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By New Year 1942 it was clear Willis could think as furiously as he liked—it would do him no good. Bomber Command was too important a propaganda symbol, and its promise as a weapon, against the German war machine and against the German homeland, too attractive. Despite the bombers' failures, the Air Staff 's long-expressed desire for a much larger force of heavy bombers had begun to find a more sympathetic ear in some government circles. After all, what alternative was there but to press on with the bomber offensive against Germany and occupied Europe?

On February 14, 1942, St. Valentine's Day, the Air Ministry issued a new directive to Bomber Command. Intensive bombing by night against Germany was to recommence, to be carried out whenever weather conditions permitted. The important aspect of the directive, however, was the new principle according to which the campaign would be waged. The key phrase was “area bombing.” From now on, rather than carrying out “precision” attacks (bombing a specific oil plant or munitions factory or transport center) and accepting the unfortunate inevitability of civilian casualties as a by-product, raids
were to be mounted on cities or areas of cities, on the assumption that damage to the German war effort would be done as a result—whether to factories and railway yards, or to power and water supplies, or to postal and telephone services. Like the Luftwaffe's switch from bombing British fighter bases to bombing London in the summer of 1940, this was actually a continued admission of failure, arising from Bomber Command's proven inability to bomb with sufficient accuracy for the notion of precision targeting to have much meaning. However, the directive went further:

Peirse was not, as it happened, the officer to whom it fell to put the new principles into action. He was sent out as commander of air forces to the Far East, where he would have his hands full. A little more than a week after the area bombing directive had landed on the AOC's desk at Bomber Command, Peirse's successor arrived. The new man's name was Air Marshal Arthur Harris. He was stubborn, combative, opinionated, a fearsome perfectionist determined to fight his corner, and under the circumstances almost certainly the very leader Bomber Command needed.

 

ARTHUR HARRIS WAS BORN
in 1892 at Cheltenham, the youngest among the six children of an official in the Indian civil service, George Steel Travers Harris, and Mrs. Caroline Maria Harris. Arthur was a true child of the British Empire. Later that year the family returned to India, where the boy was baptized at Gwalior and his christening recorded at St. George's Church, Agra, in the diocese and archdeaconry of Calcutta. At five he was sent “home,” first to what they called a “baby farm,” run by gentlefolk who provided care in loco parentis for the offspring of such respectable but relatively impecunious pillars of the British Empire as Harris's parents. Later he attended a mediocre but kindly English prep school. The red-haired Arthur was not an academic, and by the time he reached twelve, there was in any
case not enough money in the kitty for him to follow his elder brothers to Sherbourne School and Cambridge. He ended up at an obscure boarding school in Devon.

Although his father had been an official with the Indian Public Works Department, the background of the family was strongly military. It therefore came as a surprise to his parents when young Arthur announced that, rather than apply to Woolwich or Sandhurst for officer training, he was determined to go to the British colony of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) in southern Africa and become a farm manager. This he did. His plan, after gaining sufficient experience and saving some money, was to take up one of the two-thousand-acre allocations granted to new settlers, and thereby to become independent.

“He had learned a whole range of practical skills,” in the words of his most recent biographer, “and could turn his hand to almost anything. He could shoot, improvise, live rough, cook, and cope with the unexpected. He was able to organise, to run a small business, and to direct the men and women who worked for him. Above all he had acquired the self-confidence necessary to launch out on his own.”

Then came war. In 1914 Germany and Britain clashed not just in Europe, but also in Africa. The Germans threatened to launch an invasion of British Southern Africa from their own colony of South-West Africa (now Namibia). Already a group of pro-German Boers had risen in rebellion. A call went out for the young colonialists to come to the aid of the empire. Harris joined the Rhodesia Regiment, a roughrider outfit, which tackled the enemy in the Veldt and the Kalahari Desert. Within months the German territories had fallen into British hands, but there was grave news coming from Europe, where the conflict had settled into the bloody stalemate of trench warfare. Harris decided that, for the moment, his duty lay back in the old world. He returned to London and started pestering the War Office for a service commission—not with the ground forces but with the army's Royal Flying Corps.

Harris later put this choice down to his weariness with marching around after the rigors of the South-West Africa campaign. As a consequence, he said he was “determined to find some way of going to war in a sitting posture.” By January 1916 Harris had qualified as a pilot in the RFC, still insisting that he would return to his beloved African bush just as soon as the Germans had been vanquished. He was to
stay with the RFC and its successor, the RAF, for thirty years, until he retired. Only then did he return to Southern Africa, though under very different circumstances.

Harris served as a pilot and later as a commander of fighters detailed to protect London against the enemy Zeppelins and Gothas. Then, in September 1916, he was sent to France. He was almost immediately wounded and forced to crash land, suffering further injuries in the process. A spell in the hospital followed, then a period on light patrol duties in eastern England before he was deemed fit to return to the front. Promoted to captain, Harris led a flight of Sopwith Camels on “offensive patrols” over the Flanders trenches. He shot down five enemy aircraft during the rest of 1917, making him formally an “ace.”

The battle going on below him as he flew his missions was Field Marshal Haig's bloody quest to take Passchendaele Ridge and break through to the Belgian coast at Ostende. A hundred thousand British and Commonwealth soldiers would die for that stretch of mud, and about the same number of German defenders. Harris witnessed the full horror of what was happening on the ground, the wholesale slaughter of millions of young men in an apparently endless struggle between equally matched military and industrial powers. From his experiences came the opinions he would hold later, to the effect that air power, and more especially the use of bombers, would be able to break the stalemate and—however many casualties bombing caused among aircrew and people on the ground—buy the end of any new war more cheaply than had been possible in 1914–18. After all, how could the price be any higher?

