Arthur Harris

Marshal of the Royal Air Force Sir Arthur Harris commanded RAF Bomber Command from 1942 to 1945 and remains the most contested British commander of the Second World War. He was born in Gloucestershire and emigrated to Rhodesia at seventeen. He served with the 1st Rhodesia Regiment in South West Africa, returned to England in 1915 and joined the Royal Flying Corps. Between the wars he served in India, Mesopotamia, Persia and Palestine, where the RAF practised the aerial policing of colonial populations. He took over Bomber Command in February 1942, weeks after a government report concluded that most of its crews were failing to bomb within five miles of their targets. His answer was area bombing: if precision was impossible, whole cities would be the target. He believed, and argued to the end of his life, that this could break German morale and win the war without a land invasion. Lübeck, Cologne, Hamburg and eventually Dresden followed. The firestorm at Hamburg in July 1943 killed some forty thousand people in a week. Dresden in February 1945 killed roughly twenty-five thousand in a city of little military value with the war nearly over. Bomber Command's own losses were appalling: fifty-five thousand aircrew dead, a casualty rate matched only by the infantry of the previous war. Harris was unrepentant and refused to distance himself from the campaign. Churchill's victory speech did not mention Bomber Command, and its aircrew received no campaign medal, an omission Harris protested about for decades. A statue of him was finally unveiled in London in 1992, forty-seven years after the war, and had to be guarded around the clock after protests and repeated vandalism.

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