1. Quotes
  2. Authors
  3. Arthur Travers Harris

Arthur Travers Harris Quotes

Marshal of the Royal Air Force Sir Arthur Travers Harris, 1st Baronet, , commonly known as "Bomber" Harris by the press and often within the RAF as "Butcher" Harris, was Air Officer Commanding-in-Chief RAF Bomber Command during the height of the Anglo-American strategic bombing campaign against Nazi Germany in the Second World War. In 1942, the British Cabinet agreed to the "area bombing" of German cities. Harris was given the task of implementing Churchill's policy and supported the development of tactics and technology to perform the task more effectively. Harris assisted British Chief of the Air Staff Marshal of the Royal Air Force Charles Portal in carrying out the United Kingdom's most devastating attacks against the German infrastructure and population, including the Bombing of Dresden.

Harris emigrated to Southern Rhodesia in 1910, aged 17, but returned to England in 1915 to fight in the European theatre of the First World War. He joined the Royal Flying Corps, with which he remained until the formation of the Royal Air Force in 1918, and he remained in the Air Force through the 1920s and 1930s, serving in India, Mesopotamia, Persia, Egypt, Palestine, and elsewhere. At the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, Harris took command of No. 5 Group RAF in England, and in February 1942 was appointed head of Bomber Command. He retained that position for the rest of the war. After the war Harris moved to South Africa where he managed the South African Marine Corporation.

Harris's continued preference for area bombing over precision targeting remains controversial, partly because many senior Allied air commanders thought it less effective and partly for the large number of civilian casualties and destruction this strategy caused in Continental Europe. Wikipedia  

✵ 13. April 1892 – 5. April 1984
Arthur Travers Harris photo
Arthur Travers Harris: 7   quotes 2   likes

Famous Arthur Travers Harris Quotes

“The Nazis entered this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everyone else, and nobody was going to bomb them.”

Arthur Travers Harris

Statement of 1942, at the start of the bombing campaign against Germany, as quoted in "Sir Arthur Harris & The Lancaster Bomber" at The British Postal Museum and Archive http://postalheritage.org.uk/page/ww2stamps-bomberharris
Context: The Nazis entered this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everyone else, and nobody was going to bomb them. At Rotterdam, London, Warsaw, and half a hundred other places, they put their rather naive theory into operation. They sowed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind.

“I never engaged in these idiotic pamphlet-dropping exercises. They only served two purposes really - they gave the German defences endless practice in getting ready for it, and apart from that they supplied a considerable quantity of toilet paper to the Germans.”

Arthur Travers Harris

The World at War: the Landmark Oral History from the Classic TV Series (2007) by Richard Holmes, p. 298

“They sowed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind.”

Arthur Travers Harris

Statement of 1942, at the start of the bombing campaign against Germany, as quoted in "Sir Arthur Harris & The Lancaster Bomber" at The British Postal Museum and Archive http://postalheritage.org.uk/page/ww2stamps-bomberharris
Context: The Nazis entered this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everyone else, and nobody was going to bomb them. At Rotterdam, London, Warsaw, and half a hundred other places, they put their rather naive theory into operation. They sowed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind.

“People talk a lot about picking out targets and bombing them, individual small targets – in the European climate? I’ve come to the conclusion that people who say that sort of thing not only have never been outside, but they’ve never looked out of a window.”

Arthur Travers Harris

The World at War: the Landmark Oral History from the Classic TV Series (2007) by Richard Holmes, p. 296

“In spite of all that happened at Hamburg, bombing proved a relatively humane method.”

Arthur Travers Harris

Statement on the July 1943 bombings of Hamburg, as quoted in The Valour and the Horror : The Untold Story of Canadians in the Second World War (1991)by Merrily Weisbord and ‎Merilyn Simonds Mohr, p. 107

“We are going to scourge the Third Reich from end to end. We are bombing Germany city by city and ever more terribly in order to make it impossible for her to go on with the war. That is our object; we shall pursue it relentlessly.”

Arthur Travers Harris

Radio address (28 July 1942), as quoted by Sir Courtauld Thomson, in a House of Lords debate on bombing policy (9 February 1944) http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/lords/1944/feb/09/bombing-policy

“I do not personally regard the whole of the remaining cities of Germany as worth the bones of one British Grenadier. It therefore seems to me that there is one and only one valid argument on which a case for giving up strategic bombing could be based, namely that it has already completed its task and that nothing now remains for the Armies to do except to occupy Germany against unorganized resistance.”

Arthur Travers Harris

Letter to Sir Norman Bottomley (29 March 1945), quoted in [ Bomber Harris: The Story of Marshal of the Royal Air Force Sir Arthur Harris (1985) by Dudley Saward, p. 294

Similar authors

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry photo
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry 38
French writer and aviator
Erwin Rommel photo
Erwin Rommel 24
German field marshal of World War II
Bill Shankly photo
Bill Shankly 5
Scottish footballer and manager
Erich von Manstein photo
Erich von Manstein 8
German general
Pope Francis photo
Pope Francis 113
266th Pope of the Catholic Church
Augusto Pinochet photo
Augusto Pinochet 28
Former dictator of the republic of Chile
Jean Anouilh photo
Jean Anouilh 9
French playwright
Steven Weinberg photo
Steven Weinberg 46
American theoretical physicist
Hunter S. Thompson photo
Hunter S. Thompson 268
American journalist and author
Peter Higgs photo
Peter Higgs 8
British physicist