What would it take for the RAF to give up Area Bombing/Dehousing?

  • Thread starter Deleted member 1487
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The problem with that is that Area bombing/Dehousing was not his baby, he was just the best practioner of it.

Not entirely true: the area bombing campaign was seen by most of the British leadership as a temporary stopgap until the methods were developed to conduct more precise raids. However, once those methods were developed, Harris refused to change his practices to make best use of them. The handful of precision raids on industry he did allow showed just how awesome an instrument Bomber Command could have been... but because Harris fundamentally made the wrong decision - and worse, refused to change it despite a mounting pile of evidence that it was wrong - Bomber Command never realized that potential.
He continually promised that his area bombing would win the war "in a very short while." It never came close, but other methods that would have done so were open to him as early as 1943. Those being precision attacks on a few key industries, pressed home day and night to take the industries down and KEEP them down. The Americans tried, but they never quite had enough planes and bombs to land true knockout blows until 1944. They repeatedly requested Harris' help, but he refused and what help he was arm twisted into providing was always grudging, despite mounting evidence from Allied intelligence that they were right and he was wrong. A good commander has to be resolute, but Harris took it to the level of dogmatism and against all mounting evidence.

Post war, Harris grudgingly admitted that the Americans were right about the oil plan but defended his opposition by arguing that this was not evident at the time. Putting aside the fact that the British had very clear intelligence to that effect even at the time (which Harris ignored, because he was distrustful of the intellectuals who made up the codebreakers of Bletchly Park), detecting the cues and clues that others miss and finding the hidden path to victory is what separates the merely good commanders, like Harris, from the great ones.

With that said, the time to have Harris break his neck isn't in 1941... it's early-'43. 1942 is actually the period where he did a superb job turning Bomber Command from an ineffective joke into a powerful instrument of war. The problem was he then continually misapplied it in a relentless campaign of area bombing in the mistaken belief that destroying cities would break German morale and end the war. Ultimately, Harris is directly most comparable to George B. McClellan or Isoroku Yamamoto: he built a fantastic instrument of war in the face of serious adversity... but then failed to use it properly.
 
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Deleted member 1487

Not entirely true: the area bombing campaign was seen by most of the British leadership as a temporary stopgap until the methods were developed to conduct more precise raids. However, once those methods were developed, Harris refused to change his practices to make best use of them. The handful of precision raids on industry he did allow showed just how awesome an instrument Bomber Command could have been... but because Harris fundamentally made the wrong decision - and worse, refused to change it despite a mounting pile of evidence that it was wrong - Bomber Command never realized that potential.
He continually promised that his area bombing would win the war "in a very short while." It never came close, but other methods that would have done so were open to him as early as 1943. Those being precision attacks on a few key industries, pressed home day and night to take the industries down and KEEP them down. The Americans tried, but they never quite had enough planes and bombs to land true knockout blows until 1944. They repeatedly requested Harris' help, but he refused and what help he was arm twisted into providing was always grudging, despite mounting evidence from Allied intelligence that they were right and he was wrong. A good commander has to be resolute, but Harris took it to the level of dogmatism and against all mounting evidence.

Post war, Harris grudgingly admitted that the Americans were right about the oil plan but defended his opposition by arguing that this was not evident at the time. Putting aside the fact that the British had very clear intelligence to that effect even at the time (which Harris ignored, because he was distrustful of the intellectuals who made up the codebreakers of Bletchly Park), detecting the cues and clues that others miss and finding the hidden path to victory is what separates the merely good commanders, like Harris, from the great ones.

With that said, the time to have Harris break his neck isn't in 1941... it's early-'43. 1942 is actually the period where he did a superb job turning Bomber Command from an ineffective joke into a powerful instrument of war. The problem was he then continually misapplied it in a relentless campaign of area bombing in the mistaken belief that destroying cities would break German morale and end the war. Ultimately, Harris is directly most comparable to George B. McClellan or Isoroku Yamamoto: he built a fantastic instrument of war in the face of serious adversity... but then failed to use it properly.
I do agree with a lot of this, but Churchill was very much into Dehousing and Area bombing before Harris was even in the picture and continued to support it until later in the war by which time Harris was coasting on institutional inertia. Going by Blackett, the head of British Operational Research, the war might have been ended as much as a year early had they not wasted efforts on Dehousing from 1942 on and could have won the Battle of the Atlantic in 1942 had they started investing in Coastal Command first before distributing resources to Bomber Command. Thereafter he was convinced that more bomber resources to support ground forces and focus on attriting enemy resources in Germany would have been more useful than Area Bombing. By the latter point I think he means what you do, attack in military production; in combo with US focused bombing they could have landed knock out blows in 1943-44. The job that Harris did building up BC wasn't something he alone could have achieved, there were plenty of quality commanders that could have done that.
 
Not entirely true: the area bombing campaign was seen by most of the British leadership as a temporary stopgap until the methods were developed to conduct more precise raids. However, once those methods were developed, Harris refused to change his practices to make best use of them. The handful of precision raids on industry he did allow showed just how awesome an instrument Bomber Command could have been... but because Harris fundamentally made the wrong decision - and worse, refused to change it despite a mounting pile of evidence that it was wrong - Bomber Command never realized that potential.
He continually promised that his area bombing would win the war "in a very short while." It never came close, but other methods that would have done so were open to him as early as 1943. Those being precision attacks on a few key industries, pressed home day and night to take the industries down and KEEP them down. The Americans tried, but they never quite had enough planes and bombs to land true knockout blows until 1944. They repeatedly requested Harris' help, but he refused and what help he was arm twisted into providing was always grudging, despite mounting evidence from Allied intelligence that they were right and he was wrong. A good commander has to be resolute, but Harris took it to the level of dogmatism and against all mounting evidence.

Post war, Harris grudgingly admitted that the Americans were right about the oil plan but defended his opposition by arguing that this was not evident at the time. Putting aside the fact that the British had very clear intelligence to that effect even at the time (which Harris ignored, because he was distrustful of the intellectuals who made up the codebreakers of Bletchly Park), detecting the cues and clues that others miss ....

Interesting. Have some reading to recommend on this? The alternative methods and technical improvements are of particular interest. Any good sources to recommend?
 

Deleted member 1487

Interesting. Have some reading to recommend on this? The alternative methods and technical improvements are of particular interest. Any good sources to recommend?
He should be referring to the Gee, Oboe, and Gee-H guidance systems, and use of Pathfinders with H2S to increase accuracy. There are quality wikipedia articles available for all. If you want to get REALLY nerdy I can recommend the MIT Rad Lab series which explains exactly how the technology and methods of it worked.
Max Hastings "Bomber Command" is a great general history that touches on all of this.
 
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