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Marshal of the Royal Air Force
Sir Arthur T. Harris, Bt, GCB, OBE, AFC,
LLD
Air Officer Commanding-in-Chief, Bomber Command
February 1942 - September 1945
The Lancaster, beyond doubt, was a major factor in beating the Nazi
enemy down to defeat - as even the enemy admitted. But no aircraft,
however outstanding in qualities, can be an effective weapon of war
unless the aircrew that man them are also of superlative quality.
That the Lancaster crews were of such a breed is evidenced by their
deeds.
This country, and its allies, owe these young men - the Many that
died, the Few that survived - a debt they have not met: because it
can never be met in full.
It is due to them, and their kind in the other Services, that
Britain today is not a mere slave market in a Nazi Empire.
That was the Plan.
Never forget it.
by
Sir Arthur T. Harris, Bart
( RAF Bomber Command
Reunion Dinner London, 30 April, 1977)
.
Marshal of the Royal Air Force, Sir Arthur T. Harris, Baronet, Knight Grand Cross, The Most Honourable Award of the Bath and Office of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, Airforce Cross, Doctor of Laws, Commander-in-Chief, Bomber Command from 1942 to 1945.
Mr. Chairman, Members of the
Committee, Ladies and Gentlemen, not forgetting our two
"M'Lords".
I want to thank you all for the
marvelous reception you have given me tonight and if I went much
further on that theme, I do not think I would be able to control my
feelings. All I can say is, I thank you all from the bottom of my
heart.
Now I go from there to tell you that,
as you probably know, I am an old ga-ga and
garrulous.
I have a lot to say which I think
you ought to hear unless you've heard it before. I realize that
a lot of you came a long way and have a long way to go, therefore
if any of you have to get up and leave, I can assure you that I
won't be either put-off or put-out. So please take that as to what
I really mean. I won't be a bit worried if you have to go because I
know why, for one reason or another.
You know the work our crews did in
Bomber Command and whenever I speak of the Bomber Strategic
Offensive, I couple with it 50-50 our gallant American friends of
the Eighth United States Airforce. Whenever I think of what they
achieved, I realize that you have never really been given
adequate recognition of what you all did. As a matter of fact,
you have on many occasions been the object of the type of author or
the type of journalist who knows perfectly well that where he could
not find a market for the ordinary tripe he is capable of, he could
always sell a good sneer or a good smear. But I get my facts
straight from the horses mouth. I do not go digging around the
other end of the animal like those people I referred to. And we
have some very fine horses running for us, ranging from the most
senior American Commanders and, oddly enough, to the most senior
German Commanders in the last war.
You will, no doubt. most of you heard
of Albert Speer who was not a dyed in the wool Nazi - anyhow, to
start with he was a brilliant architect and he got tied up with
Hitler because Hitler liked drawing pictures, with his assistance,
of the magnificent buildings they were going to erect at the
end of the victorious war, in order to usher in the beginning of
the 1000-year Reich which, thanks largely due to you fellows, never
materialized.
Now Albert Speer, as you know, was in
prison for 20 years. As a matter of opinion, I think unjustly, for
doing his damnedest to defend his own country. When he came out of
prison, he wrote two books and he was kind enough to send me copies
of both of them and he inscribed them - as one of the inscriptions
he has repeated in the letter preface, what he said in those
inscriptions and in his own words he has said that of all the war
books that he has ever read and he has read a lot of them, the
effect of the strategic bombing of Germany is always
under-estimated. He goes on to say and these are his own words
written in his own hand, as well as repeated in the book, that
the strategic bombing of Germany was the greatest lost battle for
Germany of the whole of the war, greater than all their losses
in all their retreats from Russia and in the surrender of their
armies at Stalingrad. He then goes on to develop the reasons why he
makes those statements, starting right back in June 1942. There was
a meeting amongst the "high-ups" in Germany as to whether or not
they would do this, that and the other thing. When it came to the
question of whether they would develop the atom bomb and
don't forget that before the war the Germans were ahead of
everybody in that particular nefarious pursuit, when it came to
the question, luckily for us and the world at large, Hitler
dismissed it, he said he would have nothing to do with it because
it was all "Jews" science. That was a very lucky
decision.
Albert Speer comments in his book,
apropos of that decision, at that very date he was glad, because he
could not possibly have spared the enormous amount of skilled,
semi-skilled and unskilled labour for such am ambitious project as
the manufacture of the atomic bomb from the necessity of using
these people to repair the bomb damage to the German armament
industry. That was in June 1942 and of course that damage
went crescendo after that.
