Economist book review - The Bombing War: Europe 1939-1945
they had no equivalent of the FW Condor, the Catalina or the longe range Wellingtons operated by Coastal Command
Bit like the RAF of today then!
Sorry, I digress. Please continue.
If Germany had held out for any length of time after August 1945 they may well have been the first nation to experience atomic warfare. After all the Manhattan Project was the USA response to the fear that Germany was developing atomic weapons.
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yeah but everyone who knew much about the weapons was Jewish and had fled to the west or rather low on the totem pole
the Germans never had a serious N weapons programme
As for the Red Army I don't want to take anything away from everyone (including members of my family) who fought and died in W Europe but the once the Russians started west in 1943 they weren't going to be stopped
It would have taken longer and cost more deaths but they would have got there in the end. The best German units were deployed on the Eastern Front and they were being bled dry
My late mother, who was as anti-Red as it was possible to be always said she felt a great sense of relief when Hitler invaded Russia - she knew the war would be won one day, some day
the Germans never had a serious N weapons programme
As for the Red Army I don't want to take anything away from everyone (including members of my family) who fought and died in W Europe but the once the Russians started west in 1943 they weren't going to be stopped
It would have taken longer and cost more deaths but they would have got there in the end. The best German units were deployed on the Eastern Front and they were being bled dry
My late mother, who was as anti-Red as it was possible to be always said she felt a great sense of relief when Hitler invaded Russia - she knew the war would be won one day, some day
Thank heavens we are free to speculate about whether or not saturation bombing worked.
Over 50,000 Bomber Command men died as part of the price of buying us that freedom.
Over 50,000 Bomber Command men died as part of the price of buying us that freedom.
Alber [sic] Speer discussed the bombing of Hamburg when he was interrogated in July 1945....
"We were of the opinion that a rapid repetition of this type of attack upon another six German towns would inevitably cripple the will to sustain armament manufacture and war production. It was I who first verbally reported to the Fuehrer at that time that a continuation of these attacks might bring about a rapid end to the war."
Albert Speer reckoned the Air Defence operation it [sic] was costing Germany badly by 1944 - before that maybe not so bad but the diversion of manpower and resources started to hurt big time in the last 2 years of the war
You're also playing a game of "what if?" if you try to make a general argument that strategic bombing was ineffective
There has often been a tendency (not least amongst the Russians themselves) to see WW2 as a titanic struggle between the forces of Soviet communism and German fascism, with all other participants merely a sideshow, but the Soviet struggle was facilitated to a very great extent by the efforts and sacrifices of the air forces (and navies) of the West.
This is inaccurate. By the time the bombing campaign had got into its stride, and by the time a useful quantity of munitions was arriving in Russia from the West, the Russians had already brought the German advance to a halt and started the process of recapturing lost territory. Yes, the enormous sacrifices made sending munitions to the Russians helped them, but 'a very great extent' is over-stating it. Other participants a sideshow? One only has to look at German force dispositions a month after Overlord started to see where the Germans thought the 'titanic struggle' was taking place.
'The B-17 dropped one third of all the bombs of WWII'.
This was not justified at all, and seeing as how late the B-17 was brought into the European theatre and how well know it was for its poor bomb load, can anyone confirm, justify or repudiate this?
This was not justified at all, and seeing as how late the B-17 was brought into the European theatre and how well know it was for its poor bomb load, can anyone confirm, justify or repudiate this?
There is an element of truth in the economic activity that it sucked up, no more or less than the building of defensive measures all across the UK from 1939 onwards even after invasion was a non starter.
Many people would have been playing petty politics and looking after their own fiefdoms irrespective of the Nazis being 30 miles from Dover.................that is a sad reality of the human condition.
Nazis didn't have long range bombers and had pretty much no intention of going down that route, the development of V1s and V2's showed they were make a leap forward well beyond this.
Many people would have been playing petty politics and looking after their own fiefdoms irrespective of the Nazis being 30 miles from Dover.................that is a sad reality of the human condition.
Nazis didn't have long range bombers and had pretty much no intention of going down that route, the development of V1s and V2's showed they were make a leap forward well beyond this.
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As it consists of almost 900 pages I doubt if many people have read this book unless they had a review copy.
I think the topic has been widely covered and some of us probably still have the HMSO and SBS tomes (now worth a few quid). So I wouldn't normally want to spend Ł20 on it except I thought his excellent book Interrogations gave new insights into Nuiremburg and was well written and Xmas is on the horizon. So.....
