In order to avoid hacking everybody off with another horrifyingly long post, I’ll tackle your points in note form. IF you’re open minded you can go off and read up further.
1) Harris and favourites: He did certainly have them. I draw your attention to his treatment of Gibson, for example, and of 106 Squadron, or, if you prefer, his very different treatment of his Group Commanders. (Especially Coryton).
2) Harris the publicity hound: Read Portal’s papers, or Tedder’s! I was also lucky enough to interview a number of officers, including Group Commanders John Whitley, Hugh Constantine, Edward Addison, and Percy Maitland, and more recently interviewed some of the more junior ‘senior officers’ from the Groups. A surprising number clearly thought that Harris was ‘not quite the right sort of chap!’ and obviously disapproved of his relentless pursuit of personal publicity. Even more surprisingly, many expressed misgivings about the strategy which Harris had followed.
3) Harris and the Halifax: He radically over-stated the aircraft’s weaknesses (“One Lancaster is to be preferred over four Halifaxes...”) mainly because the Lanc carried a heavier bombload over the course of its average operational career, paying no heed to survival rates or accuracy. Nor did Harris revise his snap judgement when the Mk III arrived – let alone the superb Mk.VI and Mk.VII.
11% of Lanc aircrew survived being shot down, compared to 29% of Halifax aircrew. Though they flew lower, the Halifax’s capacious fuselage afforded greater comfort, and anecdotally it does seem that their navigators and bomb aimers were more accurate. I accept that the only evidence for this is anecdotal.
4) Harris exaggerated results. The evidence is plentiful and easy to find, mate.
5) The poor accuracy and ineffectiveness of the Bomber campaign lasted long after 1942. Even at Nuremberg in 1944, the bulk of bombs fell on Lauf, ten miles East of the city, and on Schweinfurt! Night after night in 1943 and before, tens of aircraft were lost while achieving no more than the destruction of the odd enemy cow.
6) You state “Fact - The use of Bombers to chase U-Boats around the ocean was a total misuse of scarce resources.”
Nonsense. The success of Coastal Command’s heavies cannot be measured solely in terms of the number of U-Boats sunk (though this was impressive, and probably represented a better return rate per aircraft than achieved by Bomber Command aircraft). What was important was the effective blockade imposed on Germany, and the number of allied ships which ‘got through’ unmolested. It has been said that a four-engined bomber allocated to Coastal Command had 20 times greater economic impact on Germany than a similar aircraft allocated to Bomber Command.
7) Harris ignored directives from his superiors. For existence Portal’s directive to attack oil targets, rather than making area attacks against cities which contained such targets..... You characterise Oct-Dec 44 as an oil campaign, when it was a standard area bombing campaign to all intents and purposes, however Harris described it. To say that oil targets could only be attacked by area bombing cities is nonsense.
8) Berlin. Harris absolutely promised to end the war by April 1944 by ‘tearing the heart out of the Reich’. He failed to do so, and losses forced him to abandon the offensive. Had the same weight of effort been applied to easier, more significant targets, the war would have been over much sooner. While the loss rate never reached the 13.6% suffered at Nuremberg attacks against Berlin routinely suffered 8.5-9.5% losses, though the overall loss rate for the period was reduced by the low-loss raids made against other, easier targets during the Battle of Berlin period. In 14 raids against Berlin up to the end of January, Bomber Command lost 384 aircraft, and 115 more fell in the two major raids in February and March.
9) Oboe was of crucial importance to the PFF, and the PFF were crucial to the successes which Bomber Command did enjoy. To claim that: “Oboe was only ever really useful as a target marking system as it only allowed one aircraft to cross the target at a time. Therefore the comment is invalid” is a red herring.
10) You, like most fans of Harris, choose to quote Speer. Others treat his evidence with more caution. Industrial output from Berlin’s factories INCREASED during the Battle of Berlin, though 20% of Berliners were ‘bombed out’. Berlin showed it’s own ‘Blitz spirit’ though the absentee rate soared to 23.5 days per year per worker. Bomber Command succeeded in making Kraut workers take more ‘sickies’. Wow! It did divert resources to the defence of Berlin, and to Hitler’s V-weapons programme and some industrial effort had to go to supplying bombed out workers with replacement goods, etc. But to rate the Battle of Berlin as being anything other than an outright failure is at best foolish.
Finally, while the techniques and equipment of the day meant that heavy collateral damage and civilian casualties were inevitable even in precision attacks, the only way of killing 50,000 civilians was by deliberately targeting them, and that was exactly what Harris did at Dresden.