First World War parades in
Bulawayo on its way to South Africa in November 1914. Harris was with the unit as a
bugler.|alt=A military unit stands on parade, rifles shouldered, in the middle of a town. Large crowds are gathered around. When the First World War broke out in August 1914, Harris did not learn of it for nearly a month, being out in the bush at the time. Despite his previous reluctance to follow the path his father had had in mind for him in the army, and his desire to set up his own ranch in Rhodesia, Harris felt patriotically compelled to join the
war effort. He quickly attempted to join the
1st Rhodesia Regiment, which had been raised by the
British South Africa Company administration to help put down the
Maritz Rebellion in South Africa, but he found that only two positions were available: as a machine-gunner or as a
bugler. Having learnt to bugle at Allhallows, he successfully applied to be a bugler and was sworn in on 20 October 1914. The 1st Rhodesia Regiment briefly garrisoned
Bloemfontein, then served alongside the South African forces in
South-West Africa during the first half of 1915. The campaign made a strong impression on Harris, particularly the long desert marches; three decades later, he wrote that "to this day I never walk a step if I can get any sort of vehicle to carry me". South-West Africa also provided Harris with his first experience of aerial bombing: the sole German aircraft in South-West Africa attempted to drop artillery shells on his unit, but failed to do any damage. as a
second lieutenant on probation on 6 November 1915. Harris learned to fly at
Brooklands in late 1915 and, having been confirmed in his rank, then went on to serve with distinction on the
home front and in France during 1917 as a flight commander and ultimately CO of
No. 45 Squadron, flying the
Sopwith 1½ Strutter and
Sopwith Camel. Before he returned to Britain to command
No. 44 Squadron on Home Defence duties, Harris claimed five enemy aircraft destroyed and was awarded the
Air Force Cross (AFC) on 2 November 1918. Intending to return to Rhodesia one day, Harris wore a "" shoulder flash on his uniform. He finished the war a
major. In April 1920
Squadron Leader Harris was jointly appointed station commander of
RAF Digby and commander of
No. 3 Flying Training School RAF. He later served in different capacities in
India,
Mesopotamia and
Persia. He said of his service in India that he first became involved in bombing during the usual annual
North West Frontier tribesmen trouble. His squadron was equipped with poorly maintained
Bristol F.2 Fighter aircraft. In Mesopotamia (Iraq) he commanded a
Vickers Vernon transport squadron. Harris later wrote of his time there that "We cut a hole in the nose and rigged up our own bomb racks and I turned those machines into the heaviest and best bombers in the command." The squadron,
No.45, carried out raids, including night raids, against both Turkish invading forces and local Arab rebel groups. Harris once remarked that "the only thing the Arab understands is the heavy hand." He also said of the bombing raids in Iraq that "within 45 minutes a full sized village can be practically wiped out and a third of its inhabitants killed or injured... no effective means of escape." During the 1920s Harris occasionally doubted his decision to remain with the RAF rather than going back to Rhodesia; he submitted his resignation in May 1922, but was persuaded to stay. After his return from Iraq to the UK in October 1924, and a staff training course, he was posted to command the first postwar heavy bomber squadron (
No. 58, equipped with the
Vickers Virginia), in May 1925. His commander in Iraq had been the future
Chief of the Air Staff Sir
John Salmond, who was also one of his commanders back in Britain. Together they developed "night training for night operations". and promoted to
wing commander on 1 July 1927. From 1927 to 1929, Harris attended the
Army Staff College at
Camberley, where he discovered that at the college the Army kept 200 horses for the officers'
fox hunting. At a time when all services were very short of equipment, the Army high command—which was still dominated by cavalry officers—clearly had a different set of priorities from technocrats like Harris, From 1934 to 1937 he was the Deputy Director of Plans in the Air Ministry. He was posted to the
Middle East Command in Egypt, as a senior Air Staff Officer. In 1936 Harris commented on the
Palestinian Arab revolt that "one 250 lb. or 500 lb. bomb in each village that speaks out of turn" would satisfactorily solve the problem. The same year he visited Southern Rhodesia in a professional capacity to help the Southern Rhodesian government set up its own air force. On 2 July 1937 Harris was promoted to
air commodore and in 1938 he was put in command of No. 4 (Bomber) Group. After a purchasing mission to the United States he was posted to
Palestine and
Trans-Jordan, where he became Officer Commanding the RAF contingent in that area with promotion to
air vice-marshal on 1 July 1939. In this period Harris, and others, pressured senior staff for large strategic bombers, which could bomb German targets from England. This resulted in specifications from the Air Staff which led to the
Avro Manchester,
Handley Page Halifax and
Short Stirling. Later, after severe shortcomings were displayed on operations, the Manchester was redesigned to become the very effective
Avro Lancaster.