I think the topic has been widely covered and some of us probably still have the HMSO and SBS tomes (now worth a few quid). So I wouldn't normally want to spend Ł20 on it except I thought his excellent book Interrogations gave new insights into Nuiremburg and was well written and Xmas is on the horizon. So.....
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Prof. Overy's work includes Why the Allies Won and is estimable. If the Economist headline-grabber is valid, and his new work follows the line of philosophy Prof. Grayling, Down Among the Dead Cities, in citing all Bomber Command aircrew as war criminals, then I would be sad for his decline.
Production Policy of Cabinet Defence Committee (Supply), 31/10/41, was to assign UK resources to build 12,670 Heavies for mid-’43 1st.line strength of 4,000 Scott/Hughes,Official History, Administration of War Production,HMSO,1955,P.429. UK High Policy was again to be of attrition of enemy strength, not this time by weight of men, but by denial of materials: Economic Warfare to sever sources, Air bombardment and Naval blockade to sever distribution, by RN on/under the sea, and by Bomber Command.
Fads to decry “carpet” bombing, and to overlook civilian pain from RN blockade (RN's Task since its inception), ignore the High Authority of Strategy stated to Commanders. In 10/41 Hope could not rest on the retreating Red Army, on dilatory Uncle Sam, or on theory of fission: Options were Armistice as is, where is, or recourse to CBW. Grayling-types need to put forward a credible alternative warfighting Policy, other than waiting patiently for someone else to do the dying.
Harris was appointed in Feb.1942 to implement the Policy of our elected Govt., which was thoroughly approved of by all, and especially by my mother who had emerged merely shocked from the bombed flat whence her friend had not.
Production Policy of Cabinet Defence Committee (Supply), 31/10/41, was to assign UK resources to build 12,670 Heavies for mid-’43 1st.line strength of 4,000 Scott/Hughes,Official History, Administration of War Production,HMSO,1955,P.429. UK High Policy was again to be of attrition of enemy strength, not this time by weight of men, but by denial of materials: Economic Warfare to sever sources, Air bombardment and Naval blockade to sever distribution, by RN on/under the sea, and by Bomber Command.
Fads to decry “carpet” bombing, and to overlook civilian pain from RN blockade (RN's Task since its inception), ignore the High Authority of Strategy stated to Commanders. In 10/41 Hope could not rest on the retreating Red Army, on dilatory Uncle Sam, or on theory of fission: Options were Armistice as is, where is, or recourse to CBW. Grayling-types need to put forward a credible alternative warfighting Policy, other than waiting patiently for someone else to do the dying.
Harris was appointed in Feb.1942 to implement the Policy of our elected Govt., which was thoroughly approved of by all, and especially by my mother who had emerged merely shocked from the bombed flat whence her friend had not.
Max Hastings in the Sunday Times gave a very considered review of Overy's book as below.
The allied strategic bombing campaign that razed the cities of Germany stands second only to the Holocaust among the great issues of the Second World War that rouse 21st-century passions. Was it a war crime, as many modern Germans believe? Or did it make a significant contribution to allied victory?
Richard Overy has written extensively and often authoritatively on this subject over the past 30 years, and for a decade and more positioned himself among the foremost defenders of the RAF’s Bomber Command. In a book published in 1997, for instance, he made extraordinary claims for the achievements of Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris’s force, concluding with the statement: “Bombing was a strategy that had a long and painful learning curve. But for all its deficiencies the 125,000 men and women of Bomber Command made a larger contribution to victory in Europe than any other element in Britain’s armed services.”
Yet today, it seems, Overy has undergone a drastic conversion. He concludes his latest large volume — a general history of the bombing war in Europe, which the publisher characterises as his “masterpiece”— with an almost directly contradictory judgment: “There existed throughout the conflict a wide gap between what was claimed for bombing and what it actually achieved in material and military terms, just as there existed a wide gap between the legal and ethical claims made on its behalf and the deliberate pursuit of campaigns in which civilian deaths were anticipated and endorsed. The resources devoted to strategic bombing might more usefully have been used in other ways... bombing proved in the end to be inadequate in its own terms for carrying out its principal assignments and was morally compromised by deliberate escalation against civilian populations.”
