Harris had arrived in England shortly before Eaker and moved at once to High Wycombe to take up the command left in abeyance by the sacking of Peirse. He remained the longest-serving bomber commander of the war. He began his air career in the First World War when he left Rhodesia, where he had emigrated as an adventurous teenager in 1910, to join the Royal Flying Corps. He became a major and ended a dramatic operational career in 1918 as a training officer. He remained in the fledgling RAF and saw active service in the Middle East, where he helped to define ‘air policing’ methods by using light bombers to intimidate recalcitrant populations in Iraq and Palestine. He held high office in the Air Ministry in the 1930s, and played a key part in planning what was known as the ‘Ideal Bomber’ (the Lancaster was a distant descendant). In 1939 he became commander of 5 Group, Bomber Command, before becoming Portal’s deputy when he was appointed chief of staff in October 1940. From June 1941 Harris was in Washington, absent from the ongoing arguments about air tactics and the diminishing impact of the command, though not unaware of the problems.189
On most accounts Harris was judged an effective officer and he impressed many of those who met him with a shrewd intelligence and a mordant wit. He established a working relationship – though not always frictionless – with Churchill and the American air leaders. He gave the impression of a straightforward, no-nonsense personality, who spoke his mind and changed it little. He had scant sympathy with those of his colleagues or his men who displayed any weakness. The crews who followed behind the target markers he termed ‘rabbits’; the crewmen who expressed doubts about bombing civilians were ‘weaker sisters’. The civilian critics of bombing were ‘Fifth Columnists’, his junior critics at the ministry simply ‘impertinent’.190 His blunt talking became a hallmark of his relations with anyone who crossed him, however senior. In April 1942 Wilfred Freeman, then vice chief of staff, told Harris after a typically robust exchange that he had spent years getting used to his ‘truculent style, loose expression and flamboyant hyperbole’, but could still be surprised by the level of verbal injury Harris was willing to inflict. So fearsome was Harris’s reputation that when in early 1947 the Air Ministry proposed a conference on the wartime bombing campaign based on the critical report of the British Bombing Survey Unit, Claude Pelly wrote to his co-author Solly Zuckerman that they needed adequate warning if Harris decided to come from retirement in South Africa so that they could ‘make the best of a couple of Continents’ start. Iceland or Southern Pacific?’191
Harris had two important prejudices which coloured his entire period as commander-in-chief. He held an exceptional hostility to the Germans, which made it possible for him not only to run a campaign of city-bombing with high civilian casualties in mind, but to relish in his own choice of words ‘this lethal campaign’. Harris was known to see the First World War as unfinished business, and he had an instinctive hostility to totalitarian systems, right or left. But neither perhaps explains sufficiently why he regarded the death of ordinary Germans as something to be sought in its own right. ‘We have got to kill a lot of Boche,’ he famously wrote in April 1942, ‘before we win this war.’192 During 1943 and 1944 he wanted the Air Ministry to state unequivocally that killing the German people was what his Command was for. In later life he never wavered from his conviction that there was nothing ethically objectionable to killing the enemy civilian in total war, which was a view widely shared at the time, but his complete indifference to the fate of the Germans he bombed, even in Dresden, is more difficult to understand. When the biographer Andrew Boyle asked Harris in 1979 about his ‘aggressive philosophy where Germans were concerned’, Harris did not respond.193 His second conviction was his unyielding belief that the heavy bombing of urban areas was the best use to which the current bombing technology could be put. He contested, often bitterly, any attempt to divert the forces under his command to other purposes and when compelled to do so, fought to have his bombers returned to what he saw as their only rational function as soon as possible. The destruction of cities, Harris insisted to the end of the conflict, would ‘shorten the war and so preserve the lives of Allied soldiers’, though it cost the lives of half his operational crews.194 This stubborn refusal to accept that any other strategy might yield more strategically useful and less damaging results made him into the Haig of the Second World War. Harris’s reputation, like Haig’s before him, has been a historical bone of contention ever since.