His next statement that might be of
interest to you was that he reckoned, as Minister of Armament,
which he had then become, that by the end of 1943, when we were
really getting going with about a quarter of the force we asked for
and the Americans had really got going with their Mustang Escort
Fighters, that we had already deprived the German armies on the
Russian front by bomb damage to industry of 10,000 of their bigger
calibre guns and 6000 of their heaviest and medium heavy tanks.
Well that was quite a subscription towards the war - all done by
the strategic bombers. But he goes much further than that. He made
that remark about the Bomber Strategic Offensive being the
greatest lost battle of all for Germany and he goes on to
explain why. The 8.8 cm dual purpose anti-aircraft mobile gun, was
capable of competing with the very heavy frontal armament of the
Russian tank. No less than 20,000 of those guns had to be taken
away from the German armies, all their fronts, kept away from
them and scattered all over Germany because of the unpredictability
of where the Strategic Bombers were going to strike
next. Speer said that that reduced the anti-tank
ability of the German forces on all fronts by half. When you
realize that no army of either side ever advanced a yard without
their armoured spearhead first busting a way through the defence,
you can realize what is meant when the strategic bombers cut their
anti-tank defences by half. He goes on to say that the requirement
of being prepared to defend every German city and every German
vital factory against the possibility of bombing any one of those
particular places, meant the stationing all over Germany of
hundreds of thousands of men, who should have been in the
forces.
Field Marshall Erhard Milch, who
commanded the German anti-aircraft defences said he had 900,000
fit, he stressed the word fit, men in his anti-aircraft command
alone. When he says fit, he means that they were fit to have
been up in the front line of the German armies on the various
fronts and not clicking their heels around Germany waiting for the
strategic bombers and wondering where they were going to strike
next. Well, if you know of any individual army on the allied side
which, throughout the war, deprived the German armies of
well over a million men and half their anti-tank ability,
I would personally be very obliged for the
information.
Now when Erhard Milch said
that he had 900,000 men, you can certainly add that another two
or three hundred thousand fit men who, because they were
skilled tradesmen, had to be retained in Germany and not called up
for army service because their skills were required to keep the
Nazi machine ticking over and the repair of bomb damage. I mean men
like electricians, plumbers, railway workers, people who ran the
oil manufacturing plants and so on and so forth. So there you get
that enormous subtraction from the German strength, both in
artillery and manpower, which was caused by the Strategic
Bombers and nobody else. Now as I said, you don't seem to have
got adequate credit for that, anyhow in this country but you
certainly get it from the people who were immediately concerned,
such as Eisenhower, "Monty" and the German leaders, as I mentioned,
Albert Speer, General Sepp Deitrich, etc. etc. What Eisenhower had
to say about you was this: 25 years after the war, the
Americans released a lot of stuff from their top secret archives,
amongst them letters exchanged between General Marshall, the head
of the American Army and General Eisenhower, and in this one
particular letter, Marshall refers to the fact that the joint
chiefs of staff in America had decided that our invasion of Europe
was going so well that the time had arrived to take away the direct
command of the British bombers and the American bombers from
Eisenhower and return it to the heads of their respective services,
Sir Frank Portal and General Arnold, because those two heads of
services had other theatres of war to compete with as well as
Europe. In Eisenhowers reply and I have a copy of his reply, he
said, although Marshall expressed his apprehension that that would
result in Eisenhower getting less support from Bomber Command than
he had been used to, Eisenhower said that he had no such fears and
his actual words were that he had come to regard the British
Bomber Command as one of the most effective parts of his entire
organization, always seeking, finding and using new ways for
their particular type of aircraft to be of assistance in forwarding
the progress of the armies on the ground. That was a pretty good
recommendation from that source but we have
others.
You know Monty was not by any means
given to praising idly but I have heard Monty say on two occasions,
both vast public banquets given to him, once in the city and once
in Cape town, I have heard him say that he regarded the British
Bombers as having been the greatest of all in the destruction of
the German armies as a whole. Now that was pretty good coming
from a soldier not given to praising others
lightly.
