To carry out this bombing campaign, the Air Ministry looked for a new commander-in-chief to lead Bomber Command. The man they settled on was an experienced and determined airman named Sir Arthur Harris. Over the next three years he would preside over the greatest, most systematic destruction of population centres the world has ever known, and in the process would become one of Britain’s most controversial war figures. The climax of his reign, when the world began to believe that his air force might even win the war single-handedly, was the bombing of Hamburg.

7. The Grand Alliance

… they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind

Hosea 8:7 ¹

Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris took over the reins of Bomber Command at the end of a very low period for the RAF. For the previous six months the RAF staff had been suffering a serious crisis of confidence: their insistence that ‘the bomber will always get through’ had proved wrong, their accuracy when they did get through was appalling, and their losses had been heavy. ²In two years of bombing they had not even dented the German war economy – although they did not yet know how truly ineffective they had been – and they had killed only as many Germans as they had lost in air crew. One British defence scientist of the time calculated that only a single German died for every five tons of bombs dropped – a hopeless waste of resources even if one agreed with the brutal realities of area bombing. ³Critics of Bomber Command were appearing throughout the British establishment. Even Churchill was sceptical about bombing: ‘Its effects, both physical and moral, have been greatly exaggerated,’ he said in September 1941. ‘The most we can say is that it will be a heavy and I trust a seriously increasing annoyance’ to the Germans. ⁴

By the spring of 1942, however, this was beginning to change. Brand new planes were rolling off the production lines, such as the Avro Lancaster, which could carry twice the load of almost any other bomber in existence, and the De Havilland Mosquito, which could fly higher and faster than even most German fighters. New radio technology was being developed to improve navigation, and new bomb-sights were being produced to improve the RAF’s appalling accuracy record. To accompany these changes, the RAF had been on a massive recruitment drive, transferring men from the other armed forces, and drafting some from previously reserved occupations to swell its ranks for the years to come.

So, when Harris first arrived at Bomber Command Headquarters in High Wycombe many of the problems that had plagued his predecessors were already well on the way to being solved. What was needed now was a determined leader, capable of making wise use of the formidable weapon in his hands. It is easy to see why Harris was chosen for the job: while his wisdom might sometimes have been called into question, not even his fiercest critics would have accused him of lacking determination.

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.