This was pretty much the view I reached in my own book, Bomber Command, back in 1979, but by a nice irony, I later somewhat modified this in the light of Overy’s writing. In the 1990s, he advanced an important argument that, beyond the direct damage imposed on German industry by RAF and USAAF bombardment, from 1943 onwards the offensive exercised critical leverage by forcing the Germans to shift fighters and 88mm guns from the eastern front to defend their homeland. Stalin profited mightily, his offensives inflicting repeated surprises, because the Luftwaffe could not conduct effective air reconnaissance over Russian territory.
Perhaps it is unfair to make too much of Overy’s shift of ground, because all grown-up historians review their judgments over time, in the light of new evidence. Over his lifetime, the author has done much distinguished work on the Second World War. But the magnitude of this turnaround does seem remarkable: from fulfilling a role as principal academic standard-bearer for Bomber Command, he has become today an adviser to Hamburg’s new museum on its experience of wartime victimhood at the hands of the RAF.
“Whatever claims might be made for air power in the Second World War,” he writes, “they need to be put into perspective. Bombing in Europe was never a war- winning weapon and the other services knew it.” He believes the Russians got it right, by recognising that the technology of the time was inadequate to make their air force a decisive strategic weapon, and thus using air resources almost exclusively to support the Red Army.
Overy’s book contains much solid research on the Luftwaffe’s 1940-41 blitz on Britain, the allies’ operations against Italy as well as Germany, and the aforesaid Russian use of bombers. He notes that, far from the allied bomber offensive constituting a just revenge for the Blitz, the RAF started attacking Germany — albeit ineffectually — before the first German raid on London took place.
In September 1940 and May 1941, German assaults on Britain’s cities had an alarming impact on civilian morale: the much-vaunted “Blitz spirit” was more fragile than the authorities ever admitted. Fortunately, however, the German air force lacked the weight of destructive power to inflict war-winning damage on a large industrialised society. In the 1941 words of the shrewd scientist and Admiralty adviser Patrick Blackett, in the pre- nuclear age no air force “will ever be large enough to bomb all the people all the time”.
The rulers of Britain were surprised and relieved to discover that its economy and even most cityscapes emerged from the Luftwaffe’s bombardment in better shape than pre-war doomsters about air power had dreamt possible. This made it all the more astonishing that the RAF thereupon embarked upon an attempt to do to Germany exactly what the Nazis had failed to do to Britain.
But in those lonely and almost naked days, Winston Churchill could see no other plausible means of carrying the war to the enemy. While military and naval chiefs dithered and wavered, the leaders of the RAF campaigned with messianic fervour for the chance to prove that they could win the war without the need for a bloody invasion of Europe. They got their way, with consequences or lack of them that all the world knows.
Overy drastically reduces Soviet estimates of their own wartime bombing losses, from half a million dead to 51,000 — roughly as many civilians as perished in Britain at the Luftwaffe’s hands — though in truth all Russian statistics relating to the war are wildly unreliable, and the 51,000 figure is almost certainly understated.
His account of the Anglo-American air offensive embraces the latest economic and industrial research. The author is roused to a fierce moral fervour by allied claims, then and since, that engagement in “total war” against a uniquely evil enemy justified the abandonment of all traditional constraints on the treatment of non-combatants.
I agree. I concluded my own 1979 book: “The cost of the bomber offensive in life, treasure and moral superiority over the enemy tragically outstripped the results that it achieved.” But I believe that 2013 Overy understates the merits of some of the contrary evidence and conclusions advanced by 1990s Overy. A sensible judgment about wartime bombing, as about almost everything in life, must lie somewhere in the middle ground.
Richard Overy has written extensively and often authoritatively on this subject over the past 30 years, and for a decade and more positioned himself among the foremost defenders of the RAF’s Bomber Command. In a book published in 1997, for instance, he made extraordinary claims for the achievements of Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris’s force, concluding with the statement: “Bombing was a strategy that had a long and painful learning curve. But for all its deficiencies the 125,000 men and women of Bomber Command made a larger contribution to victory in Europe than any other element in Britain’s armed services.”
Yet today, it seems, Overy has undergone a drastic conversion. He concludes his latest large volume — a general history of the bombing war in Europe, which the publisher characterises as his “masterpiece”— with an almost directly contradictory judgment: “There existed throughout the conflict a wide gap between what was claimed for bombing and what it actually achieved in material and military terms, just as there existed a wide gap between the legal and ethical claims made on its behalf and the deliberate pursuit of campaigns in which civilian deaths were anticipated and endorsed. The resources devoted to strategic bombing might more usefully have been used in other ways... bombing proved in the end to be inadequate in its own terms for carrying out its principal assignments and was morally compromised by deliberate escalation against civilian populations.”
