ISBN 1-85367-314-5
288 pages

Introduction; Preface; photos; Index.

   Sir Arthur Harris—also known as "Bomber" Harris or even "Butcher" Harris—led the Royal Air Force's Bomber Command from 1942 through the end of the war and proved one of the Allies' most strong-willed and single-minded commanders. His opinions and decisions about waging war from the air did not always coincide with, or please, his superiors or colleagues, but he managed through the power of his personality and convictions to not only retain his position but build Bomber Command into a powerful instrument molded by his vision of air warfare.
   In the immediate post-war years Harris, despite the contributions and sacrifices of his Bomber Command, was not met with the same public accolades and celebration as many of his fellow Allied leaders. The government of Prime Minister Clement Atlee shunned him when handing out to other high-ranking leaders new honors and titles. Already there was a vague grumbling in some quarters about the "Butcher's" willingness to bomb women and children. When Harris completed his official "Despatch" in which he reported to the government and the public the wartime achievements of Bomber Command, it was not publicly published as such Despatches traditionally were, but rather was classified and its circulation limited. Moreover, its one-sidedness and blunt criticisms of opposing viewpoints resulted in addition of an unusual "Memorandum" by RAF officers with other opinions and perspectives.
   Bomber Offensive was written in that environment and emerged as one of the most contentious and controversial memoirs by any senior Allied commander of the war. More than one expert has found parts of the book to be misleading and less than entirely accurate. One historian of the air war has written that certain passages in Harris' book "cause throbbing at the temples." Given the nature of the memoirs and what the author attempts to prove about himself and his policies, it can be difficult to separate the man from his book and to measure either without benefit of later post-war investigation and analysis. Indeed, many of the wartime "facts" on which Harris quite understandably based his decisions and strategies were called into question only when Allied specialists could actually study results on the ground and interview German officers and officials. That being the case, this review occasionally interjects (parenthetically) differing opinions from other sources—mostly the official Strategic Air Offensive against Germany volumes by Webster and Frankland—to contrast some of what Harris writes with subsequent research and scholarship. Harris, by the way, rejected the opportunity to review the official history volumes before they were published.
   From the first pages—in which Harris rails against parsimonious governments; the "loose thinking of...political demagogues, who blame the fighting man to conceal their own follies"; the French "[who were] rotted to the core with the worst type of politician and politically-minded serving officers"; the Royal Navy "[which] had no idea beyond the long-defunct battleship"; and even "[the road] from Norwich to Grantham, which is without exception the worst cross-country route in England"—it's clear he will be delivering opinionated blows as untempered and thunderous as his Lancaster bombers delivered against Germany. Through the very last pages he pulls no punches in his narrative.
   This sort of forthrightness was not new to Harris.

   I remember a one-time C.I.G.S. giving us a lecture [while Harris was a young officer] in the course of which, looking pointedly at me as the sole surviving airman of the course, he, to all intents and purposes, dared me to challenge his assertion that Gibraltar was so small that a bomber could not even hit the place; he then asked me what percentage of hits on Gibraltar I would consider reasonable. I replied 99 per cent, allowing for a 1 per cent hang-up on the bomb racks. He was much upset at this answer.... But he asked for it.

   Harris breezes in his opening pages through his experiences in World War I, flying against rebellious tribes on the Northwest Frontier, doing the same in Iraq ("Mespot"), at Army Staff College (where, see above, he challenged the Chief of the Imperial General Staff), commanding a flying boat squadron, on a purchasing mission to the United States in 1938, and as Air Officer Commanding Palestine and Transjordan.
   When war broke out in September 1939, Harris, newly returned from Palestine, was given command of Number 5 Group, Bomber Command, equipped with the Hampden. While in that position he initiated air-dropped minelaying operations, ignored the Air Ministry to oversee invention of an improved gun-mounting to double effective firepower of the Hampden, noted that for Fighter Command in the Battle of Britain victory was relatively certain because "the destruction of the German bomber squadrons outside their own fighter coverage was very similar to shooting cows in a field", was the first to warn of the invasion threat posed by German power-driven barges gathering on the channel coast, and with bombers was largely responsible for ending the threat of invasion by attacking those barges.
   In 1940 when Sir Charles Portal was promoted from head of Bomber Command to Chief of the Air Staff, he appointed Harris his deputy. In that position Harris reduced the size of the staff by 40% while increasing efficiency, personally scotched a variety of silly schemes proposed by the Army and Navy, then sailed for another round of purchasing war material in America where he also managed to overcome some incompetent hotel managers, outwit a female Soviet spy, correct improper nomenclature in British war communiques, and issue instructions on the preferred method of dealing with incendiary bombs dropped on America.

