Sir Arthur Harris-Chief of Bomber Command-War Criminal?

The USAAF also area bombed area targets, although later on they went to great lengths to deny it.

As soon as they got their first ground mapping radar, the 8th AF began carrying out area attacks on German cities. They would load a high proportion of incendiaries and drop them through cloud on German city centres. According to a USAAF study, it would result in less than 1% of bombs hitting within 1,000 ft of the aiming point.

At first the 8th AF openly acknowledged what they were doing. Later on the stated objective for such raids was changed from "city centre" to "marshalling yards", but the method remained the same. They still loaded a high proportion of incendiaries, despite incendiaries not being suitable for attacking marshalling yards.

The truth about bombing in Europe is that the Luftwaffe, RAF and USAAF all carried out both precision attacks and area attacks.

Accuracy was measured by taking the distance bombs fell from the aiming point. It doesn't matter whether that aiming point was a a bridge, a factory or a stadium in the middle of a city.

I only know of one direct comparison where the accuracy of the 8th AF and BC was compared against the same targets. That was provided by the USSBS, who gave figures for a number of attacks against 3 large German oil plants.

According to that, the RAF averaged 15.8% of their bombs within the plant fences. The 8th AF ranged from a high of 26.8% in good conditions to a low of 5.4% in poor conditions. The overall average for both forces was 12.6%, which probably puts the USAAF average down below 10%.

 

For bombing accuracy I've never read of anything to quite match the Mosquito raid on a Dutch Gestapo HQ. Taking out the ground floor of the building which contained the HQ and allowing the prisoners in the upper floor(s?) to escape.

 

firstly it was portal whom was responsible for citing Dresden as a target not Harris...secondly Dresden was indeed a military target with numerous plants and factories and a just target irrelevant of those whom say or assume otherwise.

Your Hatred of harris stems from what personal affliction, was the view by yourself any different then the butchering of innocent people by Goering, Richtofen or Jeschoneck!!!

Your assumption that Harris was hated for his role as creating BC and his action within it as being hated by the British people is also assumed wrong, as he was loved and sought as a hero to combat Nazi butchery that was taking place in many nations around the globe.

also your assuming women and children where strafed reads something along the lines of a Goebbels propaganda speech...never happen regardless of the amount you would like to believe, perhaps the majority of strafing of women and children took place by the LW in Poland, France and Russia, but not by the USAAF in Dresden, sorry never happened

 

I looked over "Target Hitler's Oil" by Ronald Cooke & Conyers Nesbit and talk about something like what you are . On page 203 it talks about attacks on 3 large plants in Leuna,Zeitu,and Ludwigshafen .The 8th AF scored 26.8% within the plants using visual,12.4% using part visual & part instrument,5.4% using full instrument while the RAF using pathfinder technique acored 15.8% . The average being 12.6%. It goes onto say 27,000 tons of bombs were dropped on these targets ,but only 3,376 tons fell within the perimeter. the book goes onto say the average wieght of the bombs dropped were 388 lb(of 509,000 bombs dropped) for the USAAF & 660 lb for the RAF(of 264,000 bombs dropped),very few large bombs,i.e. 1000 lb and above ,were used but where these heavier bombs hit theyu did far more damage then the equalvilent wieght of smaller bombs.
Clearly dropping larger bombs by both airforces would have helped against the oil targets while having raids of longer duration would have been better in the USAAF's case.

 

I still believe that modern German complaints about bombing and the effects thereof are so much 'sour grapes'.

To quote Churchill...."What kind of a people do they think we are....?"

He was , of course, referring to Japanese outrages post PH, but the sentiments could have applied easily to the entire Axis partnership. Germany had already fought one total war against England/France/Russia/America, in which the numbers and types of different ways found to undermine an enemy were attempted,so, what makes anybody feel that the British would shrink from making the same moves in another total war?

Sir Arthur Harris certainly didn't shrink from the tough decisions. As he pointed out to an English traffic warden, when he stopped Harris for speeding, pointing out to the gruff airman that his conduct "could kill somebody", Harris replied in matter of fact tones, "Sir, I am PAID to kill people!"

Postwar Germans bleating on about the unfairness of it all should take into account that the people of a popularly elected government (which the Nazi's were, even by appointment, they still had more votes than any other single party), must stand by and be responsible, collectively, for decisions made in their name, by their representatives.

