Bomber Command (45 page)

It is interesting that his aircrew, who never saw him, regarded him with rueful but enduring affection. His staff at High Wycombe respected and feared but, with a few exceptions, did not like him. He was too ruthless, too impatient of failure or disagreement, too devoid of endearing weakness. The stories of his abrasive encounters with authority were legion. Striding into the Air Ministry one morning, he passed one of the most senior civil servants with a bluff greeting of ‘Morning, Abrahams, and what have you done to impede the war effort today?’
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The Foreign Office sought Harris’s help: ‘Sam Hoare came bleating to me for a second aircraft to carry his diplomatic bags. But it just happened that one bag had burst open in the air on a previous run, and we found it full of lackeys’ uniforms. I told Hoare that I did not consider these a fit cargo for my aircraft in the middle of the war.’
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He made no secret of his loathing for the Royal Navy, and could contemptuously reel off the details of the deluge of decorations awarded to sailors for some of their less successful operations. He said that there were three things one should never take on a yacht – a wheelbarrow, an umbrella and a naval officer. One day Churchill told Harris that Pound was deeply concerned about the continued survival of the battleship
Tirpitz
: ‘Tell the First Sea Lord he need not worry,’ said Harris blithely. ‘I’ll sink it when I have a spare moment.’

The mask never slipped from Harris, because there was no mask. Behind that unyielding visage and those piercing eyes, there was shrewdness but little tolerance. Critics like Major Morton who
recoiled from his philistinism correctly perceived his lack of cultural interests. He had no small talk. He disliked physical activity – he often said that after his experience in South-West Africa in the First World War, he made up his mind never to walk again unless he had to. At the same period, he formed a deep affection for mules and their ways, a joke against himself which he enjoyed. Few men have applied themselves to their duty even in war with the single-mindedness of Harris. Portal occasionally took a few days’ fishing. Yet in the course of more than three years at High Wycombe, Harris allowed himself only two weekends of holiday, with friends in Norfolk. Many of his staff officers were middle-aged men who found it possible to do their parts to a not uncomfortable routine. But Harris lived with enormous strain. He often remarked that while most commanders were required to risk their forces in battle only at intervals of months, he was staking everything almost every night. He drowned his ulcers in Dr Collis Browne’s mixture, and later in a potion supplied by the Americans. He chainsmoked Camels or Lucky Strikes through a battered holder. He gave vent to his inner tensions in moments of fierce anger that exasperated his equals and thoroughly frightened his subordinates.

But those who seek to present him simply as a latter-day ‘Donkey’, indifferent to casualties, do him an injustice. He was passionately concerned to give every man in his command the best possible chance of survival. A senior civil servant at the Ministry of Aircraft Production described vividly
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an occasion on which Harris arrived to denounce the Stirling bomber and demand more Lancasters: ‘It’s murder, plain murder to send my young men out to die in an aircraft like that!’ said Harris furiously. But a good case can be made that he was slow to grasp the possibilities and limitations of the new generation of radar technology. He was one of those men who refuse to accept any lesson until they have proved it for themselves. He was not a quick or indeed a first-class mind in the academic sense, but it is debatable whether first-class minds are wanted at the summit of operational commands in wartime.

The mainspring of all that Harris did was his determination to
prove the unique qualities of strategic air power. Trenchard in the end came to regard Harris as his most perfect disciple, when other bright hopes such as Portal had been infected by unbelievers. Harris was a man of immense force and directness – though a good deal less frank than he sometimes appeared – whose overwhelming advantage was that he was quite indifferent to what the world thought of him. He reserved great warmth of heart for those who inspired his respect and affection, and was unswervingly loyal to his friends and those who served him well.

But he never took the precaution of cloaking what he was doing in the formal dress of circumspection and manners that the English traditionally cherish in peace and war. His Rhodesian background may explain something of this. He seemed to delight in assaulting social convention, in expressing the realities of the bomber offensive in the most brutally literal language. ‘I wonder whether in Allied headquarters, as in ours, the talk was not of victory over the enemy, but of his “extinction” or “Annihilation”,’ Speer mused in his cell at Spandau years later. ‘How, for example, did Air Marshal Harris express himself?’
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Harris had performed a great service to England and to the Government in the first eighteen months of his command, when the bomber offensive was the Western Allies’ greatest thrust against Germany. Now, strategic bombing had become a controversial matter. It is notable how much Churchill wrote about Bomber Command in the early chapters of his war memoirs, how little in the later. In his final volume, Harris himself is mentioned only once,
en passant
and critically. It was Harris’s reckless choice of language in writing and speaking of the bomber offensive during the war years that pinioned the levelling of Germany’s cities to his back for good or ill for the rest of history, while men who chose their words more carefully – Churchill, Portal, even Cherwell – have somehow kept a distance from it.