   So I explained that one got a long-handled shovel and, holding the lid of a dustbin as a shield, one picked up the bomb and put it in a heavy iron bucket or slung it out the window. I concluded by saying that if he would then wrap it up and send it to me I would eat it and every incendiary bomb that fell on America in the war.

   (Apparently none of the Japanese balloon bombs dropped on the West Coast were ever forwarded to him.)
   Upon his return from the States, Harris was appointed chief of Bomber Command in February 1942. The new chief soon found the air command far more stressful that an Army or Royal Navy command.

   ...I wonder if the frightful mental strain of commanding a large air force in war can ever be realised except by the very few who have actually experienced it. While a naval commander may at the most be required to conduct a major action once or twice in the whole course of the war, and an army commander is engaged in one battle say once in six months or, in exceptional circumstances, as often as once a month, the commander of a bomber force has to commit the whole of it every twenty-four hours....

   This stress was not reduced by "some definite information of a plan" by the Germans to kidnap him.
   When Harris arrived at Bomber Command, it had endured constantly changing directives and targets and, with a very small striking force, had achieved little since 1939. Harris brought to the job his usual strong and clear vision, along with considerable distaste for the Air Ministry's revolving schemes for "panacea" targets.
   The situation was simple enough. Bomber Command was the only element of the British armed forces in a position to strike Germany, so strike it must. Because of Germany's defenses it was pointless and suicidal to bomb in daylight, so the bombing was to be conducted at night. At night, however, it was impossible to navigate and bomb reliably enough to hit specific targets such as individual factories or refineries with any accuracy, so Bomber Command chose to achieve a general dislocation of German industry by bombing area targets such as large industrial towns, congested factory areas, and urban production centers. When bombs missed their industrial targets, which was not uncommon, they would be counted as successful hits against basic infrastructure and civilian morale. By fortuitous circumstance, since Harris reckoned there was no other viable strategy for bombing Germany, his analysis also revealed—based in part on his study of German bombing during the Battle of Britain—this strategy was also the optimal one to pursue for defeating Germany.

   As a matter of strict calculation it was therefore obvious that the policy of destroying industrial cities, and the factories in them, was not merely the only possible one for Bomber Command at that time; it was also the best way of destroying Germany's capacity to produce war material.

   Harris did not invent this strategy, nor was he the first to employ it, but he was its keenest proponent, staunchest defender, and chief executor through the end of the war. With a force of 4000 heavy bombers, he determined, he could bring Germany to it knees and make an Allied ground campaign in Europe all but unnecessary.
   In addition, as early as 1942 Harris knew the Germans were attempting to produce an atomic bomb. Area bombing, to dislocate the whole enemy economy, was the best response to such a threat. Despite constant nagging demands by Army and Navy for frittering away his bombers on such peripheral issues as the U-boat campaign and ground support, Harris stuck to his plans for area bombing to achieve the desired dislocation.
   Throughout 1942, with a comparatively minuscule force, Harris put his strategy to work. One of his first missions was against the battlecruiser Gneisenau and he was able to "hit her hard" after previous efforts had proved unavailing. The Renault works near Paris suffered an "extremely destructive" raid. At the end of March Bomber Command burned down its first German city, Lubeck on the Baltic coast.

   It was not a vital target, but it seemed to me better to destroy an industrial town of moderate importance than to fail to destroy a large industrial city.

   (Later surveys showed damage at Lubeck to the German war effort "very light".)
   Rostock and its outlying Heinkel factory were then shattered with "a combination of area and precision bombing" on four consecutive nights. (Later surveys showed principal war factories were nearly back to 100% production within two days.) At the end of May Harris launched against Cologne—by mustering in addition to his front line strength all his training and conversion squadrons—the first 1000 bomber raid. In one night Bomber Command devastated nearly as much acreage as its cumulative total since the war began. (Within two weeks the life of the city was functioning almost normally.) Harris then decided to tackle the Ruhr in a series of attacks in which his main force was again reinforced by the operational training squadrons. (Afterwards, the Germans reported they could not be sure, by the light and widely spread damage, what the RAF's targets had been.)
   In the autumn Harris began flying a total of fourteen missions, one by daylight, against Milan, Turin, and Genoa.

   And there is no doubt that the panic caused by Bomber Command's attacks on industrial cities in North Italy, though the weight of the attack was insignificant compared with that of the offensive against Germany, did as much as any other single factor to bring about the downfall of Fascism in that country.