This was pretty much the view I reached in my own book, Bomber Command, back in 1979, but by a nice irony, I later somewhat modified this in the light of Overy’s writing. In the 1990s, he advanced an important argument that, beyond the direct damage imposed on German industry by RAF and USAAF bombardment, from 1943 onwards the offensive exercised critical leverage by forcing the Germans to shift fighters and 88mm guns from the eastern front to defend their homeland. Stalin profited mightily, his offensives inflicting repeated surprises, because the Luftwaffe could not conduct effective air reconnaissance over Russian territory.
Perhaps it is unfair to make too much of Overy’s shift of ground, because all grown-up historians review their judgments over time, in the light of new evidence. Over his lifetime, the author has done much distinguished work on the Second World War. But the magnitude of this turnaround does seem remarkable: from fulfilling a role as principal academic standard-bearer for Bomber Command, he has become today an adviser to Hamburg’s new museum on its experience of wartime victimhood at the hands of the RAF.
“Whatever claims might be made for air power in the Second World War,” he writes, “they need to be put into perspective. Bombing in Europe was never a war- winning weapon and the other services knew it.” He believes the Russians got it right, by recognising that the technology of the time was inadequate to make their air force a decisive strategic weapon, and thus using air resources almost exclusively to support the Red Army.
Overy’s book contains much solid research on the Luftwaffe’s 1940-41 blitz on Britain, the allies’ operations against Italy as well as Germany, and the aforesaid Russian use of bombers. He notes that, far from the allied bomber offensive constituting a just revenge for the Blitz, the RAF started attacking Germany — albeit ineffectually — before the first German raid on London took place.
In September 1940 and May 1941, German assaults on Britain’s cities had an alarming impact on civilian morale: the much-vaunted “Blitz spirit” was more fragile than the authorities ever admitted. Fortunately, however, the German air force lacked the weight of destructive power to inflict war-winning damage on a large industrialised society. In the 1941 words of the shrewd scientist and Admiralty adviser Patrick Blackett, in the pre- nuclear age no air force “will ever be large enough to bomb all the people all the time”.
The rulers of Britain were surprised and relieved to discover that its economy and even most cityscapes emerged from the Luftwaffe’s bombardment in better shape than pre-war doomsters about air power had dreamt possible. This made it all the more astonishing that the RAF thereupon embarked upon an attempt to do to Germany exactly what the Nazis had failed to do to Britain.
But in those lonely and almost naked days, Winston Churchill could see no other plausible means of carrying the war to the enemy. While military and naval chiefs dithered and wavered, the leaders of the RAF campaigned with messianic fervour for the chance to prove that they could win the war without the need for a bloody invasion of Europe. They got their way, with consequences or lack of them that all the world knows.
Overy drastically reduces Soviet estimates of their own wartime bombing losses, from half a million dead to 51,000 — roughly as many civilians as perished in Britain at the Luftwaffe’s hands — though in truth all Russian statistics relating to the war are wildly unreliable, and the 51,000 figure is almost certainly understated.
His account of the Anglo-American air offensive embraces the latest economic and industrial research. The author is roused to a fierce moral fervour by allied claims, then and since, that engagement in “total war” against a uniquely evil enemy justified the abandonment of all traditional constraints on the treatment of non-combatants.
I agree. I concluded my own 1979 book: “The cost of the bomber offensive in life, treasure and moral superiority over the enemy tragically outstripped the results that it achieved.” But I believe that 2013 Overy understates the merits of some of the contrary evidence and conclusions advanced by 1990s Overy. A sensible judgment about wartime bombing, as about almost everything in life, must lie somewhere in the middle ground.
Typical Max Hastings, a reasonable collection of the pro and con arguments followed by a fudged conclusion
.
No Mr Hastings, a judgement on the wartime bombing campaign does not lie in the middle ground, it was an essential strategy of its time.
OAP
.No Mr Hastings, a judgement on the wartime bombing campaign does not lie in the middle ground, it was an essential strategy of its time.
OAP
Grayling-types need to put forward a credible alternative warfighting Policy, other than waiting patiently for someone else to do the dying.
