Hiroshima_ The World's Bomb - Andrew J. Rotter [33]
The executor of the bombing campaigns in India, Afghanistan, and Iraq was Arthur Harris, an air-power enthusiast in the mold of Trenchard, Douhet, and Mitchell. ‘Bomber’ Harris, he was called, as well as ‘The Chief Bomber’ (by Churchill), ‘Butch’ (by his crews), and ‘Butcher’ (by his critics). His father served in the Public Works Department in India, for which he designed buildings. Arthur spent much of his youth away from his parents in England, where he lived in ‘baby farms’ provided for the children of the Empire’s servants. At the age of 17, and like his future patron Trenchard, Harris went to southern Africa, in his case Rhodesia. He built houses, grew tobacco, and, when the First World War broke out, joined the 1st Rhodesian Regiment to fight the Germans in Southwest Africa. The campaign victorious, Harris left the regiment for England in August 1915. He was marched out: he wanted, he wrote, ‘to find some way of going to war in a sitting posture’. He did not trust horses. He joined the Royal Flying Corps.29
Harris was a pioneer of night flying. He served in the air defense of London, and also spent time in France, ‘bagging an occasional German fighter with our rear guns and photographing enemy trenches’. When the war ended he ‘more or less drifted into the RAF as a regular’ and was given command of a squadron. Demobilization loomed, and Harris despaired for the future of the air force. At that juncture, Churchill and Trenchard put forward their vision of air control. Harris was sent to India in 1921, there to take charge of mastering obstreperous villagers and dissuading the Emir of Afghanistan from invading the Northwest Frontier. He was transferred to Mespot in 1922, where he commanded the 45th Squadron of bombers. Harris put men and machines to frequent use, bombing Turks and tribals by day and night. ‘You could just imagine’, he wrote, ‘what they would think if they heard us over them in the darkness—you know, ‘ “By Allah they can ruddy well see us in the dark too.” ’ The success of the night raids, undertaken with what Harris called ‘baby incendiaries’, was of great interest to his superiors.30
The possibility that such attacks were unethical tugged only slightly at Harris, for he shared the views of Trenchard and the others that aerial bombing saved lives by ending wars more quickly. Bombing civilians was not illegal. Hague IV, ratified on 18 October 1907, had prohibited ‘the attack or bombardment of towns, villages, or buildings which are not defended’, but it pertained only to war on land. Hague IX, ratified at the same time, governed naval bombardment. In late 1922, while Harris was planning bombing runs in Mespot, the United States proposed, once more at The Hague, a convention governing aerial bombardment. It would have prohibited attacks from the sky ‘for the purpose of terrorizing the civilian population’, and declared such bombardment ‘legitimate only when directed at a military objective, that is to say, an object of which the destruction or injury would constitute a distinct military advantage to the belligerent’. Planes could not attack cities, towns, or villages unless these were in ‘the immediate neighborhood’ of land forces. The American proposal was rejected.31
Home from his adventures in Asia, Harris stayed in military harness but chafed at what he considered regressive thinking by officials. In 1919 the Lloyd George Cabinet had established the ‘Ten Year Rule’, which averred that Great Britain would not be forced to fight a major war for a decade. The rule was frequently reinvoked, including by Winston Churchill in 1928, and as such hobbled efforts to prepare the nation for later conflict and brought the military branches to squabbling with