Bomber Command (24 page)

Sir Arthur Harris, who would shortly become the man charged with executing the area bombing policy, claimed in his post-war memoirs that he always regarded morale as a subordinate target. He says that he chiefly sought the direct destruction of German ability to produce. He was convinced by evidence suggesting a direct correlation between acres of concentrated urban devastation and lost industrial man-hours: ‘The destruction of factories, which was nevertheless on an enormous scale, could be regarded as a bonus. The aiming-points were usually right in the centre of the town.’
⁶

If all this leaves some confusion in the mind of the reader, it also suggests an extraordinary vagueness of thought on the part of the airmen. The concept of a Trenchardian thunderbolt fascinated them. But as far as it is possible to discover, they never recorded a common assent about the exact nature of what they hoped to achieve by area bombing, beyond the destruction of punitively large areas of German real estate. The importance of this lack of rigorous thinking, the absence of a definable and measurable goal
for the bomber offensive, cannot be overstated. If a precise definition of success was not arrived at, nor was a yardstick of failure. Admirals could be sacked for failing to sink or save ships, generals for failing to win or hold ground. But nowhere was it suggested in the winter of 1941–42 that if Germany failed to collapse by a given date in the face of air attack, then the bomber offensive would have to be judged a failure. Even in Cherwell’s ‘de-housing’ paper, there was no definition of a precise number of refugees that it was necessary to create to achieve decisive results. For all the talk about morale, no one tried to sketch a realistic political scenario for the overthrow of the Nazi leadership and crumbling of the German armies in the field.

After the war some airmen argued that they failed to achieve decisive success because they were denied the 4,000 bombers they had demanded to defeat Germany. Yet in 1942 they never made the undertaking of the area offensive conditional on being given such forces, and indeed no general or admiral in history has been granted all the forces he deemed desirable to achieve victory.

At the end of the day, Britain’s huge area-bombing offensive was launched on the basis of no more concrete expectation – on the part of the air marshals, at any rate: the Prime Minister’s view will be considered below – than that if a large enough weight of bombs was poured on to Germany, something vital must give somewhere.

The Air Ministry directive issued to Bomber Command on 14 February, St Valentine’s Day 1942, was the blueprint for the attack on Germany’s cities, and removed the constraints on bombing policy. The winter injunction to conserve forces was withdrawn. ‘You are accordingly authorized to employ your forces without restriction,’ wrote Bottomley, Deputy Chief of Air Staff. Annex A, appended to the directive, listed Bomber Command’s new targets. Under the heading ‘Primary Industrial Areas’ came Essen, Duisburg, Düsseldorf and Cologne. ‘Alternative Industrial Areas’ included Lübeck and Rostock, Bremen and Kiel, Hanover, Frankfurt, Mannheim, Stuttgart and Schweinfurt. The directive ordered
continuing harassing attacks on Berlin ‘to maintain the fear of attack over the city and to impose ARP measures’. Above all, the directive stressed that during the six months’ effective life of
Gee
– TR 1335, as it was referred to – Bomber Command must seek to concentrate the weight and density of its attack as never before. Operations ‘should now be focused on the morale of the enemy civil population and in particular, of industrial workers’. It had been recognized for some months that incendiary bombs – 4-lb thermite sticks – had a special part to play as fire-raising weapons. Essen was suggested for the earliest bombardment. The remainder of the cities on the list would follow. Lest there be any confusion about objectives, Portal wrote to Bottomley on 15 February: ‘Ref the new bombing directive: I suppose it is clear that the aiming-points are to be the built-up areas, not, for instance, the dockyards or aircraft factories . . . This must be made quite clear if it is not already understood.’

The Air Ministry directive was addressed to Air Vice-Marshal Baldwin, acting C-in-C at High Wycombe. Peirse was gone. He had inspired little sympathy or affection among his subordinates at Bomber Command, and little faith in his judgement in high places. He also paid the price for having been the man in command at the lowest ebb of Bomber Command’s fortunes. There was now a new policy, new equipment. It was concluded that it would be best to find a new C-in-C, untarnished by the failures of the past.

