Bomber Offensive (Pen & Sword Military Classics) [Paperback]

Arthur Harris (Author)

Book Description

Series: Pen & Sword Military Classics | Publication Date: June 2005

Sir Arthur Harris - Bomber Harris - remains the target of criticism and vilification by many, while others believe the contribution he and his men made to victory is grossly undervalued. He led the men of Bomber Command in the face of appalling casualties, had fierce disagreements with higher authority and enjoyed a complicated relationship with Winston Churchill. Written soon after the close of World War 2, this collection of Sir Arthur Harris's memoirs reveals the man behind the Allied bombing offensive that culminated in the destruction of the Nazi war machine but also many beautiful cities, including Dresden

Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Pen & Sword Books (June 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1844152103
• ISBN-13: 978-1844152100
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.8 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.9 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,317,007 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A harsh and realistic account, November 5, 1997

By 

[e-mail] (Stockholm, Sweden) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Bomber Offensive (Hardcover)

Harris was head of bomber command in WWII for the british. This account starts with his initial military service in africa in the first world war where he particiopated in the longest forced march to combat known in modern history. He became (by shear nepotism in his own words) an officer in the flying corps and saw action in mesopotania (now basically IRAQ). He rose to become head of the british airforce. He analyses phases of the war from this high perspective. For instance, balancing aircarft production and crew training against losses over germany, produced grim statistics like an 'acceptable' loss rate of 4% of aircraft and men PER MONTH. tactics for window (now called chaff foil dropped to blind radar) introduction and decisions for its deployment are discussed. Here the germans made the wrong decision. They did not even try to reseach conter measures for chaff in the fear that the allies would hear about it. Harriss took the correct gamble and used it. The effects were devesting. The normal error for night bombing was five miles due mainly to the effect of german radar directed ground fire. With Window this error went down to 1 and a half miles. This increased the bomb / incendary concentration and caused the worlds first fire storm in Hamburg in 1943. After the raids 74% of all buildings were destroyed in this city. He is almost silent on the dresden raid. "Atomic Explosives" are discussed, but the full implications are not realised. I think estimates of a simple atomic bomb were an equivalent of 2000 tons of TNT. The first one released about 14,000 tons TNT equivalent energy. This period saw RADAR and RADIO navigation progress at an amazing rate. In this book it is seen from the usability and effect perspective. Essential reading for WWII historians...

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A personal account - a very personal account of bomber war, January 6, 2005

By 

Samuel Martinsson (Helsinki) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Bomber Offensive (Greenhill Military Paperbacks) (Paperback)

This is a nice piece dating from 1947. It is a frank and personal account. Harris is an overconfident victor of WWII, and he is not ashamed of telling his view of how he (almost) won the second world war, singlehandedly. When this book was written, the concept "politically correct" had not yet been coined, and today Harris would be in trouble with his language: Germans are idiots, and so are the French. The civil servants in the Air ministry and Ministry of aircraft production are bunglers. Colonial crankshots from all parts of the British Empire do get some credit, and Harris is fond of the Americans, and only rarely is he calling them morons. Harris was trained at Staff college, but he despises the cavalry mentality that was ingrained in the education. Interservice rivalries are given a frank expose, with the Admiralty playing the part of the villain. Harris completely ignores scientific advice and is not able to understand anti-submarine uses of bombers; to him it only diverts his resources from offensive that will break Germany.

Harris is a field commander who does not delve into deep discussions about morality of war or impact of his operations. It remains a mystery why Harris thought that RAF area bombings could destroy the German morale, because he had witnessed himself that the London blitz or Coventry bombing did not have the desired effect on the British morale.

Harris is fond of quoting Albert Speer to show how much damage bombing did to German war effort. But Harris is extremely selective, so it is good to quote other comments by Speer, for instance on attacks on ball bearing industry: "But already in the connection of the first attack enemy made a crucial mistake: instead of concentrating his efforts on ball bearings, it divided its forces... and what is more important, the British continued their haphazard attacks on German cities..." Ball bearings had been pinpointed early on as targets of primary importance, but Harris overruled those incompetent idiots of the economic warfare office. He claims to have known that the attacks would be useless, but his reasoning proved all wrong after the war. In 1944, Speer "thanks" Harris indirectly: "bombings on economically critical targets are clearly planned by men who understand German economy... We are clearly lucky that the enemy has been insane not to carry out its own policy." This means that British area bombings of 1942 and 1943 had been rather inefficient and only intensified American bombing in 1944 of critical resources started to have effect on German war effort.

It is curious that the British only sent a dozen men to assess bombing damage in Germany after the war: they had, after all, lost 50 000 men in the skies of Germany. When discussing German civilian casualties, Harris distances himself by quoting US Strategic Bombing Survey figure of 300 000 (many others put the figure at 600 000). On the whole the neglect of effects of bombing is amazing. To quote Harris: "The RAF was not in a position to judge the result of its main offensive in the light of a sufficient body of indisputable evidence". RAF "measured" the success of bombing by the the number of bombed-out people, or acres of destroyed build-up area. The Americans later perfected this approach in Vietnam: because bombing damage could not be assessed, they just reported the tonnage of bombs dropped.