   (Which would probably have been glum consolation to the Allied troops who assaulted Sicily and Italy.)
   Although night bombing had sharply reduced Bomber Command's loss rate, the "acceptable losses" plus ordinary attrition very nearly equaled the sum of new bombers reaching Harris. Despite the fact that his force was barely growing and was nowhere near his original goal of 4000 bombers, Harris clung tenaciously to his purpose. After a year at Bomber Command his force might have been barely larger numerically, but the heavy Lancasters were increasing in number, navigational techniques were improving, tactical refinements promised better results, and Harris was heartened by his perceived successes in 1942.
   Thus in 1943 with growing assistance from the daylight "precision bombing" of the US 8th Air Force, Bomber Command set upon German cities with increasing ferocity. The pace of technological advance also quickened with the advent of Oboe, H2S, "window", and more. However, German counter-measures evolved almost as quickly.
   Due to increasing strength and effectiveness of German fighters against both day and night bombing, the "Combined Bomber Offensive" directive—also known as the "Eaker Plan" and Operation Pointblank—sought to concentrate British and American airpower against six "target systems" selected specifically to cripple German fighter production and win complete command of the sky for the Allies. Harris' distaste for such "panacea" targets remained unabated. He succeeded in having the directive amended sufficiently that Bomber Command was able for the most part to pursue its own targets and its own concept of area bombing.
   The Ruhr was hit again and again. Hamburg suffered a fire-storm. (And made a remarkably rapid recovery.) Peenemunde and its V-weapons targets were struck. From November 1943 and into March 1944, Bomber Command made sixteen major attacks on Berlin, the distant and heavily defended German capital. So encouraged was Harris by the missions against Berlin that, although not quoted in his book, he wrote to the Air Ministry in December:

   From this it appears that the Lancaster force alone should be sufficient but only just sufficient to produce in Germany by 1st April 1944 a state of devastation in which surrender is inevitable.

   By the end of March, at the cost of 300 aircraft (587 according to other accounts, over 600 according to yet others), some thousands of acres of Berlin were devastated.

   Judged by the standards of our attacks on Hamburg, the Battle of Berlin did not appear to be an overwhelming success.... But by comparison with the results of all earlier attacks on Berlin it was a devastating blow, and the industrial damage, as often happened in rather scattered attacks, was particularly heavy; among the factories damaged were many of the largest and most important plants for the production of war material in Germany....

   (The official history is less charitable: "The Battle of Berlin was more than a failure. It was a defeat.") Heaviest losses were inflicted by the German fighter force which Operation Pointblank—Eaker's "panacea" plan—had been designed to reduce.
   By the spring of 1944 Harris was well-satisfied with the apparent progress of his campaign and certain increased strength and improved techniques would bring even greater—perhaps war-winning—successes in the near future. It was not to be.
   In April 1944 Bomber Command along with US strategic bombing forces were placed under SHAEF—General Eisenhower's Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force—to assist in preparations for the Allied return to the continent by undertaking the "Transportation Plan" to ruin the French rail network and seal off Normandy. Harris explains this meant that actual strategic bombing of Germany had lasted for only one year. Henceforth his command was to be used for other purposes and subordinated to the ground generals. "Naturally I did not quarrel with the decision to put the bomber force at the disposal of the invading armies." (Other sources recount in considerable detail how Harris fought a long battle against such subordination, complying only after he received a formal and direct order from Portal. "While it may be argued that some of Harris' wartime misjudgments were revealed only in hindsight, in this matter his narrow-mindedness was astonishing.")
   From April through D-Day in June, Bomber Command plastered French railway marshalling yards and facilities and coastal fortifications. On the night of the invasion itself, 1136 bombers attacked coastal batteries. Harris also dispatched a diversionary raid dropping "window" in such a manner as to simulate the approach of an invasion fleet against the Pas de Calais. Harris also attacked German E-boat bases and eradicated this threat to Allied shipping in the Channel. In June, July, and August Bomber Command contributed more strikes, including "carpet-bombing" in direct support of the Allied armies "...but the army unfortunately did not exploit its opportunities..." (See also Richthofen's similar remarks in Hayward's Stopped at Stalingrad about the unwillingness of German 6th Army to take advantage of his bombing at Stalingrad.) Harris also cleared the way for seizure of German-occupied French ports.

   ...Brest, Calais, Cap Gris Nez, and the Ile de Cezembre, which was essential for the defence of St. Malo, were all occupied without trouble after attacks by Bomber Command.