If these decisions turn out to be detrimental for the people, they really only have themselves to blame for this self-imposed state of affairs that the German people found themselves in from 1939 onward. And, being collectively responsible, they had to bight the bullet as to exactly what this state of affairs was going to mean for them personally.

They will not make this same error twice....surely enough. Military history teaches hard lessons, eh what?

 

Volga,
It's like another saying I've heard sometimes you have to get down in the dirty ditches in order to fight back against somebody who's fighting from/in the sewers.

 

Butch Harris... Yes well war is hell, yes the mass bombing of German cities was hellish and yes Butch Harris put up a fight to continue those raids, and yes the raids on allied cities were hellish too as were the V1, V2 and then the raids on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. One could go on but war is hell. My father was a 101 squadron Lancaster pilot, bombed and was shot down by Bergmann on his famous night of 10 / 11 April 1944 - evaded capture, witnessed the liberation of Paris, came back to the UK joined Pathfinders and bombed Berlin alone 17 more times, ending up flying his last Op' - as so many did - on 25th April 1945, I only recently discovered that he was on the raid on Berchtesgarden. I tell you this as it was, at least, something to give Mr and Mrs Hitler another reason to fret in their final hours.

I was unkind enough to ask my old man about what he felt about having bombed cities. He was quite categorical about the desperation to stop the Nazi's as quickly as possible, and how dangerously close a thing it had been, particularly after the March 1944 raid on Nuremberg, at which time I believe a crew's life expectancy was about two weeks.
By April 1944 the Allied infighting that went on over the targeting of cities or strategic logistical sites was something else, and yes Butch Harris was for flattening the cities but Eisenhower won. Arthur Harris has been hammered for his bombing tactics, but remember what an isolated place Britain was and what the risks were.
It's interesting that Der Dick Göring and Erhard Milch didn't develop heavy bombers and were just too late (thank God) with rocket, jet power and The Bomb; it was a close thing.

 

You get what you give. My grandfather was a Pole hsi family were murdered by German soldiers in Poland. He escaped and flew Lancasters in the Royal Air Force throughout the entire war. I'm immensely proud of him and Sir Arthur Harris for having had the courage to have stood up and fought knowing full well they'd be damned for it later.

"A thousand years will pass and still Germany's guilt will not have been erased." Hans Frank. Again you get what you give.

 

I've heard all this rubbish about Sir Arthur Harris being a war criminal for German posters before and it is rubbish -especialy coming from any German. When the British newsreels showed in British cinemas the Dresden raid of February 1945 the British audiences cheered and they were right to do so.
Back in 1939 a British Minister Sir Kingsley Wood in Prime Minister Chamberlain 's Cabinet reacted to a suggestion that the Royal Air Force firebomb the Black Forest -''We can't do that!-it's private property!.
12 months later as he watched the German Nazi Luftwaffe try to exterminate London and her population in the great German fire raid of December 28 1940 -when eight Sir Christopher Wren churches and the ancient London Guildhall were razed by fire a well as many ordinary Londoners homes-Sir Kingsley changed his tune and became an avid supporter of Arthur Harris and the raids on Hamburg July 30 1943, Cologne May 1942 and Dresden 1945 when Harris and the RAF reapaid the miserable Nazi scum who invented this area bombing game in their own coin.
To these modern revisionist nonsense mongers -especially those living in Germany- I challenge you to produce the name of one single leading Third Reich politician who-like Sir Kingsley Wood in 1939- said 'We can't bomb Warsaw, Rotterdam Belgrade London Coventry etc-it's private property..''?
You/they won't be because no such German politician had the moral fibre or guts between 1933-45 to do so-so please spare us your utter rubbish about Harris or the R.A.F. being war criminals.
As that great war leader Bert Harris said as he watched the German Nazi Luftwaffe carry out the blueprint and sign the future death warrants for Dresden Hamburg, Pforzheim and all the other Nazi cities that asked for and received justifiiable retaliation via mass allied Bombing-''They (The German Nazis) have sown the wind -they shall reap the whirlwind ..'' and they did -so much so that like my parents generation before me I too still cheer when I see newsreels of mass bombing of German Nazi cities like Dresden where the people who were murdering children wholesale in death camps (Dresden was a major staging post for Auschwitz) were made to suffer for voting a crummy regime like the Nazis into power in the first place in 1933; and fighting fanaticallty to keep them in power right up to May 1945.
Equally, the vast majority of those of us who can recall- even vaguely- the Second World War have a standard response to modern Germans who whine about ''aliied air force war crimes''-it is a non -verbal response and involves inverting Winston Churchill's two fingered ''V'' salute and pointing it at those pedlars of such guff as Arthur ''Bomber '' Harris was a war criminal statement.
My deepest regret is that Harris and Churchill didn't have the A-Bomb to drop on German cities in 1942-then all the hundreds of thousands who perished in German death camps like Auschwitz such as Anne Frank would have survived and lived.
Bert Harris said ''Not one German city is worth the bones of a single British Grenadier'' and he was right. But unfortunately, the German Volk were so idiotically welded to the Nazis that 55,000 British and allied airmen in Bomber Command died flying agianst Germany-they are the only people worth mourning -not the masses of Germans who supported Hitler and the Nazis and who suffered rightly and nightly in places like Hamburg and Dresden for supporting a crummy regime in the first place from 1943-45. courtesy of allied bombing.