Err, how about using the bombers to attack military/industrial targets? Admittedly this was difficult to achieve in 1942, but improvements in precision (Pathfinder Force, H2S etc) would have allowed this as the war went on. But instead, the strategy remained the same. What a contrast with the USAAF, who swallowed their pride and changed tack several times (ball bearings, aircraft production, then oil) to ensure that the massive effort and sacrifice of putting hundreds of bombers over Germany achieved worthwhile results.
Harris was appointed in Feb.1942 to implement the Policy of our elected Govt., which was thoroughly approved of by all, and especially by my mother who had emerged merely shocked from the bombed flat whence her friend had not.
In 1942, it is understandable that most in Britain were delighted to see German cities suffering. What they were unaware of was the cost of achieving this - both in terms of men of Bomber Command and the economic costs of building the aircraft and infrastructure to achieve this. By 1943-4, how many British civilians, had they been privy to these facts, would have wished Bomber Command to maintain the focus on destroying cities instead of military targets? And in terms of the politicians, they may have supported Harris' intent in 1942 when there was no other way to carry the war to Germany...but it is evident that by 1944-5 many were having serious misgivings over the inflexibility of Bomber Command's strategy and the lack of appreciable results. When Churchill came out publicly against the Dresden raids, do you really think he went from 'thorough approval' to publicly distancing himself in the space of a few days?
Last edited by TorqueOfTheDevil; 30th Sep 2013 at 14:26.
Churchill could have sacked Harris at any time.
Churchill could have sacked Harris at any time.
Per my earlier comment about politics and people.
The only was he could have sacked him was to have intensified bombing and showing Harris opposed it.
Anything other than this would have been shown as getting it wrong militarily before and been classified as defeatism and damaged morale together with a crisis of confidence.
Success was as more about confidence that you could prevail even when you were staring defeat in the face. Lose that and you are defeated without firing a shot.
Churchill was as much tied up in the success of Bomber command as Harris was.
Bomber command was as much about making Germany pay for starting it as it was about damaging war industry.........no element of post war revisionism will change that.
Bomber Harris was WRONG looking at things when war ended, he was RIGHT when war was on.
"It is well that war is so terrible – otherwise we would grow too fond of it." Robert E Lee
Last edited by racedo; 30th Sep 2013 at 21:53.
racedo:-
and you complain about revisionism? There is only one thing that is important when fighting a war, and that is to win it. Harris, with the enthusiastic support of Churchill (well, until that memo), sought to do just that. I doubt very much if he cared a fig about how it would look when it ended, though I think he cared greatly about Churchill's betrayal of his Command. If the First World War is anything to go by, it will take more than a century to pass after the event to see the Bombing Offensive in anything like a true perspective.
As to the supposed ease with which so called pinpoint targeting was possible by night later in the war, each aircraft was on its own. If it saw another one it was usually in dire trouble. You try it with astro, an API, and a dodgy forecast. They did well simply to find the cities that the Pathfinders marked. Many didn't, and didn't survive long enough to learn how to.
Bomber Harris was WRONG looking at things when war ended, he was RIGHT when war was on.
As to the supposed ease with which so called pinpoint targeting was possible by night later in the war, each aircraft was on its own. If it saw another one it was usually in dire trouble. You try it with astro, an API, and a dodgy forecast. They did well simply to find the cities that the Pathfinders marked. Many didn't, and didn't survive long enough to learn how to.
I'd suggest that in theory Churchill could've sacked Harris, but by the mechanism of dismissal by promoting him to command elsewhere (i.e. the air commander for a theatre, encompassing all air assets rather than just bombers).
Granted, I can't think of anywhere obvious - Churchill being mischievous might, I suppose, have moved him to what became Leigh-Mallory's post as commander of Allied Expeditionary Air Forces, but I can only begin to imagine what Ike and Tedder would have thought of that - but in theory, that mechanism did exist and Churchill could have got away with it. The point, as you allude to, I'd suggest, is that he didn't want to sack Harris. The instances where that might have eventuated - Eisenhower's 'them or me' approach over pre-invasion bombing and Harris's dispute with Portal over attacking oil targets - did not reach the point where Churchill came close to having to make that choice, I would contend, with Harris recognising he wasn't going to win in the first instance and Portal not pushing the matter in the second.
