The air commander who made strategic bombing central to total war
Days after the thousand-bomber raid on Cologne, he told a newsreel audience: 'They sowed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind.'
Arthur Harris was the Royal Air Force commander who led Bomber Command during the Second World War and made area bombing of German cities a central instrument of British strategy. He improved the operational scale and effectiveness of the campaign while remaining responsible for a method that killed civilians and destroyed urban life. Before the Normandy landings, Harris resisted diverting bombers from the pressure on German industry to the Transportation Plan, yet in March 1944 he ordered the initial attacks on French railway centres that put the plan into action. That tension exposed the conflict between an air force command defending its independent strategic campaign and the Allied demand for direct support to the invasion.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1915–1918Royal Flying Corps pilot and flight commander
- 1918–1920Served in the RAF after its formation
- 1925–1927Commanding Officer, No. 58 Squadron
- 1937–1939Command of No. 4 Group and RAF forces in the Middle East
- 1939–1941Commander, No. 5 Group, then Deputy Chief of the Air Staff
- 1942–1945Commander-in-Chief, RAF Bomber Command
- 1953Created a baronet, retaining his Southern Rhodesian identity
Related historical events
- 1914–1918First World WarRoyal Flying Corps flight commanderFrom 1915 to 1918, he served as a Royal Flying Corps pilot and flight commander.
- 1941–1944The Second Front and the Normandy LandingsBomber Command chief who carried out the initial railway attacksHe resisted diverting bombers from area bombing but carried out the initial railway attacks that tested the Transportation Plan.
The 1942 Cologne thousand-bomber raid
On the night of 30/31 May 1942, Bomber Command under Harris mounted the first 'thousand-bomber raid', codenamed Operation Millennium, against Cologne. The operation followed the Cabinet's acceptance of Frederick Lindemann's 1942 paper advocating area bombing, after which Harris pressed for raids on a much larger scale, each using 1,000 aircraft. He had to answer calls to split up his force and divert it to other theatres such as the Battle of the Atlantic, which arose from Bomber Command's poor bombing accuracy during 1941; a headline-grabbing heavy raid on Germany was his way of demonstrating to the War Cabinet that the force could make a vital contribution to victory.
The raid saw the first use of the bomber stream, a tactical innovation designed to overwhelm the German night-fighters of the Kammhuber Line. Of 1,103 bombers sent, 868 bombed the main target, dropping 1,478 tonnes of bombs, two-thirds of them incendiaries. The raid started 2,500 separate fires, 1,700 of which German fire brigades classed as 'large'. Fire-fighting and the width of the streets prevented the fires from combining into a firestorm, but most of the damage was done by fire rather than by explosive blast. Some 3,330 non-residential buildings were destroyed and 12,840 damaged in all, while 13,010 civilian homes were destroyed and 28,630 damaged. The only military installation hit was the flak barracks. The RAF lost 43 of the 1,103 aircraft sent, a loss rate of 3.9 per cent.
The Cologne raid was the starting point for the judgement Harris pressed on his superiors after the bombing of Hamburg the following year, when he assured them the war would be over in months. He believed sustained area bombing could force Germany to surrender, and in October 1943 he urged the government to state the purpose of the campaign honestly to the public. The aims he set out were the destruction of cities, the killing of German workers, the disruption of civilised life throughout Germany, the creation of a refugee problem on an unprecedented scale, and the breakdown of morale through fear.