 

I read over this resurrected thread with some interest. Harris was no war criminal as has been explained amply in many previous posts. His and all of the Allies actions were in keeping with the conventions of the day as far as legitimate use of strategic bombing, even to the extent of the often condemned bombings of Dresden and the use of nukes in Japan. Regardless of what any revisionists might try to peddle today, the Allies did not start this war and responded in kind to the actions of the perpetrators.

I don't think many today realize what "total war" really means. As Duns Scotus' post so eloquently notes, this was a fight to the death that many at the time were uncertain as to its outcome, nearly to the end. It's fairly easy to sit behind one's keyboard today and suggest that the strategic bombing campaign was a waste of resources or that the Axis' coffers were already bankrupt before the bombing campaign had even started in ernest, but who knew that at the time? Many seem to forget that if the Allies did not pursue this war the Axis started, it's difficult to know how far they could have gone, unchecked. Until the Allies, and that included all of them after Fortress Europe was established, had built up the necessary armies to engage and ultimately invade/liberate the Continent, what other option did they have to try and stop their enemy? While the concept of "knights" engaging on the field of valor is indeed chivalrous and noble, total warfare involves interdiction of everyone and everything that contributes to the war machine. Sadly, this diminishes the number of those who are truly innocent and increases the number of those who are innocent but may be killed as collateral damage.

I think the lessons learned from strategic bombing in WWII were somewhat mixed. Going into the war it was a generally held belief that one could break the morale of the enemy with a sustained bombing campaign. I believe this was proven to be false on all sides then (and subsequently), seeming rather to cement the resolve of the bombarded populace. Most conclude that the ability of the Axis to wage war was impaired, though mixed opinions were submitted (see JK Galbraith quoted above) in this regard. While ever increasing German production numbers are cited as a failure of the bombing campaign, I believe it flies in the face of common sense to assume that production would not have been even greater if it was left completely unchecked.

Finally, much has been said here about the imprecision of bombing in WWII, how wasteful it was and how shameful the collateral damage was that it caused. This was the state of the art and science of the time and not much more can be said of it. The entire saga is tragic. War is hell.

 

Not so: the state of the art and science of the time allowed these effort could have been invested in other way:
More long-range ASW patrols, with better RADAR … in 1942.
The Merlin was fitted in tanks in 1944 … It shall had happened in 1943.
The Hawker Tempest arrived in 1944, the Fury in 1945 … more engineers … It shall had happened in late 1942-1943.
The RAF suffered the lack of droppable tanks for the fighters till late 1943 …etc.
The British workers of the shipyards produced Halifax bombers while the Torch, Husky , Anzio even Overlord suffered the lack of barges …

Harris really believed in their work and the way he was conducting the aerial warfare. He was a patriot, but TODAY we know that was terribly wrong.
The USAAF achieved air superiority: forced the LW to fight. The Bomber Command did not contribute to that goal. And it was the main contribution of the strategic bombing: The Galbraith opinion you mention is the common view.

