The Storm of War - Andrew Roberts [246]
Harris was unquestionably a tough man, but as the scientist Professor R. V. Jones used to ask: ‘Who else could have stood up to what he had to do?’12 His refusal to indulge in pleasing euphemism – ‘kill the Boche, terrify the Boche,’ he would say openly – led to his post-war demonization, but he was a loving father and privately a warm individual, kind to his bull-terrier Rastus and popular with both his men and the British public. He was a single-minded individual who thought he knew how to shorten the war, and a realist who despised cant about what his airmen were doing night after night. He also had a sharp tongue, asking civil servants, ‘What are you doing to retard the war effort today?’ and telling Air Chief Marshal Sir Trafford Leigh-Mallory, who had complained before D-Day that he didn’t want to go down to posterity as the killer of thousands of Frenchmen: ‘What makes you think you’re going to go down to posterity at all?’13 Certainly Harris had absolutely no moral qualms about what he was doing to the Germans, telling the newsreels in 1942: ‘They sowed the wind and now they are going to reap the whirlwind. There are a lot of people who say that bombing can never win a war. Well, my answer to that is that it has never been tried yet, and we shall see.’14 Yet he was not a monster, and two days after VE Day he wrote to Portal to say: ‘I regret indeed occasions on which I have been crotchety and impatient. I was the closest to the urgencies of my command, and, frankly, borne down by the frightful inhumanities of war.’15
By the end of 1941 Bomber Command had dropped 45,000 tons of bombs over military targets in Germany, though without much to show for it. One reason why the High Command put so many resources into the bombing offensive was to try to help the Russians. Churchill and Roosevelt were very conscious of not doing enough for the USSR – a feeling Stalin sedulously encouraged – operationally in the west. When the British Commonwealth was fighting twelve Axis divisions at El Alamein, as we have seen, the Russians were engaging 186 on the Eastern Front. The postponing of the so-called Second Front attack in north-west France led to a powerful desire to help draw off German forces elsewhere, and the bomber offensive was thought to be one way of doing that which did not involve an over-hasty return of ground troops to France. Rather like the Arctic convoys to Murmansk, the bombing offensive was conceived almost as a kind of displacement therapy. In the end, helping Russia was indeed to be its chief value to the war effort.
The losses suffered by Bomber Command were monstrous. Soon after taking over, Harris ordered the bombing in March and April 1942 of the ports of Lübeck and Rostock, which were badly damaged for the loss of only twenty-four aircraft, but overall Bomber Command lost 150 aircraft in the month of April alone. No fewer than 55,573 members of Bomber Command lost their lives during the Second World War, 47,268 on operations, but a further 8,305 on training and other non-combatant missions, representing in all one-quarter of all British military dead. Out of 199,091 Bomber Command aircraft despatched on raids during the war, 6,440 (or 3.2 per cent) failed to return.16 The death toll was roughly the same number as British officers killed in the Great War or