Though Harris’s appointment no doubt marked a turning point in the bombing war, he was not, as is so often suggested, the originator of the area-bombing campaign. He arrived at his command after a brief interregnum in which the officers in the Air Ministry in favour of large-scale incendiary attacks on residential areas had been able to exploit the absence of a field commander to put in place an unambiguous commitment to the strategy they preferred. A new directive was sent to Baldwin as acting commander-in-chief on 14 February 1942, modifying the directive of July 1941 by removing communications as a primary target and focusing the force entirely on ‘the morale of the enemy civil population and in particular of the industrial workers’. A list of cities was appended to the directive, with the vulnerable central zones highlighted and the bomb tonnage necessary to destroy them recommended.195 In February 1942 the Directorate of Bombing Operations, which had prepared the directive, explored the vulnerability of particular cities to large-scale conflagration and chose Hamburg (rated ‘outstanding’), followed by Hanover, Cologne, Düsseldorf, Bremen, Dortmund and Essen.196 The zoning system developed in 1941 was now applied to these cities to show the value of hitting the ‘closely built-up city centre’ (Zone 1) and the ‘completely built-up residential area’ (Zone 2a). Attacks on these central zones were estimated to be up to 20 times more effective than attacks on the outer industrial and suburban zones. The damage done to a large working-class area was expected to affect the output of numerous factories through absenteeism or death, where an attack on a single factory target would affect only that one.197 This was the background to the famous minute sent to Churchill by Lord Cherwell on 30 March 1942 in which he calculated that 10,000 RAF bombers would by mid-1943 be able to drop enough bombs to de-house one-third of Germany’s urban population. ‘Investigation,’ ran the minute, ‘seems to show that having one’s house demolished is most damaging to morale.’ Churchill was so impressed that he insisted on circulating the minute to the War Cabinet. It generated at the time a great deal of argument from other scientists who criticized the arithmetic (Patrick Blackett thought it exaggerated by a factor of 600 per cent), and it has attracted much discussion from historians, but in effect it simply advertised a shift in bombing priorities that had already been agreed and was now in place.198
Harris did make a difference when he took over Bomber Command because he was an aggressive and single-minded defender of his force against all efforts to divert it to other purposes or to compromise the directive he had been given. He also argued forcefully against the widespread criticism of the Command – ‘ignorant and uninstructed chatter,’ he called it – because of the damaging effect on bomber crew morale to be regularly reminded that their efforts were ‘futile’.199 But Harris did realize how limited bombing still was without a substantial increase in the size of the bomber force and an end to the dispersion of bomber aircraft to other theatres. When he arrived at the Command he had at his disposal only a few hundred bombers, of which a large part were still medium Wellingtons. He understood that this force was incapable of achieving what the new city-bombing directive suggested. He complained to Norman Bottomley, deputy chief of staff, that what he needed was a force of at least 2,000 bombers; such a force, he claimed, would not only destroy his list of 20 cities, but ‘knock Germany out of the war’.200
Harris nevertheless set out to demonstrate what his limited numbers could achieve. On 8–9 March 1942, 211 aircraft (including 37 heavy bombers) armed with ‘Gee’ navigation attacked Essen and the Krupps complex. Dense industrial smoke obscured the city; no bombs h
it Krupps, a handful of houses were destroyed and 10 people killed. A second raid on Essen two days later killed only five people; the bombs were scattered over 61 different villages and towns.201 A raid on Cologne on 13–14 March proved more effective thanks to better target-marking despite a gloomy night. The most successful attack was made against the Baltic Sea port of Lübeck on the night of 28–29 March. Although beyond the range of ‘Gee’, there was a full moon and good visibility. The 234 bombers attacked in three waves, carrying two-thirds incendiaries against the lightly defended and densely constructed ‘old town’ area. Around 60 per cent of buildings in the city were damaged and 312 people killed, the heaviest casualties in Germany so far. A series of four raids were then made against the northern port of Rostock between 23–24 and 26–27 April, again aiming for the main city area, 60 per cent of which was damaged or destroyed, though thanks to effective civil defence only 216 inhabitants died. These were the first raids where incendiary damage could be inflicted on the central areas of a combustible target along the lines planned in 1941 and they inflicted high levels of urban destruction. They were also the first raids that the German authorities took seriously; following the Rostock raid a special category of ‘great catastrophe’ was introduced to define larger and more destructive attacks.202
