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. Sir Arthur Harris was the Royal Air Force commander who led Bomber Command through the main strategic bombing offensive against Germany. Sir Arthur Harris, 1st Baronet was born in Cheltenham, England and died in Goring, England.

Max Hastings’s Bomber Command places Arthur Harris at the centre of the RAF’s transformation into a mass night-bombing force after he became Commander-in-Chief in 1942. Hastings examines Harris’s commitment to area bombing, the growth of Lancaster and Halifax operations, the technical systems that made large raids possible and the extraordinary losses borne by aircrew. Harris is also the focal point for the book’s central moral and strategic argument: whether the destruction of German cities and the deaths of civilians produced military effects proportionate to their cost, and how far responsibility should be assigned to the commander who defended the policy so relentlessly.