Second World War Harris returned to Britain in September 1939 to take command of
No. 5 Group. Appointed a
Companion of the Order of the Bath on 11 July 1940 he was made
Deputy Chief of the Air Staff in November 1940 and promoted to the acting rank of
air marshal on 1 June 1941. The
Butt Report, circulated in August 1941, found that in 1940 and 1941 only one in three attacking aircraft got within five miles (eight kilometres) of their target. Harris was appointed
Commander-in-Chief of
Bomber Command in February 1942, replacing Air Marshal Sir Richard Pierse, who became in charge of Air Forces in Southeast Asia. Harris was advanced to Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath on 11 June 1942. In 1942,
Professor Frederick Lindemann, having been appointed the British government's leading scientific adviser by his friend, Prime Minister
Winston Churchill, presented a seminal paper to Cabinet advocating the area bombing of German cities in a
strategic bombing campaign. It was accepted by Cabinet and Harris was directed to carry out the
Area bombing directive. It became an important part of the
total war waged against Germany. At the start of the bombing campaign, Harris said, quoting
Hosea from the Old Testament, Harris comments that he first made this comparison while standing with Portal watching the
London Blitz in 1940. At first the effects were limited because of the small numbers of aircraft used and the lack of navigational aids, resulting in scattered, inaccurate bombing. As production of better aircraft and electronic aids increased, Harris pressed for raids on a much larger scale, each to use 1,000 aeroplanes. In
Operation Millennium Harris launched the first RAF "thousand bomber raid" against
Cologne (Köln) on the night of 30/31 May 1942. This operation included the first use of a
bomber stream, which was a tactical innovation designed to overwhelm the German night-fighters of the
Kammhuber Line. Harris was promoted to temporary air marshal on 1 December 1942 and acting
air chief marshal on 18 March 1943. Harris was just one of an influential group of high-ranking Allied air commanders who continued to believe that massive and sustained area bombing alone would force Germany to surrender. On a number of occasions he wrote to his superiors claiming the war would be over in a matter of months, first in August 1943 following the tremendous success of the Battle of Hamburg (codenamed
Operation Gomorrah), when he assured the Chief of the Air Staff, Sir
Charles Portal, that his force would be able "to produce in Germany by April 1st 1944 a state of devastation in which surrender is inevitable" and then again in January 1944. Winston Churchill continued to regard the area bombing strategy with distaste and official public statements maintained that Bomber Command was attacking only specific industrial and economic targets, with any civilian casualties or property damage being unintentional but unavoidable. In October 1943, emboldened by his success in Hamburg and increasingly irritated with Churchill's hesitance to endorse his tactics wholeheartedly, Harris urged the government to be honest with the public regarding the purpose of the bombing campaign, Many senior
Allied air commanders still thought area bombing was less effective. In November 1943 Bomber Command began what became known as the
Battle of Berlin that lasted until March 1944. Harris sought to duplicate the victory at Hamburg but Berlin proved to be a far more difficult target. Although severe general damage was inflicted, the city was much better prepared than Hamburg and no firestorms were ignited. Anti-aircraft defences were also extremely effective and bomber losses were high; the British lost 1,047 bombers, with a further 1,682 damaged, culminating in the disastrous raid on
Nuremberg on 30 March 1944, when 94 bombers were shot down and 71 damaged, out of 795 aircraft. Harris was promoted to the substantive rank of air marshal on 1 January 1944 and awarded the Russian
Order of Suvorov, First Class on 29 February 1944. After the Southern Rhodesian Prime Minister,
Sir Godfrey Huggins, visited Harris in May 1944, Southern Rhodesia asked the UK government to appoint Harris as
Governor at the end of the year, Huggins being keen to install a self-identifying Rhodesian in that office rather than a high-ranking British figure. Though keen to take the position, Harris felt he could not leave the war at this key stage, an opinion shared by Churchill, who turned down the Southern Rhodesian request. in 1945 in 1945 Before the
D-Day invasion on 6 June 1944, Harris was ordered to switch targets for the French railway network under the
Transport Plan; this was a switch he protested against because he felt it compromised the pressure being applied to German industry and using Bomber Command for a purpose it was not designed or suited for. By September the Allied forces were well inland; at the
Quebec Conference it was agreed that the Chief of the Air Staff, Royal Air Force (
Portal), and the Commanding General, U.S. Army Air Forces (
Arnold), should exercise control of all strategic bomber forces in Europe. Harris received a new directive to ensure continuation of a broad strategic bombing programme as well as adequate bomber support for General Eisenhower's ground operations. The mission of the strategic air forces remained "the progressive destruction and dislocation of the German military, industrial and economic systems and the direct support of Land and Naval forces". After D-Day, with the resumption of the strategic bomber campaign over Germany, Harris remained wedded to area bombardment. The historian
Frederick Taylor argues that, because Harris lacked the necessary security clearance to know about
Ultra, he had been given some information gleaned from
Enigma but not informed of the source. According to Taylor, this directly affected Harris's attitude concerning the effectiveness of the post-D-Day 1944 directives (orders) to target oil installations, as Harris did not know the Allied High Command was using high-level German sources to assess exactly how much Allied operations were impairing the German war effort. Harris tended to see the directives to bomb specific oil and munitions targets as a high level command "panacea" (his word) and a distraction from the real task of making the rubble bounce in every large German city. Harris was promoted to the substantive rank of air chief marshal on 16 August 1944. The historian