On the other hand I have seen articles
written, in particular by a man described as a very well-known
military correspondent, in which he made two remarks. He said all
the Bomber Command ever did was to raise better obstacles in front
of the progress of our armies than the Germans could have done
themselves. That was one remark. The other remark he made was
that they took no part whatsoever in the Battle of the Ardennes
where the Germans, as you know, nearly broke through the Allied
lines. Well, whether you like to believe that or not is a matter
for your personal tastes but I would say this, that although that
fellow said that we raised these appalling obstacles in front of
our own army, I would agree to this extent that our grade one prize
boffin, dear old Barnes Wallace, who I am sorry is not able to be
here tonight but I hope you will send him your best wishes - if he
had come here I would have recommended that after this dinner you
should have debagged him for grave dereliction of duty in not
designing the one urgent requirement of the army, which I am sure
he would have done with half an hours thought on the back of an old
envelope and that was a bomb that made a self-filling crater that
yawned deep and wide to embarrass and entrap the enemy but
automatically filled it up as soon as it sensed the approaching
footfall of an Allied soldier.
Now
lets take the statement that you fellows took no part in the Battle
of the Ardennes where, as you recall, in this last frantic effort
by the Germans to break through our lines, was just held up on the
verge of a breakthrough by what? By the Allied General on the spot
(this is history as it is made) firing off at them an unheard of or
unexpected secret weapon. Thinking that his position was hopeless,
the Germans demanded his surrender and he fired off his weapon,
which was a rather mild four letter word... and that is history "as
she is wrote". But when you come down to brass tacks and find our
what really happened - to stop that offensive you will find that
Hitler, as soon as the offensive began to be held up, told Albert
Speer to get up at the front and tell the General on the spot, Sepp
Dietrich, that he was to go on at all costs - at any cost and he
was not to stop. Speer relates in great detail, his tremendous
difficulties in getting to the front at all. The Ardennes country
is terribly difficult country, almost impossible even for tracked
vehicles to cross country. There are only two comparatively poor
and precipitous road routes through it and everybody especially the
French, saying that the Germans will never come through there. So
it was quite likely to offend you and the said that in spite of the
fact that this was the third occasion that the Germans had come
through since 1870. Well Speer relates the tremendous difficulties
in getting up there at all. He says that sometimes he only made
good a mile in an hours struggle and you can bet as Hitler's
representative he would have been pushed, pulled and carried, car
and all, round, over and above any obstacles that existed. Finally
he arrives at the headquarters of the advanced armoured force on
which the whole offence depended. Their job was to break through
the join between the American and the British Canadian armies, turn
sharp to the right northward, pushing them into the sea again for
another Dunkirk and there they were, held up by that rude American
General who made that remark which apparently forced those tough
Germans who had fought through all that way regardless of shot and
shell - to rock back on their heels, turn round, burst into tears
and go home and complain to mother about that rude man - that is
now history.
When Speer eventually got to Sepp Dietrich's headquarters, he
encountered that one German General who dared even mildly answer
back Hitler. The reason being that he started his
career as Hitler's private chauffeur in the early days of Nazidom
and ha had once, very unfortunately for us and everybody, saved
Hitler from being assassinated, so he could mildly answer back and
Speer relates how he said to Sepp Dietrich that the Fuhrer's orders
are to go on at once at all costs, you are not to stop and the
answer he got was not a four-letter word even like the one the
American General used but just a statement to the effect - "Go on?
How can we go on, we have no ammunition left and all our supply
lines have been cut by air attack". Well that of course is a
fairly potent reason for not going on with an offensive. And who
cut the supply lines? You fellows cut it and nobody else and
the reason it was you and nobody else was that in the atrocious
weather that existed over those critical day and nights, all our
bases on the Continent were almost permanently shut down, the
American bases in East Anglia to the extent where they couldn't use
their ordinary formation escorted daylight tactics but you fellows,
your crews, would get off in any muck and mire, even if they could
not see. As one cockney gunner once remarked to me, "you couldn't
see y' hand in front y' bloody face!" He said that they'd get off
in those conditions provided there was somewhere to get down in the
morning and luckily where on base went out, one came in and so on
and so forth. At the end of the day you fellows did the job
and Speer gives a very informative account of what he called his
"nocturnal discussion" with Sepp Dietrich that night. As they sat
there listening to the unending roar of heavy engine bombers
overhead in the fog and the crash of bombs behind them, Sepp
Dietrich remarked to him, "You know, people don't understand that
not even the best troops (meaning his own troops and they
were picked troops), could stand this mass bombing. One
experience of it and they loose all their fighting spirit".
Speer's concluding remarks of that conversation was "what a scene
of German impotence, we've no defences anywhere". Well you know
what happened after that. Monty attacking in the north with the
21st Army Group and some borrowed Americans, and George Patton, the
famous Cavalry Leader with the American armoured force attacking in
the south, sent those weeping "boche" back to where they came from
and a lot further as well. Well now, that remark of Sepp Dietrich's
was not patent to him by a long way. Shortly after our invasion got
established in France, Rommel remarked to his superiors, "if you
can't stop the bombing we cannot win, and it is no good going
on because all we get by going on is to loose another city every
night". He said, "make peace, or drop the atomic bomb if you
have got it". But of course I told you why they hadn't got it.