One evening in December 1941, during the first great conference between the leaders of the British and American war efforts, Sir Charles Portal sought out Air Marshal Arthur Harris, head of the permanent RAF delegation in the United States, and asked him to take over Bomber Command. Harris accepted. Portal said: ‘Splendid! I’ll go and tell Winston at once.’
⁷
On 22 February 1942, a week after the issue of the Air Ministry directive unveiling area bombing, Harris became Air Officer Commanding-in-Chief at Bomber Command headquarters, High Wycombe. He was just short of fifty and
he remained in the post until the end of the campaign. In the thirty months of war that were already passed, Bomber Command had lost 7,448 aircrew killed in action and accidents or taken prisoner. By May 1945 this figure would have reached 72,350. The bomber war had scarcely begun when Harris became C-in-C. Henceforth, his name would be indelibly associated with its fortunes.

Arthur Travers Harris was the son of a member of the Indian civil service, conventionally privately-educated in England until he fell out with his parents over their wish that he should enter the army. He then took the usual path of disgruntled young Edwardian Englishmen, and departed for the Colonies. At the age of sixteen he arrived in Rhodesia with five pounds in his pocket. In the six years that followed, he tried his hand at farming, gold mining and driving horse teams. Rhodesia was kind to him, and he returned her welcome with lifelong affection. At the outbreak of war in 1914, he joined the Rhodesia Regiment as a boy bugler and fought through the fierce hardships of the German South-West African campaign. When this ended in 1915, he found his way back to England, determined that he had had enough of footslogging. He joined the Royal Flying Corps and was shortly afterwards posted to France. He finished the war as a major with the Air Force Cross. In the next twenty years he commanded bomber squadrons exercising Trenchard’s Air Control scheme in the further outposts of the Empire, and served from 1933 to 1937 in staff posts at the Air Ministry. Unlike Portal or Ludlow-Hewitt, he was not regarded as an obvious high-flier, destined for the highest ranks. But he advanced steadily to command of 4 Group in 1937, to head the RAF Purchasing Mission in America in 1938, then to command the crack 5 Group in the early days of the war. It was there that he made a reputation as a forceful director of bomber operations.

Sir Arthur Harris, as he now became, possessed something of the earthy, swaggering ruthlessness of an Elizabethan buccaneer. A broad man of medium height, his piercing eye gave him immediate presence in any company. ‘There are a lot of people who say that bombing cannot win the war,’ he declared to a newsreel
interviewer a few weeks after taking over at High Wycombe, in the crisp, clipped tones that cowed so many wavering staff officers. ‘My reply to that is that it has never been tried yet. We shall see.’ He gave no sign of fearing God or man, and in Washington his outbursts of frankness left behind a trail of savaged American military sensitivities. He was an early convert to the concept of strategic bombing, and ranked among Trenchard’s most dedicated disciples. He had devoted much energy between the wars to means of improving bomb-aiming and target-marking.

His dry, cutting, often vulgar wit was legendary throughout the RAF, as was his hatred of the British Army and the Royal Navy. He was fond of saying that the army would never understand the value of tanks until they could be modified to ‘eat hay and shit’. A man of boundless energy, he spent much of the war racing his Bentley at breakneck speed between High Wycombe and the Air Ministry, and was the bane of motor-cycle policemen on the London road. ‘You might have killed somebody, sir,’ said a reproachful constable who stopped him late one night.

‘Young man, I kill thousands of people every night!’ snapped Harris. He seemed to like the ogre-ish role that fortune had cast for him. His contemporaries called him ‘Bert’, but his crews called him ‘Butcher’, ‘Butch’ for short. His subordinates at High Wycombe were deeply in awe of him, and there was little scope for dissent at his councils. He was a man of startling directness, and his temper cannot have been improved by the ulcers from which he suffered throughout the war. Saundby, his SASO, once sent him a memorandum, painstakingly describing ten alternative methods of attacking a target. Harris returned it with a scrawled endorsement: ‘TRY FERRETS’.

