Arthur Harris was born in Cheltenham, in 1892. His father, who was a civil servant in the British Raj, always wanted him to go into the army – which the young Arthur Harris was dead set against. After a series of arguments, he left home at the age of sixteen and travelled to Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) where he tried his hand at farming, gold mining and driving horse teams. It is ironic that after all this he should have joined the army anyway, but six years later, at the outbreak of the First World War, that was what he did. In 1915, after taking part in the fight for German West Africa, he made his way back to Britain and joined the Royal Flying Corps – then part of the army – and began a lifelong relationship with aeroplanes. Over the next twenty years he flew everything from night fighters to flying boats. He ended the First World War as a major, with the Air Force Cross, and went on to command squadrons of bombers in some of the furthest-flung outposts of the empire under Trenchard’s Air Control scheme. Eventually, in 1933, he returned to England and worked his way through the ranks of the Air Ministry, until he became Commander-in-Chief of Bomber Command mid-way through the Second World War. 5
By all accounts Harris was a forceful man, possessed of almost boundless energy and a bluntness that verged upon rudeness. He despised the other armed services, and was fond of saying that the army would never understand the value of tanks as a replacement for the cavalry until they could be made to ‘eat hay and shit’. 6He had a dry, cutting sense of humour, and did not suffer fools gladly. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor he was called by a friend in New Jersey who wanted advice on how to defend his factory against incendiaries. Harris told him to get a long-handled shovel and throw any out of the window – then went on to say that he should wrap it up and send it to Harris, who ‘would eat it and every incendiary bomb that fell on America in the war’. 7His aggressive nature was reflected in the way he drove. Late one night, while racing his Bentley between London and High Wycombe, he was stopped by a policeman who reproached him: ‘You might have killed somebody, sir.’ Whereupon Harris replied, ‘Young man, I kill thousands of people every night!’ 8
Harris made few friends, but those he had remained loyal to him throughout their lives. The Chief of Air Staff, Charles Portal, had been his friend for years, as had many of his subordinates – particularly Robert Saundby and Ralph Cochrane, who had first served with him in Iraq in 1922, and Don Bennett, who had served with him in a flying-boat squadron at the end of the 1920s. His plain speaking also made him friends in the American air force, especially General Ira Eaker, who shared many of the same problems when it came to dealing with the other armed services. Most importantly, however, he inspired a fanatical devotion among the air crews who served under him, many of whom vociferously defend him to this day. To them he was known as ‘Butcher’ Harris, or ‘Butch’ for short – a man who would always get the job done, however distasteful it might seem to others, and whose first concern was to provide his men with the right equipment and resources to do their job.
Harris was a staunch disciple of Trenchard, and firmly believed that if enough concentrated misery could be inflicted on the cities of Germany over the next eighteen months the Nazis would be compelled to surrender. One of his first actions after taking command was to appear on a newsreel in which he said, in clipped tones, ‘There are a lot of people who say that bombing cannot win the war. My answer to that is that it has never been tried yet. We shall see.’ 9He had no qualms about area bombing, and remained unapologetic about it to the end of his life. ‘If the Germans had gone on using the same force for several nights against London,’ he said, after the war, ‘… the fire tornado they would have raised would have been worse than anything that happened later in Hamburg, and the whole of London would have gone as Hamburg went.’ 10
Right from the start, Harris’s aim was to attack the very heart of the Reich: Berlin, the capital city; Hamburg, the centre of shipbuilding and trade; and the Ruhr valley, Germany’s industrial heartland. But the RAF was not strong enough yet to make a serious impact on such heavily defended targets, so he concentrated instead on demonstrating to the world what British bombers were capable of once they were deployed in force. The aim was threefold: to quieten the critics at home, to show support for the Russians, and to demonstrate to the Germans what lay in store for them if they continued the war.
The targets he picked were two medieval cities on the Baltic coast of Germany: Lübeck and Rostock. Both seem to have been chosen for their vulnerability rather than their strategic importance: their crowded wooden buildings were highly flammable, and would provide a perfect opportunity for Harris to test his belief that the incendiary, rather than high explosive, was the most efficient means of destroying a city. As Harris said, the closely packed Hanseatic town of Lübeck was built ‘more like a fire-lighter than a human habitation’, and when 234 aircraft firebombed it on 28 March 1942 60 per cent of the old city was consumed. 11More than a thousand people lost their lives in the worst single attack on a German city so far.
A month later, a series of similar attacks was launched on Rostock, which again destroyed about 60 per cent of the city centre by fire. As German propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels stated in his diary, community life had come to an abrupt end: ‘The situation in the city is in some sections catastrophic.’ 12Later Harris justified the attack by pointing to the Heinkel aircraft factory on the outskirts of the town, but the real victory was psychological. While the British had failed to make any real impact on major targets, like Berlin or the cities of the Ruhr, they had proved their worth against smaller targets. Here, at last, was a demonstration to the world that the power of the RAF was on the rise.
The destruction of Lübeck and Rostock was merely a taste of things to come. On 30 May Harris launched the first thousand bomber raid of the war. The target was originally supposed to be Hamburg, concentrating as many bombers in one attack as the port normally saw in a year, but the city was temporarily reprieved when the weather over the German coast deteriorated, and the target was switched to Cologne. That night 1,046 aircraft took off for the north Rhineland, and within a few hours had dropped 2,000 tons of bombs on the city. An estimated 3,300 houses were destroyed in the attack, along with thirty-six factories, and 469 people were killed, most of them civilians. Twelve thousand separate fires raged through the city, the gas mains exploded, the water mains were severed, and all transport systems were put into such disarray that the disruption was still felt months later. 13But, most importantly, the RAF had achieved a major propaganda success. The magic figure of a thousand bombers was far greater than anything the Luftwaffe could achieve, and when Britain was falling behind their enemy in every other arena of the war this was an important morale boost for her people.
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A second morale boost occurred later in the summer of 1942, when the Americans entered the fray. The USA had officially joined the war shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor at the end of 1941, but she was by no means ready for it. Like her British allies, she had been slow to arm. While Germany had been rapidly building her air force since 1935, and Japan likewise throughout the 1930s, it was not until 10 July 1940 that Roosevelt convinced Congress to spend an extra $5 billion on war production. Slowly the world’s greatest industrial giant began the long process of building her army’s air force. By the time the Axis powers declared war against America in December 1941, she was producing some 26,000 military aeroplanes per year, compared to Britain’s 20,000 and Germany’s 11,000. Even so, without experienced crews to fly them it would take eighteen months before the Americans could deploy in force over the skies of northern Europe.
The overall commander of the United States Army Air Force (USAAF) was Lieutenant-General Henry ‘Hap’ Arnold, the son of a Pennsylvanian doctor. Arnold had learned to fly before the First World War when he joined the Aeronautical Division of the US Army Signal Corps, and at one point had even held the world altitude record. Throughout the First World War he ran the army’s aviation schools, and rose steadily through the ranks until, in 1938, he became head of the Army Air Corps.