He was not the only fellow that made that remark by a long way. As
our armies advanced along the north coast of France, they urgently
required the channel ports such as Le Havre, Boulogne and Calais,
etc. Those ports were manned by 20,000 German soldiers, not only
sworn to die but under a master who they knew very well would see
that they died if they didn't do as they were supposed to. They
all surrendered - 20,000 troops, with a total loss of 150
casualties to our armies. Thanks entirely to mass bombing. In
the pocket diary of a senior German Commander who surrendered at
Boulogne, were written the words, "can anybody survive this carpet
bombing? Sometimes one is driven to despair when at the mercy of
the Royal Air Force without any protection. It seems that all
fighting is in vain and all losses are in vain". Well, there you
are, one after another, the German Generals said the same
thing.
Now
when it comes to our side and the American side, I told you what
Eisenhower had thought of us but after the bombing that did so much
in the battle of the Ardennes, he sent me a "Thank you" message and
I replied thanking him for his message and I said that his message
had been passed on to the crews responsible and I finished my
signal by saying, "you know by now you can always depend on my lads
for anything short of the impossible". Tedder relates how that
signal of mine was circulating around Eisenhower's headquarters and
scrawled across my signal in Eisenhower's handwriting were the
words "Goddammit (you know in the American language that is
all one word), they have already achieved the
impossible". - now, there is a so-called famous military
correspondent saying that Bomber Command did nothing but make an
infernal nuisance of themselves where our armies were concerned on
the Continent, and the Commanding Chief saying that you fellows
achieved the impossible on behalf of the armies. Who would you like
to believe? Well, I have got very little more to say accept that
quite apart from the fact that those facts I have given you do
indicate beyond doubt, agreement with Albert Speer's statement that
the Strategic Bombing of Germany was the greatest losses of
all their losses in the war. I would say that you also
scored the biggest air victory of the war, because you did what
Baume said was the one thing you had to do to defeat an enemy was
to drive them on to the defensive and you certainly did that. Over
the last year or two of the war, the Germans did nothing with their
air force, which had been the major cause of their easy sweep right
across Europe, Poland and every else at the beginning of the war
and their easy victories but they did nothing over the last year
or two of the war but make fighters and trained fighter pilots
in a despairing effort, which failed in it's object to protect the
Fatherland from the Strategic Bombing and that was a fact.
The effect of that was firstly, that it put an entire stop to the
bombing of this country. It is quite true they started off with
these comic rockets and things. Well you know, the V2 rocket for
instance, the thing that created quite a bit of alarm and
despondency. The maximum possible production of these V2 rockets
was a thousand a month and it took 5000 of them to carry as much
explosives as on attack by the Strategic American and British
bombers. So there are the comparative values.
Now
and I told you I think, that you have won certainly one of the
major ground battles. What I told you about Albert Speer certainly
one of the major air battles in driving them entirely on the
defensive but what you have never been given any credit for - you
certainly won the major battle of the European war. Who said so?
Speer again. I have read an account by a so-called expert naval
correspondent, who said that in all the war, Bomber Command only
sank one submarine.
What did Speer say - he was responsible for the production of
submarines and everything else. This simple sentence in one of his
books - "We would have kept our promised output of submarines for
Admiral Doenitz' U-boat war if the bombers had not destroyed a
third of them in the ports. Well, who was right? The navy
wanted to pinch all our Lancasters to go looking for haystacks all
over the Atlantic - looking for needles in the haystacks, or we who
set the pace, to get the submarines where they came
from.
The
German Admiral in charge of the training of U-boat crews in the
Baltic, wrote a letter in which he said, "Without trained U-boat
crews you cannot have a U-boat offensive and I cannot train crews
if you cannot keep these damned air-raid mines away from
my training ground". Well, they could not keep them away,
although the major expensive effort by the German navy during the
war was trying to conquer the 30,000 tons of mines that you fellows
laid in waters approaching every port that the Germans used from
the Baltic, through the whole of the North Sea coast and down to
the Bay of Biscay. You can be quite certain that apart from the
other wreckage they caused, those mines certainly accounted for
quite a number of other submarines who disappeared (if my German
pronunciation is right, I'm not very good at it) "Speroz der sank"
- 'disappeared, sank without trace.' Those mines incidentally,
coupled with the bombing, virtually annihilated the German
Merchant Marine on which they depended for the import of vital
ores from Scandanavia for their basic industries and the Swedes who
were forced to participate in that trade, when they realized
towards the concluding stages of the war that the German pistol in
the back of their neck was no longer a serious threat, they
withdrew what was left of their Merchant Marine from the same
trade, sooner than put up with additional losses of men and ships.