From February 1942 until the end of the war Harris lived a few minutes’ drive from High Wycombe, at the Commander-in-Chief’s official residence, Springfield House. It was an odd
ménage
. He
married his second wife Therese only in 1938, and it took her some time to shrug off her natural initial shyness, a young woman suddenly thrust amidst the summits of the Royal Air Force. Now, at Springfield, she was bringing up their small daughter Jackie and entertaining ministers and celebrities of every nation in the war. De Gaulle came, and Ellen Wilkinson, the radical MP; there were Indians who needed special food, and Americans like Ira Eaker to be shown Harris’s famous Blue Books – indeed his chief concern with every visitor was to indoctrinate them about the achievements and potential of Bomber Command. An RAF cook, Sergeant Simmonds, presided over the kitchen, although Harris himself was fond of taking over at the stove when there were no guests. There was a resident nucleus of Harris’s staff. Harry Weldon, his Personal Staff Officer, was a philosophy don from Magdalen College, Oxford. It was Weldon who adapted Harris’s language and sentiments into the forcefully expressed minutes and memoranda with which he bombarded the Air Ministry and the War Cabinet.

John Maze was posted to Harris at the completion of his tour of operations with 76 Squadron in the winter of 1943, one of a succession of ADCs throughout the war. Naturally nervous in his C-in-C’s drawing-room after dinner, the gangling young man emptied his coffee over the pristine white carpet sent to Springfield from the
Queen Mary
when she was stripped to become a troopship. The Harrises liked to nickname the household and they knew their Damon Runyon, so Maze became ‘Feets’, just as Weldon was ‘Harry the Horse’.

Harris’s other permanent guest at Springfield was Air Vice-Marshal Sir Robert Saundby, first SASO and now Deputy C-in-C of Bomber Command. Sandy Saundby was effectively Harris’s Chief of Staff, an outstanding technician who was responsible for translating Harris’s target decisions into operational reality, in liaison with the Group commanders. Saundby’s family lived in Berkshire, too far for him to get home for more than occasional visits, so the Harrises invited him to live with them. Second only to his dedication to the concept of strategic bombing, he was a passionate
naturalist. In his spare hours at High Wycombe, he stalked the hedgerows in pursuit of butterflies and plants. There was a legendary occasion on which he was arrested up a tree with his butterfly net, suspected by a local constable of attempting to catch sparrows for the London market. Saundby was also a superb fly-fisherman, drifting across West Wycombe lake in summer, rowed by any officer who would play boatman for him. Once he brought back a basket of trout for the Harrises, unconscious of their conviction that fish were a mass of pins and cottonwool. It was Saundby’s turn to shudder at dinner that night, when he found his beloved trout on the table as fishcakes.

The Deputy C-in-C’s other passion was model railways. In a room above the mess at High Wycombe, he had an enormous layout on which he lavished all the attention that he could spare from nature and the bomber offensive. He was a genuine English eccentric, a placid, humorous, mild-mannered man who excelled at detail. He drove an old Rolls-Royce which he said he had bought as a lifetime investment, but never took shopping because it caused stores to overcharge him. He was almost old-maidishly careful about money, and the difficulty of catching him when it was time to buy a round of drinks was a standing joke in the mess at High Wycombe.

Saundby’s crippling weakness was that he was totally in awe of Harris. A staff officer describes their relationship as that of headmaster and schoolboy.
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It would never have occurred to Saundby to make a decision without consulting Harris, or to dispute policy with the C-in-C. Studying Bomber Command headquarters throughout the period of Harris’s command, it is difficult to find evidence of any senior staff officer who took open issue with the C-in-C on a major policy matter. Harris was perfectly approachable on tactics and organization, but it would have been a brave man – and there were very few at High Wycombe – who touched the C-in-C on one of his exposed nerves. There was a chronic lack of open, critical debate. There were too many weak men and sycophants around the throne, and this situation must be attributed to
Harris’s choice and treatment of his subordinates. There was a fear of clear thinking if it led to unpalatable conclusions. If Harris had been able to call on more frankness from those close to him, some of Bomber Command’s most serious misfortunes might have been avoided. Most important, perhaps, the Battle of Berlin might have been halted months before its eventual conclusion. ‘Berlin had become a fixation with Bert, and we knew it,’ said one of his staff officers thirty years later.
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But it never occurred to himself or his colleagues to say as much to Harris at the beginning of 1944.