Harris claims that he could have forced Germany to surrender by air power alone, if only he had been given 4000 heavy bombers. Harris completely ignores the aircraft building effort. The fact is that the Bomber command never grew big because the Germans kept shooting down heavies at the same rate as the British build them. The idiots at the Ministry of Aircraft Production did supply some 7000 Lancasters, 7000 Halifaxes, 10 000 Wellingtons (and 7000 medium Mosquitos), yet Bomber command never had more than 1600 planes at any one time.

Harris had some very profound views of the future of warfare. He understands that bombers are historical relics, and the future belongs to missiles. This is a rather brave comment from a man who created a major bomber force to a win a war just a few years earlier. Many later writers, including Denis Richards but surprisingly excluding the official RAF historians, rely on Harris's memoirs as their main guidance in bomber war histories.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars review of Harris' autobiography, February 16, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: Bomber Offensive (Hardcover)

One of the most controversial figures of the Second World War was an african who sunk more German battleships than the Royal Navy, did as much to win the Battle of Britain as Fighter Command (but lost more men in the process), and killed over 50,000 of the enemy in a single night.

What interested me most was the thoughts of such a commander. It's not only Air Marshalls who strive hard, have to overcome obstructive idiots who are supposed to be helping you, and when you've succeeded, get it in the neck from those you've most benefitted. It is clear his main enemy during the war was useless bureaucrats. High up on his list was top brass at the RN with their battleship mentality, and requests to divert money and bombers to some of their more pointless tasks (as he saw it). He showed disdain also for the army's cavalry mentality, but probably most of all he hated pointless civil service delay during war-time:

"After the war, Albert Speer, [...], was asked to what extent the loss of records affected efficiency in production. He replied "On the contrary, the loss of records led to a temporary loosening of the ties of bureaucracy. We very often received the message 'Administrative building burnt out, production continues at full pressure.' " Perhaps our own problems could have been solved as expeditiously by a few bombs on the appropriate Government departments."

Unexpected attacks that hurt him more though were those from the floor of the House of Commons, and Fleet Street; he didn't have to wait till the end of the war to learn that his efforts were considered offensive by many, as he acknowledges in the title of his book which is to some extent an account of his life as well as of the bomber offensive itself.

At least two of his brothers had been considered more promising than him, and though born (in 1892) in England, he had chosen to become a Rhodesian. Resisting intense pressure from his father to join the army, at sixteen he accepted a ticket and a fiver and went off to become in turn a gold miner, farmer and driver, and loved the life. Returning from a trip into the bush he heard of the outbreak of WWI and took the last available position in the 1st Rhodesian Regiment: bugler. He soon took part in the greatest marching performance of an infantry brigade in English military history, and after they had: "...defeated and collected the Boche ... I sailed for England determined to find some way of going to war in a sitting position. I thought of the cavalry but I had no faith in horse warfare. The Gunners were full up. I thought I would learn to fly; even before the war I had toyed with the idea of joining the R.N.A.S. and might have done so if it had not meant becoming a professional sailor. I therefore joined the R.F.C."

Openly admitting to help from a highly-placed uncle, he was appointed a second-lieutenant on probation, and soon formed a squadron for home defence (one of his men shot down the first Zeppelin) and for defending artillery spotters in France.

Staying in the R.A.F. after the war his liking for a warm climate took him to the Middle East. Amidst terrible privations and shortages mostly due to maladministration, he tells us how he was involved in the bombing of "Irak" (or "Mespot" as they called it).

Just before WWII he was in Palestine. It seems the rules for the British there were:
"...you must not get rough, no matter how rough the "enemy" is... My advice to all young commanders in all services is, whenever you see any prospect of being called out "in aid of the civil power" in any part of the world, to get the hell out of there as quickly and as far as you can. If you fail by being to soft you will be sacked; if you succeed by being tough enough, you will certainly be told you were too tough, and you may be for it."

He raises a number of interesting points in his account of the war itself. He ascribes the German decision to stop the Blitz to their very high loss of bombers due to crash landing at night on their return to base; the industrial haze of the Ruhr defended it from effective raids in the first part of the war; the field of "Operations Research" grew out of the need to answer questions on the effectiveness and strategy of raids without being able to run controled experiments. Notable in his absence from the book is Leigh-Mallory who, in his biography, was described has having organised the bombing of the French railways before and after D-day, which Harris discusses as his own work.

The effectiveness of Bomber Command rose exponentially towards the end of the war; it is not well-appreciated how incredibly accurate, even at night, the Lancasters and Mosquitos became. A great fan of the Americans, Harris obviously regarded them as rivals, and he points out that they also opted for carpet bombing; it produced a firestorm in Tokyo. He doesn't mention though that American day bombing damaged the German war effort in the air as well on the ground.

Another German veiwpoints on Harris' work from the book:
Speer: "Owing to their greater effectiveness, night attacks caused considerably more damage than day raids... by reason of the fact that the superheavy bombs caused shattering damage to [the synthetic oil plants]."

Harris suffered less for his efforts than Oppenheimer, though his reputation fared worse. His regretless post-war return to his adopted Africa was probably accompanied by the thought that you can't expect thanks for a difficult and dirty but essential job well executed.