Reaping The Whirlwind.

Mild-Mannered Avenger: “The Nazis entered this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everyone else, and nobody was going to bomb them. At Rotterdam, London, Warsaw, and half a hundred other places, they put their rather naïve theory into operation. They sowed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind.” - Sir Arthur "Bomber" Harris, 1942.

HAD IT NOT BEEN for the intervention of the Queen Mother, Arthur “Bomber” Harris would never have got his statue. While all the other great British commanders of the Second World War were showered with honours and had their likenesses cast in bronze, Air Marshall Harris became someone the British Establishment found it expedient to overlook. Why? Because Harris was responsible – at least in terms of his strategic decision-making – for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians.

Harris’s “Bomber Command” rained down explosives in such quantities that, in the cities of Hamburg and Dresden, they created firestorms. A firestorm takes hold when the combustion site exhausts its supply of oxygen and begins drawing in the surrounding air to keep the inferno alive. The inrushing air soon acquires the speed of a gale-force wind. This not only fuels the flames, it fans them, increasing the size and heat of the conflagration to truly horrific levels. Without oxygen, those huddling in bomb shelters are asphyxiated. Those attempting to flee find their feet sinking into superheated asphalt as, all around them, the streets melt. So hot did it become in Dresden, that school-girls seeking protection from the intense heat in a water tank were boiled alive.

Harris was not in the least bit fazed. In a notorious address, delivered to the British people in 1942, at the start of his no-holds-barred bombing campaign, Harris chillingly declared:

Sir Arthur "Bomber" Harris.

The Nazis entered this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everyone else, and nobody was going to bomb them. At Rotterdam, London, Warsaw, and half a hundred other places, they put their rather naïve theory into operation. They sowed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind.

Challenged to justify the huge civilian losses at Dresden, in the context of a war that was clearly only weeks away from being won, Harris responded:

The feeling, such as there is, over Dresden, could be easily explained by any psychiatrist. It is connected with German bands and Dresden shepherdesses. Actually Dresden was a mass of munitions works, an intact government centre, and a key transportation point to the East. It is now none of these things.

It isn’t difficult to understand why Harris had to wait so long for his statue. But, those who turned their backs on him were the worst kind of hypocrites. In the context of an increasingly brutal global conflict, Harris distinguished himself by refusing to cloak the brutality of war in fine phraseology, or weasel words. The strategy of “carpet bombing” German cities was approved by Britain’s war cabinet because it worked. Home Office researchers had discovered that people coped better with losing their loved ones than they did with losing their homes.

People who say that bombing civilians doesn’t work are, quite simply, wrong.

Nor is it the case that New Zealanders can stand aloof from Harris’s cold-blooded destruction of human life. Six thousand Kiwis flew in those bombers, ofttimes navigating by the terrible red glow in the skies ahead of their aircraft. Nearly 2,000 of them never returned to base.

I rehearse these facts as the Israeli Air Force rains death and destruction upon the defenceless cities of Gaza. The world stands aghast at the horrific scenes filling the screens of its devices. “These are civilians!”, it cries, “Innocent women and children!” From the streets of the Middle East rises the grim accusation: “Israel is guilty of war crimes!”

But if the Israelis are guilty of war crimes, then so were my father’s generation – and my grandfather’s. It was “our side” that blockaded Germany for the duration of World War I. Like the other British Dominions, New Zealand was quite willing to have the Royal Navy starve Germany to death. It was war. You do what it takes to win.

“Bomber” Harris spoke the brutal language of military necessity. Faced with the impossibility of defeating Germany without killing Germans, he point-blank refused to indulge in moral humbug.

Sorting out the guilty from the innocent in the crimson fog of war is beyond the competence of mortal men.

Sir Arthur Harris (he was knighted in 1953) died in 1984, and his statue was unveiled by the Queen Mum in 1992. She was taken aback to hear the jeers and boos of the crowd.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 27 October 2023.