The armistice found Harris back in England, preparing a new unit, 44 Squadron, for night fighter duties. Outspoken, often to the point of rudeness, confident, a keen disciplinarian, Major Harris (as he now was) also had a reputation for caring about his men, pilots and ground crew alike, and for leaving nothing to chance.

That he did not go back to Rhodesia was due to two factors. First, the new air force showed him a satisfying respect (he was awarded the Air Force Cross), and second, Harris had married in 1916, and it soon became clear that his culture-loving, upper-middle-class English spouse would find life hard in the African bush. Harris made a decision that would prove fateful not just for himself and the Royal Air
Force, but arguably also for Germans born and yet unborn. On August 1, 1919, he accepted a permanent commission as a squadron leader.

In tune with the RAF's postwar role as the British Empire's policeman, Harris commanded squadrons first on the northwest frontier of India, where there was yet another Afghan war in progress and British forts under siege. Transferred to the rebellious former Ottoman province of Iraq, now controlled by the British, he led bombing raids, first against alleged Turkish infiltrators on the northern border, and then against an attempt to establish an independent Kurdish state.

The dropping of warning leaflets over rebel villages before raids sometimes, but not always, saved lives. It is possible, more than eighty years later, to see history repeating itself not just in similar ways but also in the same places. Nevertheless, Harris made a reputation for himself and his men, despite what he described as “the appalling climate, the filthy food, and the ghastly lack of every sort of amenity.” Though he was an obedient servant of the empire, his political judgments could be surprising. He showed sympathy with the Iraqis. They had, he agreed, “been led to expect complete independence and got instead British Army occupation and a horde of Jack-in-Office officials.”

Despite his abrasive character traits, Harris steadily gained promotions and experience. The outbreak of the European war saw him an air vice marshal and air officer commanding in Palestine and Trans-Jordan. He traveled straight back to England to take over at 5 Group, Bomber Command, and was soon back in the thick of action once more.

There were similarities between the roles and characters of Harris and Churchill, who came to know each other well over the next few years. What each of them had to do when he reach his peak—Harris as AOC Bomber Command, Churchill as prime minister—was already clear, even predestined. What each brought to his job, and which transformed the situation in each case, was personality, energy, and determination.

Bomber Command headquarters was in an underground bunker near High Wycombe, a town in Buckinghamshire about thirty miles north of London, best known for the furniture produced there from local beechwood. In February 1942, when Harris walked through the reinforced doors of Bomber Command headquarters for his first operations meeting, it was as if a typhoon had hit the place.

 

THE CHANGE IN ATTITUDE
at Bomber Command was not due just to new, more energetic leadership, or a more ruthless bombing policy. The other developments that gave the proponents of large-scale bombing, chief among them Harris, confidence in its future were scientific.

The relative lack of success Bomber Command had experienced in the first two years of the war was due partly to inferior aircraft, partly to inexperienced aircrew, but equally crucial was the lack of aids to accurate navigation and target location. Here the Germans had held the edge during this time, to some extent due to Britain's understandable concentration on defensive rather than offensive technology. The British might have invented centimetric radar, enabling night interception of enemy aircraft, but they had nothing to match the X-Gerät used at Coventry or its more advanced successor, the Y-Gerät (also known as Wotan). Within weeks of Harris's assumption of command, however, the first major British breakthrough in this area of research was ready to be used in a real attack on Germany. This device was named Gee.

Gee was not a single beam to be followed, like the German devices, but a web of such beams covering enemy territory. This was created by a “master” and two “slave” stations. A cathode-ray tube receiver carried in each aircraft picked up these signals and from them created a grid on a screen. Hence the name Gee for “G,” which stood for grid. This device enabled a navigator to plot his plane's position with accuracy far superior to any previous guidance system. Gee further enabled aircraft to follow one another along a prearranged course in much better order, and to maintain or retain that course much more easily.

Gee's great advantage was that the role of the equipment on board the bomber remained completely passive; it was simply a receiver, emitting no signals that the Germans could track down. And without such signals, the network of beams had no meaning as far as the enemy was concerned. At least for a while, this would have the German radar experts perplexed. It was expected that they would start considering countermeasures only when a Gee-equipped aircraft was shot down and they got a look at the device. This could be a matter of weeks or months, but until then aircrew had an extremely useful aid that enabled them to navigate to the target and all the way back.

The main drawbacks with Gee were twofold. First, because limited
by the curvature of the earth, its range only extended over around 400–450 miles (not as far as Berlin or central Germany). Second, although it brought the aircraft to within two to three miles of the target (remembering that five miles had previously been considered impressive), it was not a pinpoint system. This was shown all too clearly in the first Gee operation against Essen, heavily defended home of Krupp and Holy Grail of British bombers, on March 8–9, 1942.

Harris had optimistically believed that Gee's introduction would “be equivalent to multiplying my force of 300 aircraft by seven…I should be able to destroy completely Essen and three other towns in the Ruhr within three months.” The 211 aircraft got there, but the city was so fogged with industrial pollution that they couldn't find it. Some houses and a restaurant were damaged. Eight aircraft were lost. The same thing happened the following two nights, over Essen and other Ruhr industrial towns. Most of the Krupp manufacturing facilities lay right in the middle of Essen. This was rare; in most industrial towns they were in the suburbs and therefore harder to find. If you couldn't hit Krupp, what
could
you hit?