And let's not forget that when he made the 'Never in the Field of Human Conflict' speech, Churchill gave more time to Bomber Command than Fighter Command, observed "The fighters are our salvation but the bombers alone provide the means of victory”. If you trace Churchill's involvement in the development of military aviation and his views on bombing, he was inextricably linked to bombing policy, no matter how hard his minutes after Dresden (the first withdrawn at Portal's insistence) attempted to rebrigade the historical record for posterity...
Granted, I can't think of anywhere obvious - Churchill being mischievous might, I suppose, have moved him to what became Leigh-Mallory's post as commander of Allied Expeditionary Air Forces, but I can only begin to imagine what Ike and Tedder would have thought of that - but in theory, that mechanism did exist and Churchill could have got away with it. The point, as you allude to, I'd suggest, is that he didn't want to sack Harris. The instances where that might have eventuated - Eisenhower's 'them or me' approach over pre-invasion bombing and Harris's dispute with Portal over attacking oil targets - did not reach the point where Churchill came close to having to make that choice, I would contend, with Harris recognising he wasn't going to win in the first instance and Portal not pushing the matter in the second.
And let's not forget that when he made the 'Never in the Field of Human Conflict' speech, Churchill gave more time to Bomber Command than Fighter Command, observed "The fighters are our salvation but the bombers alone provide the means of victory”. If you trace Churchill's involvement in the development of military aviation and his views on bombing, he was inextricably linked to bombing policy, no matter how hard his minutes after Dresden (the first withdrawn at Portal's insistence) attempted to rebrigade the historical record for posterity...
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Some of the points raised are well informed and sincerely felt but do not reflect the true situation in WWII.
We did what we could reasonably do with our limited resources and any injury we could inflict on the hated Germans was welcomed. Any criticism of our methods and our lads efforts was unwelcome and could easily lead to the critic having a rough time.
In the years 1939 until Alamein we had a procession of reverses including losing 400,000 tons of shipping in one month and the terrifying blitzes.
The bombing of Germany was not only highly popular and has few critics amongst the British people who were involved.
Some years ago I went to a talk By Hamish Mahaddie on the Bombing of Germany in WWII. The audience included many WWII bomber aircrew and one of them asked the question "Were you bothered about the number of civilian casualties caused" to which he replied "I never lost any sleep over killing the spawn of Schicklgruber". This was met by loud applause.
Seventy years ago there was no time for liberal views. It really was Big Boys Rules
We did what we could reasonably do with our limited resources and any injury we could inflict on the hated Germans was welcomed. Any criticism of our methods and our lads efforts was unwelcome and could easily lead to the critic having a rough time.
In the years 1939 until Alamein we had a procession of reverses including losing 400,000 tons of shipping in one month and the terrifying blitzes.
The bombing of Germany was not only highly popular and has few critics amongst the British people who were involved.
Some years ago I went to a talk By Hamish Mahaddie on the Bombing of Germany in WWII. The audience included many WWII bomber aircrew and one of them asked the question "Were you bothered about the number of civilian casualties caused" to which he replied "I never lost any sleep over killing the spawn of Schicklgruber". This was met by loud applause.
Seventy years ago there was no time for liberal views. It really was Big Boys Rules
As to the supposed ease with which so called pinpoint targeting was possible by night later in the war, each aircraft was on its own
We did what we could reasonably do with our limited resources and any injury we could inflict on the hated Germans was welcomed
Harris, with the enthusiastic support of Churchill (well, until that memo), sought to do just that.
Bomber command was as much about making Germany pay for starting it as it was about damaging war industry.........no element of post war revisionism will change that.
I also disagree with 'well, until that memo'. Of course Churchill had enthusiastically embraced bombing as a course of action in the early war years (and previously). But it's absurd to suggest that he suddenly changed his view in the space of a few days. Dresden was simply the straw which broke the camel's back. After all the arguments about changing strategy during 1944, there was Harris, still wasting his people, aircraft, petrol and bombs going after German civilians when the end of the war was in sight and there was still nothing to show for the years of bombing cities. Churchill was perhaps especially uncomfortable about Harris' obstinacy given the Americans' signal success in changing tactics until they found the chink in the German armour.
I can well understand the desire among both British civilians and Bomber Command aircrew (and the commanders and politicians) to mete out retribution for the Blitz; when Harris took over, being seen to be striking back was at least as important as doing any worthwhile damage to Germany military/industrial might. I am well aware of the various accounts of RAF personnel who were thanked by random civilians for 'what they were doing', in the same way that during the Blitz, the AA guns kept lobbing shells into the sky, despite the near-impossibility of hitting anything, just to show that we were trying to fight back. But military strategy is not decided by the man in the street, nor by the footsoldiers.