So that is what you achieved in the Naval war but that was by no
means all. Few people realise that at the beginning of the war
the German navy had a high seas fleet consisting of about 17
absolutely super battle wagons ranging all the way from the big
fellows, the TIRPEZ (Willy Tait finished off the TIRPEZ with his
merry boys), the BISMARK, all the way down to the heavy battle
cruisers and the pocket battleships, etc. - 16 or 17 of them. What
happened to them. Did you ever hear? No, well I'll tell you what
happened to them. The Navy sank three of them, the Fleet Air Arm
sank 1 - that's 4 ( I have to add up on my fingers in my old age),
the Norwegian shore defences sank one during the invasion of Norway
- that's 5. The Russians navy did so much damage to one that it was
out of action for nearly the whole of the war - that's 6, Bomber
Command kept two out of action by repeated damage, so
that during the war that they would never really have been
available for anything in the nature of fleet action - that's two
more gone - where have we got to - that's 9. Bomber Command sank
6 and really hardly got a "Thank you" for it - so there you are
- two left - the Prince Eugen and Nuremberg and in the closing
stages of the war, they were lying outside Copenhagen - cold meat
to the big bomb that Willy Tait & Co were putting on their
machines and I happened to be out of my office for five minutes -
occasionally I had to leave my office for five minutes - my
Deputy Commander had taken the half day off (one of the six half
days he took of during the entire war) either to attend to his own
business or have his business attend to him and my naval liaison
officer was an absolutely first class fellow and of the most
assistance to us with the mining. When I got back to my office,
there he was, all in a tremble and he said, I've had to
counter-command the attack on the EUGEN and the NUREMBERG." I said,
"Why?" He said, "Orders from the Admiralty." Well of course you
could not blame the lad, to a naval officer an order from the
Admiralty is one above a direct command by the Almighty, so he done
it and there he was all of a tremble. It was too late to turn the
bombers back again. But those two ships were cold meat and the fact
that they escaped enabled them rather spitefully to expend most
of their ammunition on bombarding around Copenhagen, doing
quite a lot of damage and killing quite a lot of Danish friends and
would be allies.
When the destruction in the ports became absolutely intolerable,
the Germans had a bright idea to prefabricate their submarines
inland, send the huge sections down to the ports so they'd only be
a few days or weeks being buttoned together rather than months
being built from the keel upwards and destroyed in the process by
bombers but that didn't work either because the prefabricated
sections were too big to go by rail or road. They could only go by
canal which was exactly why the Strategic Bombers, the Americans
and the British, kept on busting up the two canals concerned,
the Middleland Canal and the Dortmund Emms, with the result that
those prefabricated sections - the deliveries of them to the port -
quickly sank from a maximum of 120 sections in one month to a few
handfuls and to zero.
Well I hope I have told you enough about your share in the Air War,
the Naval War and the Land War and nobody can take that away from
you because I say it's all from the horses mouth. From the leading
Germans to the leading Americans and the leading British, even Lord
Alanbrook, the head of the army, who was no friend of the
Airforce, always making inordinate demands on what we should do for
them, he admitted in his private diaries which were published after
the war by Sir Arthur Brown, he referred to the brilliant skill
of the bombers and the outstanding assistance they gave to the army
during the invasion.
Well when you consider that our invasion of France consisted of 37
divisions with a large content of green and inexperienced troops
and that joint experience in the First War - the soldiers always
said that if you want any chance of success in the attack, you must
be two-to-one advantage in numbers and material over the enemy -
those 37 divisions chased 60 German divisions clean across
Europe from the Atlantic to the Elbe, totally destroyed the
German army of half a million men - the 7th Army, captured tens of
thousands of prisoners, all their equipment and beat them down to
unconditional surrender at Lunberg Heath and that was largely due
to two things - the Germans lack of anti-tank defences and the
complete, not air superiority, but absolute air supremacy of our
fellows over on the Continent - thanks to the fact that the
bombers had forced the German air force to spread nearly all its
efforts on a failed attempt to defend their own
country,
Thank you for listening to me.