Chief of the British Royal Air Force (RAF) Bomber Command
from 1942 to 1945.
Born at Cheltenham in Gloucestershire, the son of an
engineer-architect in the Indian civil service, Arthur Harris was educated at
Gore Court, Sittingbourne, and Allhallows, Honiton. In 1914 Harris joined the
first Rhodesian Regiment as a bugler and took part in the campaign against
German South-West Africa. In 1915 he returned to Britain and was commissioned
into the Royal Flying Corps. He participated in defensive night fighter
operations against zeppelin raids and also served on the western front, where
he earned enough victories to qualify as an air ace. After the war, he took a
permanent commission in the RAF and was involved in air operations in northwest
India, Iraq, and Palestine. In 1939 Harris was given command of No. 5 (Bomber)
Group, which did valuable work against German shipping concentrations and
airfields during the invasion threat in 1940. Later that year he became deputy
chief of the Air Staff and in 1941 was appointed head of the RAF delegation to
Washington, where he sought to speed up the delivery of aircraft and air
supplies. In 1942 he was summoned back to Britain to become commander in chief
of Bomber Command.
Under Harris, Bomber Command developed into a formidable
weapon of war. His favored method of attack was the area bombing of German
cities at night. He did not invent the policy—it was already in operation from
1941— but he pursued it with relentless zeal. He firmly believed that the
destruction of German cities and the homes of the workers would bring the enemy
to its knees and prevent a repetition of the bloody battles of attrition on the
western front that he had witnessed during the previous war. While the United
States Air Force concentrated on precision attacks during the day as part of a
combined bomber offensive, Bomber Command unleashed a series of large-scale
raids on such cities as Essen, Hamburg, and Berlin. The zenith of the area
bombing campaign came at Dresden in February 1945, when the RAF started a
massive firestorm that devastated the old city and killed between twenty-five
and thirty-five thousand people.
Since the war the military and ethical justifications for
Harris’s area bombing policy have been called into question. The critics argue
that the results of the bombing were not worth the heavy cost in RAF aircrew
lives, that the extensive resources poured into Bomber Command could have been
put to better use, and that the deliberate targeting of German civilians was an
unacceptable means of waging war. Harris’s defenders, however, contend that the
bombing played a significant role in the Allied victory in Europe. Although the
bombing did not prevent a sustained increase in German military production or
fatally undermine civilian morale, the effects of the Anglo-American bombing
offensive—and it is difficult to consider one in isolation from the other—were
considerable. For example, a ceiling was placed on the growth of military
output, and factories were diverted to producing items for home defense such as
antiaircraft guns and ammunition, which deprived the German army of vital battlefield
equipment. Many German troops were tied up in antiaircraft duties when they
could have been more usefully employed on other fighting fronts, and German
offensive airpower was restricted as the Luftwaffe was forced to defend the
Reich against air attack. While the bombing of cities was undoubtedly a
dreadful way to wage war, this was regarded at the time as little different
from the policy of targeting civilians through blockade or siege in previous
wars. The Allies were engaged in a war of survival against a brutal
totalitarian regime, and civilian workers were at the heart of the enemy’s war
potential. Certainly Harris, who had watched London burn during the Blitz, had
little sympathy for the Germans: they had sown the wind and would reap the whirlwind.
At the end of the war Harris was embittered by the seeming
reluctance of the British government to acknowledge the role of Bomber Command
in the defeat of Germany. He retired from the RAF and went to live in South
Africa. In the 1950s he returned to Britain and spent his latter years quietly
in rural Oxfordshire, with occasional forays onto the public stage. He died in
1984. In 1992 a statue of Harris was unveiled by the Queen Mother in London.
The mayors of Dresden and other cities that had been heavily bombed expressed
their disapproval. The Bomber Command veterans regarded it as a long overdue
tribute to a much maligned commander.
BIBLIOGRAPHY Harris, Sir Arthur. Bomber Offensive. London,
1947. Overy, R. J. ‘‘Harris, Sir Arthur Travers, First Baronet (1892– 1984).’’
In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, edited by H. C. G. Matthew and
Brian Harrison. Oxford, U.K., 2004. Probert, Henry. Bomber Harris: His Life and
Times. London, 2001.
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