The routine at High Wycombe was a mirror-image of war on the stations: the day began as the crews went to bed, ended as they took off into the night. Each morning after breakfast Harris left Springfield in his black Bentley two-seater at 8.30, driven by the impeccable Maddocks, his chauffeur, with his distinctive patent-leather moustache. In his car Harris rushed everywhere, the way swept clear by the ‘Cabinet Priority’ badge on the bonnet, WAAFs and staff officers leaping for their lives as they saw the C-in-C’s motor racing up the road of No. 1 Site. His office was situated at the corner of the solid redbrick two-storey building that housed Bomber Command’s most senior officers, down the long ground-floor corridor. Lesser mortals were scattered over several acres of wartime huts. On Harris’s arrival Peggy Wherry, his formidable WAAF secretary, brought him the most urgent signals and target folders. He retired to his morning ablutions to consider them, and there was often a hasty struggle to recall him when the Prime Minister came on the scrambler for details of the previous night’s attack.

‘I’m sick of these raids on Cologne,’ growled Churchill testily one morning.

‘So are the people of Cologne,’ barked Harris.

If the C-in-C was not available, the call went through to some nervous staff officer in the Operations Room: ‘How did the raid proceed last night?’ inquired the most famous voice in England. ‘Only 700 aircraft reached the target? Your C-in-C promised 800. And how many tons of bombs did you discharge?’ The hesitant
young man in the Ops Room might talk on for several minutes before realizing that the Prime Minister, having learnt what he wanted, had long since noiselessly hung up.
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At 9 am Harris left his office and was driven the few hundred yards across the base to the grass-covered mound that concealed the great underground bunker from which the bomber offensive was directed. The Operations Room, ‘The Hole’ as it was known, had been purpose-built for Bomber Command just before the outbreak of war. Here, at ‘Morning Prayers’ each day, Harris determined which city of Germany would suffer fire and high explosives that night. He took his seat at the desk in the midst of the big room, flanked by the great wall maps of Europe and the target-priority list of dozens of cities and objectives, updated daily in accordance with the movement of the war, extensive enough to afford Harris enormous latitude. Around him stood Saundby, Magnus Spence the weather expert, the SASO, Deputy SASO, Group-Captain Operations, Group-Captain Intelligence, Navigation Officer, Captain de Mowbray of naval liaison, Colonel Carrington for the army, and a supporting cast of half a dozen wing-commanders and squadron leaders from Operations and Intelligence.

After a brief report on the previous night’s operations, it was invariably Spence who commanded the attention of the meeting. He might report that a front was moving up western Germany around midnight. Harris would say: ‘In that case it’s obvious that Hamburg, Bremen or Wilhelmshaven are our best bet for tonight’ – he pronounced German names in obstinate English, so that Wiesbaden became ‘Wysbaden’ – ‘Can we get there in time without too early a start?’ If Spence approved, there was a hasty shuffling of target folders and photographs among the staff, and the possibilities were handed forward to the C-in-C. Occasionally Saundby reminded Harris of an urgent Air Ministry or Ministry of Economic Warfare request, but there was no controversy at ‘Morning Prayers’. The decisions were unequivocally those of the C-in-C. The weather was both a dominant reality and an all-embracing alibi. Whatever target lists had recently been passed down by the
Combined Strategic Targets Committee, on which the Americans, the Ministry of Economic Warfare and Bomber Command were all represented – Harris could and did plead the weather as an excuse for pursuing his own intentions, although often enough it genuinely restricted his options. He seldom lingered more than a few moments over the target folders at conference before closing the issue: ‘Right. We’ll send 800 heavies to Hamburg. Now what about some “gardening”? What do you want “gardened”, de Mowbray?’ Harris could never resist teasing the naval officer, not unkindly. The moment the key decisions had been taken – targets and forces – Harris left the room and returned to his office.