The reaction to the first ‘Gee’ raids at the Air Ministry was nevertheless unenthusiastic. The Director of Bombing Operations, John Baker, accused Harris of misunderstanding the nature of the incendiary attacks he had recommended, by carrying too much high explosive. Harris was sent a memorandum summing up the opinion of British fire chiefs about the relative value of high explosive and incendiary, which showed that in almost all cases more than 90 per cent of the damage had been caused by fire. Baker suggested carrying at least 200,000 4-lb incendiary bombs to maximize the damage.203 On 8 May, following the Rostock raids, Baker’s deputy, Sydney Bufton, also wrote to Harris with the evidence from plotted photographs that his attacks on Essen in March and again in April showed 90 per cent of bombs had fallen from between 5 to 100 miles from the Essen aiming point. Plots of 12 raids on Essen between March and June 1942 showed that in seven of them fewer than 5 per cent of aircraft got within three miles. The raids on Rostock, which was easier to locate being near the coast, showed that 78 per cent of the photographs taken were not of the town.204 A few weeks before this, on 14 April, the chiefs of staff had asked Churchill to authorize a second study of bombing results by Justice Sir John Singleton, to see what might be expected from bombing over the following 18 months. The decision was prompted by Cherwell’s minute on ‘de-housing’, which suggested very significant consequences by the end of that period with more bombers and greater accuracy.205 Singleton’s report was produced by 20 May using material supplied by Baker and Bufton, though without the statistical foundation used in the Butt Report from the previous August. Singleton concluded that the use of ‘Gee’ had had mixed results, but that in general efforts to improve the level of accuracy and concentration had been a failure. He did not believe that over the following six months ‘great results can be hoped for’.206 Cherwell wrote to Churchill a week later that Singleton had been disappointed ‘as any layman would be, by the inaccuracy of our bombing’.207
On the question of greater accuracy Harris was generally unhelpful. The arguments over developing a target-finding force equivalent to the German Kampfgruppe 100 had begun in 1941 but were still unresolved when Harris took over. He was opposed to the idea of using the introduction of ‘Gee’ as an opportunity to develop specialized units to find, identify and illuminate a target city. Together with other senior commanders, he thought the creation of an elite corps would leave poorer-quality crews to follow behind and would sap the morale of the rest of the force. He favoured keeping ‘lead crews’ in each bomber Group to find and mark the target, and was impervious to the evidence that this practice failed to produce a concentration of bombing effort. At a meeting with Group commanders and the Directorate of Bombing Operations in mid-March, Harris made it clear that he entirely rejected the idea of a target force and was supported by all five Group commanders.208 The argument highlighted the extent to which the individual commanders-in-chief and their commanders enjoyed independence from the Air Staff at the ministry in the way they chose to run their campaigns. It was nevertheless difficult for Harris to ignore all the evidence of continued inaccuracy and the political and service pressure to improve it. Failure to do so might, as an Air Staff memorandum pointed out in May, make it increasingly difficult ‘truthfully and logically’ to resist pressure to divert bombers to other uses.209 In March, Bufton sent out a questionnaire to squadron and station commanders in Bomber Command asking them whether they approved the creation of a Target-Finding Force. The replies were unanimously in favour. A squadron commander based at Oakington, near Cambridge, told Bufton that the senior officers’ First World War experience was valueless in the new conflict: ‘The crocks … must be swept from the board.’210