 

bomber Harry was not wrong at all. Why did the Raf fly night Operations? Because the Raf could not afford fighter escorts. If he could have escorted his lancs he would have gladly done so, so he did the best he could with fewer men and less aircrafts.

The USAAF did a tremendous job but saying they did it all is wrong. For a start the RAF was there since 1939 (vs August 1942 for the USAAF) and it took some guts to fly to Germany over and over again without any escort and yet achive some excellent results. I have the highest respect for the RAF airmen who paid the ultimate price.

Saying the dead from such nationality are worth more is just rubbish. Every death is tragic, but some tragedies are needed to preserve freedom.

May all those who gave their lives rest in piece, whether Allied or Axis, civilians or military.

 

From what i have read Stalin complained bitterly to the allies that his army was doing all the fighting and wanted a second front opened in the west as early as 1942. Weather Stalin was correct in his statement or not is not the issue, he believed it was so . The only way the Allies had to strike back at Germany was through the bombing campaign. Every me109, Ju88 or 88mm flack gun and the soldiers and aircrew that manned them that was committed to the defence of German cities was one that the Russians weren't faceing.
and as the bombing got more intensive the Germans were forced to committ even more of their precious resources to the defence of their cities. One of the reasons D-Day was successful was that the allies had complete air superority, what remained of the once powerful luftwaffe was defending the Reich from allied bombers . Weather it's Carl Spatz, Jimmy Dolittle or Arthur Harris , running a bombing campaign was a dirty dangerous business, their job was to reduce once beautiful cities to rubble, and watch helplessly as thousands of your own boys are killed or maimed in the process. Were they ruthless in continueing the air assult ? yes , were they war criminals ? no . War was and is a dirty dangerous business...

 

You have quoted me out of context. I was speaking of the imprecision of bombing of the day.

Even if we accept that as the case today for the sake of discussion, that was unknown and certainly not the common view at the time.

 

I don't intend to go too far in this thread. Dresden will end it in the end when it is brought up...but the statement of one poster...:they realized what he was and was hated for it!!!...Is simply incorrect...The British may question the need and the means...But very few after the war hated him..very few today even know who he was or what he did...He may well be hated by some for whatever reason...but the British people never hated him. Or hate him.

 

Arthur Harris was not always right -who is ? -especially even in war. But his Bomber campaign against Nazi Germany was a justifiable crusade that made the Nazi supporting Germans suffer for some of the misery that they tried to inflict on innocent people throughout Europe. between 1939-45.
Also the number of 88mm and 105mm guns which were diverted to counter the allied Bombing campaign also meant that they couldn't be used in the Eastern Front or elsewhere.
Little known is the fact in 1940 Harris at the height of the Nazi invasion scare submitted a paper suggesting that African killer bees might be unleashed on the south of England invasion beaches against landing Germans as the German Leader in German South West Africa -Von Lettow-Vorbeck- had once repulsed a British attack on that German colony by having his his machine gunners shoot up killer beehives -with devastating effects on the atacking British.

 

I feel a deep admiration for all those who risked their lives, or lost, to defeat Hitler. I wrote it in my very first post.
So I deeply regret that those who command them did not have the gift of clairvoyance and that all decisions would have been the best. Which as we know is impossible.

IMHO the decision to prioritize the RAF bombing campaign, to the detriment of coastal command, tactical aviation and barges was not a good decision.

And that limits the post. In fact, I have refrained from commenting on any of the arguments presented in favor of the Harris campaign ...With defenses like that ... Who needs prosecutors?

 

Now that is genuinely interesting. Obviously, I knew that most of the Halifax production came from Cricklewood, Radlett and Leavesden ( they're all close to where I live which is a long way from the sea ). Then there were the Northern facilities such as Samlesbury, Speke and Stockport ( OK, they're not that far from the sea but it's rather flat and marshy up there....not exactly shipbuilding country ).

So I'm wondering which shipyards actually built any Halifaxes....?

 

Well Speke certainly was not a shipbuilding place Martin as much as Hooton on the other side of the water. Maybe they built them in Beaverbrookes underground factories outside Birmingham...transported them by canal to the sea..launched straight into the war and off after the U boats...but shhhh its a secret still to this day.

 

No offence Efestos , my comment was general and was not adressed directly to you. I know your initial post was fair.