radar and the Pathfinder force were implemented later on in the war.
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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."[6] 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".[6]
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).[7] He finished the war a major.
After the war, Harris chose to remain in the newly formed Royal Air Force. In April 1920 Squadron Leader Harris was jointly appointed station commander of RAF Digby and commander of No. 3 Flying Training School. He later 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".[8] 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 peoples 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."[9] 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".[8]
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.[8]
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.[10] In 1937 he was promoted to Air Commodore and in 1938 he was 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.
Harris returned to England in September 1939 to take command of No. 5 Group.[11] In November 1940 he was made Deputy Chief of the Air Staff and then in 1941 he was promoted to Air Marshal before being appointed Commander-in-Chief (C-in-C) of Bomber Command in February 1942.[12] At the time, Bomber Command was making a negligible contribution to the war effort because 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 airfields.
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 World War II, 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 including 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 bombers such as the Wellington, 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 (Area bombing directive). It became an important part of the total war waged against Germany.
Lord Cherwell's paper advocated attacking major industrial centres in order to destroy as many homes and houses as possible (dehousing). 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. Lindemann's calculations showed that Bomber Command would be able to destroy the majority of German houses located in cities quite quickly; these calculations were based on the Luftwaffe's bombing campaign over Britain, but Lindemann had skewed the calculations to hugely overstate the effects. 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.[N 2][N 3]
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".[14][N 4] 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, resulting in scattered, inaccurate bombing. 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 (Köln) 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, Harris 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 civilised life throughout Germany.[16][17]
- ... 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.[18]
In November 1943 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".[19] 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 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.[20]
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-marshalling yards for the coal gateways of the Ruhr.[21] His summation is rejected by Sebastian Cox head of the Air Historical Branch (AHB). Cox notes that half of the oil production was produced by Benzol plants located in the Ruhr. These areas were the primary target of Bomber Command in 1943 and the autumn of 1944. Cox concludes the targets were highly vulnerable to area attacks and suffered accordingly. The American official history notes that Harris was ordered to cease attacks on oil in November 1944, as the bombing had been so effective none of the synthetic plants were operating effectively. The American history also includes information from Albert Speer, in which he points out Bomber Command's night attacks were the most effective.[22]
Adolf Galland argued that Germany would have fallen earlier if fuel production had been targeted earlier. Not only were frontline Luftwaffe squadrons directly affected by fuel shortages but the quality of training of new pilots was impacted due to the restriction in flying hours caused by the lack of fuel.
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 criticised 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.
Within the postwar British government there was some disquiet about the level of destruction that had been 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,[23] and was also made GCB[24] until he retired on 15 September 1946 and wrote his story of Bomber Command's achievements in Bomber Offensive. In this book he wrote, concerning Dresden, "I know that the destruction of so large and splendid a city at this late stage of the war was considered unnecessary even by a good many people who admit that our earlier attacks were as fully justified as any other operation of war. Here I will only say that the attack on Dresden was at the time considered a military necessity by much more important people than myself."[25] 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, the sole commander-in-chief not made a peer in 1946.[26] Disappointed by the criticisms of his methods, Harris moved to South Africa in 1948 and was the manager of the South African Marine Corporation (Safmarine), from 1946 to 1953.
In 1953 Churchill, now Prime Minister again, insisted that Harris accept a baronetcy and he became Baronet.[27][28] 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 acclaimed documentary series The World At War produced by Thames Television and shown on ITV. In the 12th episode entitled "Whirlwind: Bombing Germany (September 1939–April 1944)", narrated by Laurence Olivier, Harris discusses at length the area-bombing strategy that he had developed while AOC-in-C of Bomber Command.[29]
Harris died on 5 April 1984, eight days before his 92nd birthday, at his home in Goring.[30] 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 in the title role.[31]
Despite protests from Germany as well as some in Britain,[32] 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, one of whom shouted "Harris was a war criminal". 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 and iconoclasts.[33][34][35][36]
Phrases like "Bomber-Harris, do it again!" and "Bomber-Harris Superstar - Thanks from the red Antifa" are popular slogans among the so called "Anti-Germans" which is a political movement in Germany and Austria.[37]
| Military offices | ||
|---|---|---|
| Preceded by H P Van Ryneveld |
Officer Commanding No. 45 Squadron (acting) 18 August – 24 August 1917 |
Succeeded by A M Vaucour |
| New title Squadron established
|
Officer Commanding No. 191 Squadron (Initially acting) 1917 – 1918 |
Succeeded by Unknown |
| New title Unit established
|
Officer Commanding No. 3 Flying Training School at RAF Digby April 1920 – April 1922 |
Succeeded by School disbanded |
| Preceded by Unknown |
Officer Commanding No. 45 Squadron 20 November 1922 – 14 October 1924 |
Succeeded by R M Hill |
| Preceded by Unknown |
Officer Commanding No. 58 Squadron 25 May 1925 – 28 July 1927 |
Succeeded by E W Norton |
| Preceded by R Leckie |
Officer Commanding No. 210 Squadron 1933 |
Succeeded by R H Kershaw |
| Officer Commanding RAF Pembroke Dock 1933 |
||
| Preceded by C F A Portal |
RAF Deputy Director of Plans 1934 – 1937 |
Succeeded by J C Slessor |
| Vacant
Title last held by
C R SamsonIn 1919 |
Air Officer Commanding No. 4 Group 1937 – 1938 |
Succeeded by C H B Blount |
| Preceded by R M Hill |
Air Officer Commanding Palestine and Transjordan 1938 – 1939 |
Succeeded by J H D'Albiac |
| Preceded by W B Callaway |
Air Officer Commanding No. 5 Group 1939–1940 |
Succeeded by N H Bottomley |
| Preceded by W S Douglas |
Deputy Chief of the Air Staff 25 November 1940 – 27 May 1941 |
Succeeded by N H Bottomley |
| Preceded by J E A Baldwin |
Commander-in-Chief Bomber Command 1942–1945 |
Succeeded by Sir Norman Bottomley |
| Business positions | ||
| New title Corporation established
|
Manager of the South African Marine Corporation 1946 – 1953 |
Succeeded by Unknown |
| Baronetage of the United Kingdom | ||
| New title | Baronet (of Chipping Wycombe in the County of Buckingham) 1953–1984 |
Succeeded by Anthony Harris |
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