From the beginning of the war, he was convinced that given the vast shortcomings of Britain’s armed forces compared with those of Germany, a bomber offensive was inevitable:

I could . . . see only one possible way of bringing pressure to bear on the Boche, and certainly only one way of defeating him; that was by air bombardment. It consequently looked as if it was going to be a straight fight between our own and the enemy’s production of heavy bombers . . .

If we could keep ahead of the Germans, I was convinced, having watched the bombing of London, that a bomber offensive of adequate weight and the right kind of bombs would, if continued for long enough, be something that no country in the world could endure.

It was, of course, anybody’s guess what effort would be required and over what period the offensive would have to be continued.
⁸

Harris was naturally an ardent advocate of the 4,000-bomber plan, which it was apparent would never be fulfilled. Some compromise with the Royal Navy’s demands for heavy aircraft and the insistent needs of other theatres had to be made, and Harris would have nothing like the resources he hoped for until at least 1943. But he would fight until the last day of the war to ensure that Bomber Command achieved the utmost possible strength, and the attainment of an order of battle of 1,600 heavy bombers in his operational squadrons by April 1945 was a tribute to his determination and force of personality. Area bombing was not his creation, but he applied himself to executing the policy with an energy and single-mindedness that prevailed long after less committed airmen turned their minds to other strategies.

At the time that he became C-in-C, Harris knew Churchill scarcely at all. In 1940, when he was commanding 5 Group, he had once been summoned to the Prime Minister’s occasional retreat at Ditchley, but he had been granted only a few words. Now, however, the apparent intimacy between Harris and Churchill began to attract widespread attention and intense jealousy, not least among the admirals, who were enraged to hear of the airman being invited to drive the few miles from High Wycombe to Chequers for dinner and presumably a great deal of special pleading for his Command. The precise relationship between the C-in-C
and the Prime Minister remained a matter of curiosity and controversy throughout the war and afterwards. General Sir Bernard Paget thought that ‘Bert Harris was the sort of buccaneer whom Churchill particularly liked . . .’
⁹
But Major Desmond Morton, the secret service officer who had been one of Churchill’s intimate circle since before the war, believed quite otherwise:

Curiously enough, I think he
never
cared for Harris as a person. I do not know why not, though I know why I did not . . . My own distaste . . . was based on what I thought, rightly or wrongly, of his personality. He seemed to me to be a bit of a boor (not bore) with little or any sort of fine thoughts or sign of anything distinguished in his mind or person. I am always attracted by anyone who seems to be trying to be, and behave like a gentleman in any way, I found nothing of this sort in Harris. I do not condemn Harris absolutely. He did many great things doubtless. It is not easy (if possible) to become a Marshal of the Royal Air Force without doing many notable things well. But in my opinion many of the things he did and said and did well, were done and said in a manner lacking refinement.
¹⁰

Morton’s shrewd assessment received endorsement many years later, with the publication of
The Long Sunset
, memoirs of Churchill’s last Private Secretary, Anthony Montague Brown. In his old age, Churchill said privately of Harris: ‘I admired his determination and his technical ability. He was very determined and very persuasive on his own theme. And the Prof. backed him up . . . [He was] a very considerable commander. I said so many times. But there was a certain coarseness about him.’

Whatever the admirals’ fears about Churchill’s relations with Harris, the airman never gained the Prime Minister’s confidence for his grand vision of victory by air bombardment alone. And whatever the truth of Morton’s suspicions about the Prime Minister’s personal attitude, there is no doubt that many of those in high places reacted to Bomber Command’s C-in-C like the fastidious major.

But Harris’s style, the stories about his rudeness and extravagance, contributed immensely to his popularity with his overwhelmingly lower-middle-class bomber crews. They endeared him to them, though they never saw him, with a warmth that a more distant, discreet, patrician figure such as Portal never inspired. Harris was a real leader. From beginning to end, he succeeded in seeming to identify himself totally with the interests of his men.