   (Accounts of ground attacks on Brest do not always reflect these Bomber Command successes.) Further missions were dispatched against V-weapons sites.
   Finally released from SHAEF on 25 September, with the Normandy operation complete and the V-weapons sites overrun, there emerged an opportunity for Bomber Command to strike targets other than those chosen by the ground commanders. While Bomber Command itself never achieved Harris' goal of 4000 heavy bombers, the combined strategic bombing forces of Britain and America now numbered well more than that, and there was every likelihood the proponents of independent strategic bombing could be vindicated once and for all.
   By this stage in the war there were three strategies proposed for continuation of the strategic bombing offensive: extending the "Transportation Plan" to Germany; the "Oil Plan" for knocking out German petroleum production and supplies; and massive area bombing of German cities. Back in May 1944 the 8th Air Force had begun bombing German synthetic oil plants when circumstances permitted; now they stepped up the pace of such attacks. Portal and the Air Ministry directed Harris to join in the Oil Plan. But oil was simply another target about which the "panacea-mongers" of the Ministry of Economic Warfare and sundry other experts had been wrong on many prior occasions. Harris remained convinced he was better suited than anyone to direct the strategy and select the targets of Bomber Command, and he continued to believe area bombing was the only way to ensure the rapid, complete, and relatively bloodless defeat of Germany. (In the margin of Portal's order Harris scribbled "Here we go round the mulberry bush.")

   I therefore strongly objected [to Portal] to stopping the offensive for which we had worked for five years, and which was succeeding hand over fist at the very moment when we at long last disposed of such a weight of attack as to put all questions of failure out of court.

   Harris and Harris alone would determine the missions of Bomber Command in the last months of World War II.
   (On this point the official history sums up the situation nicely: "...what had previously been a difference of opinion now became a serious dispute. Nor was this dispute ever resolved, and there can be no doubt that it diminished the effectiveness of Bomber Command in the final phase of the war. It may seem curious that such a dispute between the Chief of the Air Staff and a [subordinate] Commander-in-Chief could endure in this way without either a solution being reached or a change in command taking place. The ultimate responsibility for its consequences must, of course, be attributed to the senior of the two protagonists, Sir Charles Portal, who, it may be judged, should either have changed or enforced his view. Nevertheless, the explanation undoubtedly lies in the character and prestige of Sir Arthur Harris. These were such that the Commander-in-Chief [of Bomber Command] could not be prevailed upon to change his mind and, even then, could scarcely be removed from his command.")
   From that time until the final days of the war Harris waged his favored area bombing campaign as he saw fit, and the weight of RAF bombs fell on city after city, many of which had already been pulverized and burned. Harris explains the situation:

   Effective additional damage could only be done to the already devastated cities of the Ruhr by an enormous expenditure of bombs, as much as four to five thousand tons of bombs in two attacks in close succession. It was also difficult to estimate from air photographs either the extent or the value of the damage done, since it was often a question of comparing one ruin with another that had previously stood on the same spot.

   The bombing continued even as the number of viable targets continued to shrink due to the advance of the Allied armies and the results of previous bombing successes. The Lancasters did not stop demolishing German cities until the very end of April, little more than a week before the end of war in Europe, and even then Bomber Command Mosquitoes were not through. Harris' final attack was launched on the night of 2/3 May against Kiel.
   Post-war tasks of the Allied air forces included preparation of an assessment of their aerial campaigns. That of Bomber Harris was predictably favorable.

   But I am certain that if we had had an adequate bomber force to attack Germany a year earlier, that is, in 1943, or if we had not had the pre-invasion bombing and the bombing of the V-weapon sites to divert us in 1944, we should never have had to mount an invasion on anything like the scale that proved necessary. ...without these diversions the result would have been the inevitable and total collapse of Germany and there would have been no need for the invasion.

   It is an assessment long debated.
   During the war and since, especially in the wake of the findings of the US Strategic Bombing Survey, there have been many among the public and the military who believed the policy of area bombing cities to be at best ineffective and at worst immoral. According to the Introduction to his official "Despatches", "...[Harris] had no doubt that, had the Germans won the war, he would have been tried as a war criminal, and he believed that some in the post-war British Labour Government considered he should have been tried in any case." As recently as 1992 the memory of Harris—who died at the age of 91 in 1984—caused renewed controversy when a statue of him was unveiled in London, leading to demonstrations, clashes, and vandalism.
   Bomber Offensive is a book all students of World War II and airpower simply must read. Compared to the memoirs of contemporaries such as Alexander, Montgomery, Slim, and Cunningham, page after page of Harris' book reverberates with ferocious, uncompromising blasts. Whether these prove Harris was always as right as he believed, or even that he was correct in his single-minded pursuit of area bombing, is best left to the reader to decide.
   Finally, whether they could have won the war single-handedly, or were thrown away in pursuit of a flawed strategy, or whether the truth lurks somewhere in between the two extremes, nothing can diminish the gallantry, devotion to duty, and sacrifices of the crews of Sir Arthur Harris' Bomber Command.
   Available from online booksellers, local bookshops, or directly from Stackpole Books. (Also available from the UK publisher, Greenhill Books.)
   Thanks to Stackpole for providing this review copy.