BOOKS OF THE DAY
Unrepentant Fighter
Bomber Offensive. By Marshal of the R.A.F. Sir Arthur Harris. (Collins. 21s.)
WHEN Sir Arthur Harris faded quietly out of the scenes quorum pars magna fuit there were many to whom it seemed that the great services which he had rendered to the nation had been insufficiently rewarded, and some, the better informed, said to themselves: " Ah ! Didn't hit it off with higher authority, evidently." That they were right this book shows. In it "Bomber Harris" tells the story of the two long fights which he fought in the years 1942-45. One was against the Germans. The other was against the powers of darkness at home among them the Air Staff, who plagued the life out of him. The worst of that bunch, it seems, was Sir Norman Bottomley, the Deputy Chief of the Air Staff, to whom fell the task (admirably performed, be it interpolated) of issuing the directives approved by higher authority to govern our air strategy. What Sir Arthur thought of these he makes abundantly clear. He speaks of the "multiplicity of directives embodying one change of plan after another and so cautiously worded at the end with so many provisos and such wide conditions that the authors were in effect guarded against any and every outcome of the orders issued. They were always in the happy position of being able to challenge any inter- pretation of any order, if so desired." In other words, higher authority hedged and tried to cover itself. There could be no more damning indictment of higher authority, in peace or in war.
It will be gathered that Sir Arthur Harris was no more disposed to pull his punches in the internal than in the foreign conflict. He was a fighter all along the line. He came to Bomber Command in the dark days of February, 1942. He infused into it a thrustfulness which it had lacked before. He tried his hand first on two industrial towns of secondary importance—Liibeck and Rostock, both of which were wrecked. Then he went after bigger game. He organised the much-publicised "thousand-bomber raid" on Cologne, and followed it up by heavy attacks on other large towns in 1942. In 1943 he sent his bombers to the battles of the Ruhr, of Hamburg, of Berlin. He smashed scores of German cities in 1944. He believed fervently in hitting Germany where it hurt, in her centres of industry and population. The Air Staff were forever bothering him to attack all sorts of finicky targets, "panacea targets" he calls them. He had no use for that kind of air strategy. He wanted to smash cities and he did.
The reason why he made such a set on the cities has been mis- understood. The United States Strategic Bombing Survey states :— "Harris and his staff had a low opinion of economic intelligence
and were sceptical of 'target systems.' They had a strong belief in Germany's powers of industrial recuperation and doubted that her war potential could be significantly lowered by bombing. At the same time, they had a strong faith in the moral effects of bomb- ing and thought that Germany's will to fight could be destroyed by the destruction of German cities."
It is evident from Sir Arthur Harris's own account that he expected less from moral effect than is here suggested. But he did believe profoundly in the offensive against industrial centres. That view of his chimed with the popular demand of the time. He seemed to give us just what we wanted. We were tired of hearing of raids on oil plants at places with outlandish names—Kastrop-Rauxel, Wanne-Eic.kel, etc.—or on rubber factories such as Huls, or on the marshalling yards at Hamm. We had never heard of most of these tedious places. What we wanted to hear was that great chunks of high explosive had been slapped down on Berlin or Hamburg or other German towns. That, we told ourselves, was the stuff to give the troops. Harris filled our bill. There was no nonsense about him. He became and remained "Bomber Harris" to the end. We felt that we were getting somewhere at last.
Actually, we were not getting there nearly as fast as we imagined. The unexpected, the disconcerting, fact, now established beyond challenge, is that after five years of war German production was higher than ever. It reached its peak in July, 1944, falling there- after. That did not mean that the attack on industry was a waste of effort. It did mean that the results were subject to a considerable time-lag. There was altogether too much of delayed action about it. That was why in 1944 we went back to our first love and took the Americans with us. We resumed the attacks on special targets, that is, on oil and transportation. They Germany's goose. Sir Arthur Harris, who opposed the switch-over at the time, has
the magnanimity to admit that "the triumph of the offensive against oil was complete and indisputable." So, in perhaps even greater measure, was the success of the attack on the railways. There were, in fact, three, and only three, decisive battles of the air in the war. with Germany: the battles of Britain in 1940 and of oil and of transportation in 1944-45. But Sir Arthur Harris would not put these first. For him, the battle against the industrial cities was always the most important. If he had been allowed to continue it in full blast in 1944 he believes that Germany would have been knocked out in a few months.
He does not claim that bombing won the war. He does claim that it could have done so if the Allied war-leaders had had enough confidence in strategic bombing. Because they were of little faith "the two older services were able to employ a large part of the nation's war effort and industrial capacity on the production and use of the older weapons," such as "the battleships, the most ex- pensive and the most utterly useless weapons employed in the whole of the last war." There is a wealth of revelation in comments of this kind. There is a substratum of truth in them, but the verdict is a lop-sided one all the same. There is a hint, indeed, of resurgent, unrepentant Bourbonism here and there in these pages. Can it be seriously contended at this late hour that, once Russia and the United States were in the war, we ought to have staked all on the air offensive and pushed the older arms into the background? In 1940-41, perhaps, when we had no alternative, but surely not in 1942-45. One cannot imagine another great airman, Tedder, betray- ing such a single-track mentality: which probably explains why
Tedder is where he is and Harris is not. J. M. SPAIGHT.
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