Chastise. Max Hastings
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out of his subsequent official biography. Not long afterwards he proposed marriage, down the intercom of a Hornet Moth biplane in Rhodesia, to a very young woman to whom he was giving a joyride. ‘I think it would be very nice if you were to marry me – will you?’ Harris demanded of Polly Brooks, who – in P.G. Wodehouse’s phrase – turned him down like a blanket. Miss Brooks offered the reasonable excuse that the airman was old enough to be her father, though she added politely, ‘It’s very nice of you to ask me.’
Instead, in 1938 he married another very young woman, twenty-three-year-old Therese Hearne, a strong-minded Catholic always known as Jill, who gave birth to a daughter, Jackie, the following year. Thus, through the years during which Harris directed Britain’s bomber offensive from his High Wycombe headquarters, at his official residence in nearby Springfield House a wife more than twenty years his junior entertained a procession of Allied warlords while rearing a small child.
Conflict was Harris’s environment of choice, his feuds tempered only by a harsh wit. He once scrawled on a memorandum describing complex alternative means of destroying a target: ‘TRY FERRETS’. He enjoyed the joke against himself of being stopped for speeding in his Bentley – an offence which he revelled in repeating – and rebuked by a policeman who told him that he might have killed someone. ‘Young man,’ the air marshal replied, albeit surely apocryphally, ‘I kill thousands of people every night!’ His staff and close associates were unable to decide whether the chronic ulcers from which he suffered stimulated his ill-temper, or were precipitated by it.
During the year since the new C-in-C assumed direction of Britain’s strategic air offensive, he had transformed Bomber Command from a transport service dumping ordnance almost indiscriminately around the German countryside into a serious weapon of war. Sceptics, some of them within the RAF, sustained doubts about whether burning cities was doing anything like as much as Harris claimed to advance Allied victory. Sir Wilfrid Freeman, Portal’s able vice-chief, wrote to the CAS on 16 September 1942 deploring the grossly exaggerated claims made by some commanders: ‘in their efforts to attract the limelight, they sometimes exaggerate and even falsify facts. The worst offender is C-in-C Bomber Command.’
Nonetheless, the RAF’s publicity machine made much of ‘Bomber’ Harris, as he was nicknamed by the press, and of the devastation that his aircraft inflicted nightly upon Germany. In 1940 Bomber Command dropped just 13,033 tons of bombs on enemy territory; in 1941, 31,704 tons. Thereafter, under Harris’s command, in 1942, 45,561 tons fell; in 1943, 157,457 tons; in 1944, 525,718 tons. By the war’s end, Bomber Command was capable of raining upon Hitler’s people in a single twenty-four-hour period as many bombs as the Luftwaffe dropped during the course of its entire 1940–41 blitz on Britain.
Autocratic is an inadequate word to describe Harris’s style of command. He considered himself to have been entrusted with a vast responsibility, and resisted any interference, criticism or even interrogation about his manner of fulfilling this. He regarded with contempt the Directorate of Bomber Operations, a cell within the Air Ministry which provided Portal with in-house advice that often ran counter to the convictions of Harris and his staff, few of whom dared to think for themselves, far less speak out. He especially loathed Gp. Capt. Syd Bufton, who had successfully championed the 1942 creation of an elite Pathfinder force – what became Bomber Command’s No. 8 Group – against the opposition of the C-in-C. ‘Morning, Bufton,’ he once greeted that officer on arriving at the Air Ministry for a meeting. ‘And what have you done to impede the war effort today?’
Among the terms of abuse Harris heaped upon his critics, that of ‘panacea merchant’ was intended to be the rudest, embracing Bufton, sometimes Portal, even the prime minister. The words meant that a given individual was advocating means of defeating the Axis, or more especially of bombing Germany, which did not require the systematic demolition of its urban centres. The relationship between Harris and Portal was extraordinary. Bomber Command’s C-in-C frequently defied direct instructions from the Air Ministry, and sometimes from Portal himself, to divert aircraft from attacking cities towards alternative objectives, of which dams came to be among the most contemptuously regarded, alongside ball-bearing factories, V-weapon sites, French railways, synthetic-oil plants, aircraft factories and U-Boat pens.
