Sir Arthur Harris, 1st Baronet

Sir Arthur Travers Harris was a Royal Air Force officer who became Commander-in-Chief of Bomber Command in February 1942. He was a forceful advocate of area bombing and oversaw the expansion of the RAF night offensive against German industrial cities as Bomber Command acquired larger fleets of Lancaster and Halifax bombers and increasingly sophisticated navigation and target-marking systems.

Harris remains one of the most controversial British commanders of the Second World War because of the scale of civilian destruction caused by the bombing campaign and arguments over its military value. Max Hastings’s Bomber Command examines Harris’s strategy critically within the wider operational and human history of the campaign. The book is nonfiction.