Bernard Wasserstein notes that the official history of British strategic bombing says, in what Wasserstein describes as 'an unusually sharp personal observation', that "Harris made a habit of seeing only one side of a question and then of exaggerating it. He had a tendency to confuse advice with interference, criticism with sabotage and evidence with propaganda". Alfred C. Mierzejewski argues that area bombing and attacks against fuel plants were ineffective against Germany's coal- and rail-based economy and that the bombing campaign only took a decisive turn in late 1944, when the allies switched to attacking railway-marshalling yards for the coal gateways of the Ruhr. His summation is rejected by
Sebastian Cox, head of the
Air Historical Branch (AHB). Cox notes that half of the oil was produced by Benzol plants located in the Ruhr. These areas were the primary target of Bomber Command in 1943 and the autumn of 1944. Cox concludes that the targets were highly vulnerable to area attacks and suffered accordingly. The American official history notes that Harris was ordered to cease attacks on oil in November 1944, as the combined bombing had been so effective that none of the synthetic plants were operating effectively. The American history also includes information from
Albert Speer, in which he points out that Bomber Command's night attacks were the most effective. Harris was very encouraging of innovation but he resisted the creation of the Pathfinder Force and the development of precision strikes which had proven so effective in the
Dambusters' raid. Harris was awarded the American
Legion of Merit on 30 January 1945. The most controversial raid of the war took place in the late evening of 13 February 1945. The
bombing of Dresden by the RAF and USAAF resulting in a lethal
firestorm which killed a large number of civilians. Estimates vary but the city authorities at the time estimated no more than 25,000 victims, a figure which subsequent investigations, including one commissioned by the city council in 2010, support. Raids such as that on
Pforzheim late in the war as Germany was falling have been criticised for causing high civilian casualties for little apparent military value. The culmination of Bomber Command's offensive occurred in March 1945 when the RAF dropped the highest monthly weight of ordnance in the entire war. The last raid on Berlin took place on the night of 21/22 April, just before the Soviets entered the city centre. After that, most of the rest of the attacks made by the RAF were
tactical missions. The last big strategic raid was the destruction of the oil refinery in
Tønsberg in southern
Norway by a large group of Lancasters on the night of 25/26 April. In his postwar memoirs Harris wrote, "In spite of all that happened at Hamburg, bombing proved a relatively humane method". His wartime views were expressed in an internal secret memo to the Air Ministry after the Dresden raid in February 1945 Whenever the bombing campaign of World War II is considered it must be appreciated that the war was an "integrated process". As an example, quoting
Albert Speer from his book
Inside The Third Reich, "ten thousand [88mm] anti-aircraft guns ... could well have been employed in Russia against tanks and other ground targets". The Soviet commanders clearly recognized Harris's efforts, as shown by the 29 February 1944 award of the Russian Order of Suvorov First Class to the air marshal. advanced to
Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath on 14 June 1945 and appointed a
Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Southern Cross of
Brazil on 13 November 1945. He was also awarded the
Distinguished Service Medal by the United States on 14 June 1946 and promoted to
Marshal of the Royal Air Force on 1 January 1946. Within the postwar British government there was some disquiet about the level of destruction that had been created by the area-bombing of German cities towards the end of the war. Harris retired on 15 September 1946 and wrote his story of Bomber Command's achievements in
Bomber Offensive. In this book he wrote, concerning Dresden, "I know that the destruction of so large and splendid a city at this late stage of the war was considered unnecessary even by a good many people who admit that our earlier attacks were as fully justified as any other operation of war. Here I will only say that the attack on Dresden was at the time considered a military necessity by much more important people than myself." Bomber Command's crews were denied a separate campaign medal - as they were already eligible for both the
Air Crew Europe Star and
France and Germany Star - and, in protest at this perceived establishment snub to his men, Harris refused a
peerage in 1946; he was the sole commander-in-chief not to become a peer. Disappointed to have missed the opportunity to return to Southern Rhodesia as governor because of the war, Harris wrote to Huggins in June 1945 that he would like to be considered if the office were ever open again, and that he would be interested in other Southern Rhodesian government appointments relating to aviation or perhaps entering politics there. "If I have deserved anything of my country—Rhodesia—it would delight me to have opportunity to serve her further," he wrote. In February 1953 Winston Churchill, now prime minister again, insisted that Harris accept a
baronetcy and he became baronet. In the same year he returned to the UK, and lived his remaining years in the Ferry House in
Goring-on-Thames, located directly adjacent to the
River Thames. In 1974 Harris appeared in the acclaimed documentary series
The World At War produced by Thames Television and shown on
ITV. In the 12th episode entitled "Whirlwind: Bombing Germany (September 1939 – April 1944)", narrated by
Laurence Olivier, Harris discusses at length the area-bombing strategy that he had developed while
AOC-in-C of Bomber Command.
Awards • • • • x 2 • Order of Suvorov, 1st Class (USSR) • Distinguished Service Medal (
DSM) (US Army type) • • Grand Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta (Poland) • • • ==Family==