March 7, 2015

Finest Hour 157, Winter 2012-13

Page 38

By Christopher H. Sterling

Controversy forever surrounds the Allied strategic bombing of Germany, during most of which Sir Arthur Harris headed the Royal Air Force Bomber Command. From early 1942 to war’s end, Harris worked closely with Churchill, who found in him “a kindred spirit, a man who ‘would not flag or fail,’ someone who would fight the war to a finish, however hard the road to victory, however high the cost. [After 1945] Churchill found it advisable to distance himself from a man whose wartime actions, however justified and officially approved at the time, were becoming contentious.”¹ The full story of their relationship is more complex than that.

While Churchill rarely mentioned Sir Arthur Harris in his postwar memoirs,² the Bomber Command leader had served the prime minister’s goals and strategies at least as much as the more widely praised Field Marshal Montgomery. Britain’s few winning British commanders in the long years before D-Day provided the sharp end of the country’s resolve to see the war through, and Bomber Command carried that role, at fearsome cost, for three and one-half years.

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Right Man, Right Place

Arthur Travers Harris (1892-1984), a Royal Flying Corps and RAF officer since 1915,³ took command of 5 Group’s bombers in 1939, becoming an air marshal when he was promoted to head Bomber Command in February 1942. He was knighted shortly thereafter. Harris’s driving dedication to the bombing effort (he scarcely took a day off for the duration of the war) endeared him to an often-beleaguered Churchill. To his friends he was “Bert”; to the flying crews who seldom saw him in person, it was “Butch” or “Butcher”; while he was often the “Chief Bomber” to the prime minister⁴ and simply “Bomber Harris” to the usually admiring press.

When Harris took control of the British bombing effort, the Empire had just lost Hong Kong and Singapore, and its army was faring poorly against Rommel in North Africa. Parliament and the nation were restless in the face of constant British setbacks. Harris found Bomber Command to have insufficient and inadequate aircraft, poor training, and crude navigation and bomb-aiming techniques. With a high loss rate and precious little to show for it, there was no wonder why morale was low. On the other hand, Britain’s best four-engine bomber, the legendary Lancaster, was finally reaching squadron service, supporting larger missions and providing the ability to hit targets deep in Germany.

For eighteen months before Harris’s arrival and nearly forty months after, Bomber Command spearheaded the British war effort against Hitler, touted by Churchill as the second front Stalin was constantly demanding. Every night, Harris sent out his bombers, sometimes with notable success, as against Hamburg in July 1943. More often results tended to be much less impressive.

The Bomber and the P.M.

While one historian says there was little warmth between Harris and Churchill,⁵ others differ. One account described The Bomber as “a court favorite, appearing regularly at the prime minister’s meal table.”⁶ That Bomber Command headquarters at High Wycombe was just a half hour’s drive from Chequers surely helped. Harris’s most recent biographer argues that mutual appeal drove the relationship:

They shared a sense of history; while Harris was no author he was an avid reader of military history and could appreciate Churchill’s insights and perspectives. Each had his vivid recollection of the First World War and its lessons. Neither had subsequently had any doubts about the dangers of a resurgent Germany; for both there was “unfinished business” to be done. Above all, there was in both men an overriding conviction that one wins wars only by taking them to the enemy. The offensive spirit, the single-minded tenacity, the outspokenness that Churchill observed in Harris were qualities that matched his own….While Churchill enjoyed Harris’s zeal, he saw the bombers (and their crews) more as a necessary tool in forging a victory, never emotionally identifying with them as he did with Fighter Command during the 1940 Battle of Britain.⁷

Remembering those days of close collaboration, Harris did admit that the eloquent Churchill was a poor listener:

I was frequently bidden to Chequers, especially during the week-ends when Winston was normally there. I never failed to return from these visits invigorated and full of renewed hope and enthusiasm, in spite of the appalling hours Winston habitually kept….If I wanted to get anything across or to give any complicated explanation, I found it much better to send him a paper than to talk to him.⁸

We can see from this remark that their relationship cut across conventional lines of command. When Harris sent those papers, he copied Air Chief Marshal Charles Portal, chief of the Air Staff—but the direct access to the top surely aided the needs of his command.