The head of the RAF was subjected to barrages of invective from his nominal subordinate, to which he was often driven to respond in the language of a headmaster rebuking an errant pupil. In April 1943 there was a characteristic Harris explosion, about a pamphlet circulating widely in British cities and allegedly also at some bomber stations, headed ‘STOP BOMBING CIVILIANS’, together with a demand from the C-in-C for the identification and indictment for treason of its authors, essentially for highlighting inconvenient truths.
Portal replied on the 9th: ‘It does not appear that prosecution of the authors for circulating [this pamphlet] among civilians would have the slightest chance of success. No court would be likely to hold that it was an offence to advocate that bombing should be confined as far as possible to military objectives. You suggest that this pamphlet comes under the heading of subversion when addressed to an individual in the Service. Even if this is technically correct I do not think it would be prudent to maintain in public that a pamphlet such as this, maintaining a moderately-worded statement of the case against civilian bombing, is likely to incite aircrew to disobey orders … We can however reduce the likelihood of such opinions gaining ground by emphasizing in our publicity industrial damage rather than the destruction of civilian dwellings.’ The RAF’s chief of staff replied to another incontinent note from the C-in-C of Bomber Command: ‘I feel bound to tell you frankly that I do not regard it as either a credit to your intelligence or a contribution to winning the war. It is in my opinion wrong in both tone and substance.’
How did Harris retain his job until 1945, when he displayed an unreason and insubordination that few other senior officers would have dared to indulge? He possessed in full measure the quality of ‘grip’ indispensable to successful commanders in war. Propaganda elevated Harris into a famous figure, and such people become ever harder to sack. He was a man of steel, certain of his purposes when many others, including Portal, wavered and doubted about how the air offensive should best be conducted. ‘Peter’ Portal, as he was known to intimates, possessed an intellect unusual among service officers of any rank, including chiefs of staff. He was a brilliant diplomat, especially in conducting relations with the Americans, whom Harris privately regarded with contempt. But he was also often indecisive. Portal did not oppose area bombing, indeed presided over its inception. He merely favoured leavening fire-raising attacks on cities with precision strikes whenever suitable targets could be identified, and means found to hit them.
Nobody in high places was sufficiently assured of the superior merit of any alternative strategy, or of any more effective commander at High Wycombe, to remove Harris. Later in the war, extraordinary though it may seem when hundreds of bombers continued to fly forth nightly to broadcast death and destruction, the prime minister lost interest in the air offensive: it is striking how little mention Bomber Command receives in the final volumes of Churchill’s memoirs. Once the great land campaigns got under way, armies and the fate of nations entirely eclipsed air forces as the focus of his attention. In the early months of 1943, however, Harris was near the zenith of his fame and importance. He was playing a role more conspicuous than that of any other British commander towards encompassing the destruction of Nazism. Without Harris, without Bomber Command, until June 1944 there would have been only Gen. Sir Bernard Montgomery and his Eighth Army, the North African and thereafter Italian ‘sideshows’.
In January 1943, when President Franklin Roosevelt and the US chiefs of staff met Churchill and the British chiefs in newly liberated Casablanca, the British achieved one of their last diplomatic triumphs of the war, before American dominance of policy and strategy became explicit. The US team unwillingly accepted that there would be no Western Allied invasion of north-west Europe that year. Instead, there would be amphibious assaults on Sicily and probably thereafter Italy, together with a ‘combined bomber offensive’ on Germany by the two air forces. The consequent so-called Casablanca Directive ordered British and American air chiefs: ‘Your primary aim will be the progressive destruction and dislocation of the German military, industrial and economic system, and the undermining of the