The audience included many WWII bomber aircrew and one of them asked the question "Were you bothered about the number of civilian casualties caused" to which he replied "I never lost any sleep over killing the spawn of Schicklgruber". This was met by loud applause.
Seventy years ago there was no time for liberal views. It really was Big Boys Rules
I've just enjoyed listening to Mathew Parris's "Great Lives" on Radio4, with Al Murray talking about Montgomery. "Arrogant, hard to like, but undeniably successful":-
BBC Radio 4 - Great Lives, Series 31, Al Murray on Bernard Montgomery
Whether that similarly sums up Harris is of course what this book and this thread is very much about, but it does it for me. As said in the programme, in peace you really want agreeable people that will not upset others (particularly your Allies). All that changes in war, where the very qualities above are more appropriate in one's commanders. Just like Montgomery, Harris rapidly became persona non grata, perhaps even more so. So what? The important thing was that he did the job handed down to him from above. That he truly believed in that strategy seems to me a mark in his favour rather than against.
As to main force it was a giant club to beat the enemy with, not a foil, not an epee, but by necessity a club because big though it was (though a 1000 at a time was not routine in any way) it had to fly by night. That was the crucial difference between it and the USAAF. The latter could make a good fist occasionally given favourable enough conditions, but BC's favourable conditions simply meant successfully finding a target of city size. Even so, both forces regularly succeeded in flattening fields and killing German cows.
We all know that this argument will rumble on for years. We also know that the Bombing Offensive has been consistently disowned by the very Service that conducted it, and that this is directly related to the delay in providing a worthy memorial to those who perished in doing so. So be it. Time alone will determine the final DS solution. I am sure that certain operations could have been better planned and executed, but to characterise a whole campaign as a pointless waste in blood and treasure seems wrong to me.
Speer knew better than anyone, certainly anyone posting here, what effect it had on Germany's war making ability. He likened it to an additional front that had to be provisioned and fought. He lied and charmed his way out of the gallows that he deserved, but in this at least I think he was telling the truth.
BBC Radio 4 - Great Lives, Series 31, Al Murray on Bernard Montgomery
Whether that similarly sums up Harris is of course what this book and this thread is very much about, but it does it for me. As said in the programme, in peace you really want agreeable people that will not upset others (particularly your Allies). All that changes in war, where the very qualities above are more appropriate in one's commanders. Just like Montgomery, Harris rapidly became persona non grata, perhaps even more so. So what? The important thing was that he did the job handed down to him from above. That he truly believed in that strategy seems to me a mark in his favour rather than against.
As to main force it was a giant club to beat the enemy with, not a foil, not an epee, but by necessity a club because big though it was (though a 1000 at a time was not routine in any way) it had to fly by night. That was the crucial difference between it and the USAAF. The latter could make a good fist occasionally given favourable enough conditions, but BC's favourable conditions simply meant successfully finding a target of city size. Even so, both forces regularly succeeded in flattening fields and killing German cows.
We all know that this argument will rumble on for years. We also know that the Bombing Offensive has been consistently disowned by the very Service that conducted it, and that this is directly related to the delay in providing a worthy memorial to those who perished in doing so. So be it. Time alone will determine the final DS solution. I am sure that certain operations could have been better planned and executed, but to characterise a whole campaign as a pointless waste in blood and treasure seems wrong to me.
Speer knew better than anyone, certainly anyone posting here, what effect it had on Germany's war making ability. He likened it to an additional front that had to be provisioned and fought. He lied and charmed his way out of the gallows that he deserved, but in this at least I think he was telling the truth.
racedo:-
Quote:
Bomber Harris was WRONG looking at things when war ended, he was RIGHT when war was on.
and you complain about revisionism?
Quote:
Bomber Harris was WRONG looking at things when war ended, he was RIGHT when war was on.
and you complain about revisionism?
racedo:
I would have thought that to be the classic example of revisionism and something that is so typically British. We are ruthless in war and forever apologetic about it thereafter. Our war leaders and career military then have to perform some deft footwork and our wartime commanders suffer the consequences. I know those I feel contempt for, and those with whom I sympathise. Others of course may differ....
....then judged by peacetime standards
.