Nor did it hurt in Churchill’s eyes that Harris rapidly adopted the area or city-wide bombing tactics favored by the prime minister’s chief scientific adviser. Reviewing the RAF bombing performance in 1941, Professor Frederick Lindemann reported limited British capabilities and ever-stronger German defenses. Like Harris, he dismissed precision bombing attempts as impractical and ineffectual. Politically it was also the way Britain could convince the Russians that she was doing her part. Harris also despised what he termed “panacea” targets—constantly changing directives demanding a focus on transport, oil, U-boats, or some other identified factor in the German war economy.

Harris consistently argued that strategic area bombing could win the war without the necessity of a cross-channel invasion.⁹ This led him to make bold statements such as his startling November 1943 claim, “We can wreck Berlin from end to end if the USAAF will come in on it. It will cost us between 400 and 500 aircraft. It will cost Germany the war.”¹⁰ When Bomber Command pilots flew some thirty-five missions to Berlin between November 1943 and March 1944, however, aircraft and crew losses dramatically outweighed results. Nor did German morale crack, as Harris and others had predicted.¹¹

After mid-1944, Harris’s area bombing priority (critics dubbed it an obsession) increasingly diverged from the ideas of Portal, the Air Ministry and Churchill. Though Harris resisted orders to divert his forces to “panacea” targets, once the Allies landed in France, Bomber Command was no longer the primary British war effort. And criticism of continued area bombing effects grew louder as victory neared.

The infamous Dresden attack of February 1945, for example, was requested by the Soviets and ordered by officials senior to Harris—but largely because of it, he and Bomber Command received broad and continuing criticism. By late 1944 and certainly early 1945, Churchill too had turned away from sustained support for Harris’s continued area bombing. Given the progress in the invasion of Europe, such an effort now appeared almost gratuitous to Churchill.¹²

Aftermath

The war’s end brought relief, though also disappointment, to Harris and his fliers. While Churchill commended Bomber Command “as an example of a duty nobly done,” Harris’s final Despatch on War Operations was not published for three decades because of its strong opinions and concerns about the secrecy of some of its contents.¹³ The Air Ministry did authorize an Aircrew Europe Star, but not a specific medal for bomber crew.

Disgusted, in part as he felt his fliers were underappreciated, Harris declined an offered peerage. He was promoted to Marshal of the RAF at the start of 1946, departing at age 53 for a business career in South Africa. He was not to return to England for several years.

On Churchill’s return to power, he persuaded Harris to accept a Baronetcy—John Colville wrote that the Air Ministry would not support a peerage.¹⁴ Some felt that this was payback for Harris’s obsessive commitment to area bombing, which by late 1944 had greatly frustrated Portal and other senior officials, and in the years after war had become anathema to many. Another rebuff appeared with the 1961 publication of the official history of the RAF strategic bombing campaign. Written with only limited input by Harris, it criticized many of his decisions.¹⁵ At Harris’s own request, the first book-length biographies appeared only after his death.¹⁶

In retrospect, it is clear that Arthur Harris’s Bomber Command was essential to Churchill’s war strategy at least through D-Day.¹⁷ Until then, RAF bombers attacked Germany as no other British force could. From then on, however, the prime minister exhibited growing unease with area bombing, and with Harris’s unremitting support of that policy. Aside from the moral questions it raised, the human cost had been fearsome: some 55,000 crew were killed in combat. Yet, working with their U.S. allies, Harris’s bombers played a vital role in wearing down Germany. One quiet indicator of the lasting esteem Churchill held for Harris’s service was the invitation by his family to be a pallbearer at Sir Winston’s funeral.¹⁸

Dr. Sterling taught Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University for thirty years and is an associate dean at GW’s Columbian College of Arts & Sciences.

Endnotes:

1.Robin Neillia, The Bomber War: The Allied Air Offensive Against Nazi Germany (Woodstock, New York: Overlook Press, 2001), 400.

2. Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War, 6 vols. (London: Cassell, 1948-54) notes Harris only in passing at several points in vol. IV; comments on his “vigorous leadership” (V 457), and includes his name in one quoted memo in vol. VI. Several historians have commented upon the dearth of references to Bomber Command and its leader. See for example David Reynolds, In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War (New York: Random House, 2005), 320.

3. Harris was born in India, educated to age 16 in England, and spent his early working years in Rhodesia, before joining the army in South Africa as a bugler in 1914. He returned to England a year later and shifted to the Royal Flying Corps. He served at home and on the Western Front (with five victories to his credit), rising to major by 1918. Between the world wars he served in various RAF posts in the Middle East and India. Details are in Henry Probert, Bomber Harris: His Life and Times (London: Greenville, 2001), chapters 1-6.

4. For an example of Churchill’s use of “Chief Bomber,” see Ian Hunter, ed., Winston & Archie: The Collected Correspondence of Winston Churchill and Archibald Sinclair 1915-1960 (London: Politicos, 2005), 384.

5. Max Hastings in Bomber Command (New York: Dial, 1979) wrote: “For all the courtesies between them, their respect for each other as dedicated warriors, there is no evidence of real personal warmth between Churchill and Harris, or that their meetings had any influence on the priority accorded the bomber offensive…. Churchill, for his part, probably found Harris a convenient tool rather than a convivial companion” (255).

6. See for example Ronald Lewin, “Dragon Ascendant: The Strategic Air Offensive 1940-1945,” chapter 4 in his Churchill as Warlord (New York: Stein & Day, 1973), 91.  

7. Probert, 134.

8. Arthur Harris, Bomber Offensive (Barnsley, Yorkshire: Greenville Press, 1990 [1947]), 151-52.

9. Tami Davis Biddle, “Bombing by the Square Yard: Sir Arthur Harris at War, 1942-1945,” The International History Review 21: 569-852, September 1999.

10. Harris to WSC, 3 November 1943, in Charles Webster and Noble Frankland, The Strategic Air Offensive Against Germany, 1939-1945, 4 vols. (London: HMSO, 1961; reprinted Naval & Military Press, 2006), II 9.

11. Martin Middlebrook, “Marshal of the Royal Air Force Sir Arthur Harris,” in Michael Carver, ed., The War Lords: Military Commanders of the 20th Century (Boston: Little, Brown, 1976), 327.

12. See “Bombing Germany: Again,” Finest Hour 127: 29; and, on The Churchill Centre website, Martin Gilbert, “Churchill and Bombing Policy,” Fifth Churchill Lecture, http://xrl.us/bgy3j2 and Christopher Harmon, “Leading Churchill Myths: Dresden” http://xrl.us/bgy3hy. See also Paul Addison and Jeremy A. Crean, eds., Firestorm: The Bombing of Dresden, 1945 (Chicago: Ivan Dee, 2006); Christopher C. Harmon, “Are We Beasts?” Churchill and the Moral Question of World War II “Area Bombing,” (Newport, Rhode Island: Naval War College “Newport Paper No. 1,” 1991); and Stephen Kinzer, “Honor to R.A.F. Leader Wakes Dresden’s Ghosts,” The New York Times, 6 January 1992, A6.

13. For Churchill’s commendation see Charles Messenger, “Bomber” Harris and the Strategic Bombing Offensive, 1939-1945 (London: Arms and Armour Press, 1984), 197. See also Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur T. Harris, Despatch on War Operations, 23rd February, 1942 to 8th May, 1945 (London: Frank Cass, 1995). For a less formal and even more opinionated presentation, see Harris, Bomber Offensive, 151-52.

14. John Colville, The Churchillians (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1981), 150.

15. Webster and Franklyn, passim.

16. Messenger, Arthur Harris, 197. See also Dudley Saward, “Bomber” Harris: The Authorized Biography (London: Cassell/Buchan & Enwright, 1984) and Probert, Bomber Harris, passim.

17. Geoffrey Best, Churchill and War (London: Hambleton & London, 2005), 284-86 discusses Churchill’s growing unease with the bombing effort, but explains why sacking Harris was never seriously considered, in part because he had become widely popular with the British public.

18. Probert, 399. Harris was unable to serve because of a long-planned trip to South Africa.