Bufton sent the results of the survey to Harris but it made little difference. Harris found five squadron commanders who were prepared to argue the opposite case. The most he would concede was the idea of raid leaders for each Group, which built on existing practice. The crisis point came in June when Wilfred Freeman, acting on Portal’s behalf as vice chief of staff, finally seized the initiative after weeks of fruitless argument with Harris over tactical issues. He told Harris that he would have to accept the logic of a specialized force. Harris met Portal and despite a trenchant rearguard action finally agreed to the establishment of what he insisted on calling the Pathfinder Force to distinguish it from the Air Staff title of target-finding. Even then Harris found ways to obstruct the proper functioning of the new force, which remained short of the most effective aircraft and highly trained crews. An Australian pilot, Group Captain Donald Bennett, was appointed on 5 July 1942 to command the new units; the Pathfinder Force was activated on 15 August and undertook its first operation three days later against the north German coast port of Flensburg. It proved an awkward baptism. Strong winds drove both the Pathfinders and the main force off course and instead of bombing the German city, the bombs fell on two Danish towns and injured four Danes.211 An Air Ministry minute in early August noted that despite the agreement to form a target-finding force, ‘a lack of enthusiasm and sense of urgency in high quarters permeates the whole command, and will inevitably result in a complete failure of the T.F.F. [Target-Finding Force] at its inception’.212
Harris found himself, like Peirse before him, fighting against a chorus of criticism both inside and outside the RAF. During May he began to plan a sensational air raid to try to still public criticism and stamp his mark on his new Command. He won approval from Portal and Churchill for the plan to send 1,000 bombers against a single German city. It was a risky promise because it depended on the cooperation of Coastal Command in releasing their bomber aircraft for the raid and the use of aircraft from the training units. Bomber Command itself had just over 400 front-line aircraft. The city chosen was Hamburg, which like Lübeck and Rostock was easily identifiable as near the coast. The object, Harris wrote, was to wipe it out in one night, or at most two. The target was large, near and ‘suitably combustible’. The aim was to carry every single incendiary possible and to create an ‘unextinguishable conflagration’ by bombing in a continuous stream and in a short period of time, a gesture towards the tactical recommendations made by the Air Ministry.213 The codename ‘Operation Millennium’, like later codenames, betrayed its apocalyptic purpose. By 23 May plans were prepared with details of German defences and three routes to the target. Coastal Command agreed to release 250 aircraft, only to find that the Admiralty countermanded the offer. Harris had at the last moment to recruit training personnel and trainee pilots to raise his force to a total of just over 1,000. The weather worsened over the week that followed and by 26 May Cologne was chosen as a possible alternative. Hamburg was finally abandoned as the primary target and waited another year for i
ts firestorm.
After first approving, then cancelling, then reinstating the operation on 30 May, the raid against Cologne was authorized by Harris for that night. A total of 1,047 bombers were sent off, but only 868 claimed to have attacked the main target, dropping 1,455 tons of bombs, two-thirds of them incendiaries, though only 800 tons fell on the city itself. The concentrated stream allowed the bombers to complete the raid in just an hour and a half, which may explain why the first reports from the city suggested that only between 50 and 100 bombers had been overhead. A later report from the local National Socialist regional leader confirmed the actual scale: it was, he wrote, ‘the most successful concentrated enemy air attack to date’.214 Some 3,330 buildings were destroyed and 7,908 damaged; 486 people were killed and over 5,000 injured; 59,100 were rendered temporarily homeless. This represented a loss of 5.2 per cent of Cologne’s buildings. Heavy though the raid was, it was impossible to wipe a city out, as Harris had hoped.215 He planned to continue the large raids as long as he had the force of bombers acting together. On 1–2 June another ‘1,000’ raid was made on Essen, with far less success: only 11 houses were destroyed and 15 people killed. The last large ‘1,000’ raid, Millennium II, was against the port of Bremen on the night of 25–26 June. Out of a force of 960 aircraft, 696 claimed to have hit the city, but destroyed only 572 buildings and killed 85 people, suggesting that many of the bombs missed the target area altogether.216 This was the end of the ‘1,000’ plan. Despite the effort to overwhelm the Kammhuber Line by using a concentrated bomber stream, losses were the highest of the war, 123 bombers from the three raids. This threatened to eat into Bomber Command’s training system and the large raids were discontinued. Some of the OTUs were close to mutiny at the loss of training staff and the demands placed on novice crews sometimes forced to fly obsolescent aircraft to make up the numbers on each raid.217
The Bombing War: Europe 1939–1945 Page 40