What dose Veeky Forums think about Arthur Harris ?
What dose Veeky Forums think about Arthur Harris ?
Lucas Gray
Julian Gray
>be German
>get melted
Ryan Rogers
"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 naive theory into operation. They sowed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind."
What did he mean by this
Kevin Nguyen
Primarily ineffective. I'm going to skip over the morality of the Strategic Bombing campaign, in large part because I don't have a coherent enough moral framework to pass that kind of judgment, and stick to pure military efficacy, which I at least think I have a better handle on.
Offensive air war has something that's traditionally been much harder to use strategically than it ought to be, at least during the interwar period and even during the early part of WW2. Sure, everyone agrees that it's good to have airplanes, and ideally more and better than your enemy, but what is the best way to use this air power to crush your foes? Do you want to support your ground and naval forces directly by bombing their men, guns, tanks, and boats? Do you want to be trying to disrupt lines of communications? Do you want to destroy their people and their morale? Do you want to try to knock out their industry before it can turn out weapons to use against you? Is this an arm that supports other branches of the military, or should it be the primary striking force? Nobody really had a definitive answer, and you had an enormous number of proponents saying this, that, or the other thing was the best way to use a polity's limited air resources.
(1/3)
Gavin Torres
Harris advocated and ultimately turned Bomber Command into a very Trenchardian style operation. Bombing was THE first and foremost way to bring the war to your enemy, and all other arms existed only to keep your foe at bay long enough for your bombers to come about with that moral collapse. You can't call it terror bombing, at least not to the press, but that's what the best use of air industry is; to turn out big nasty bombers to terror bomb your enemy into submission. CAS? Who needs ground forces, when you can get a favorable peace just by bombing? Interdiction? Again, who gives a shit about those stupid infantrymen? Even the economic angle was a "panacea" that merely blinded people away from the hard fact that the best and safest way to win a war was to bomb your enemy into submission.
Ultimately, it didn't work. There never was a moral collapse in Germany; it had to be directly defeated and occupied. Italy collapsed because of the actions on the ground. Japan is the only major Axis power you could even make the argument for moral collapse, and Japan is a very complicated subject, both for lack of information and because of the complex chain of events that led to the atomic bombing; you couldn't have gotten a B-29 with a nuke all the way from Hawaii, and you needed the other campaigns to get into position. In any case, Harris wasn't involved there.
(2/3)
Tyler Myers
My (armchair) verdict on Harris would be "ineffective". He rose to the top primarily because he HAD a strategy, against a backdrop of most of the other air brass waffling over the best way to do things, whereas Harris always had the answer of "Bomb more, bomb harder, bomb everything until they break". But he never did get that moral collapse, and his decentralization of bombing efforts meant that the industrial application of his attacks was often diffused or simply ineffective. He didn't like re-hitting targets that were under construction and repair, because that didn't have the same headline effect, even though that was what the people on the other side, Speer and the like, were generally most worried about, as those targets were usually softer. He fought every effort to turn Bomber command into something that would support other arms, he hated every Sunderland built because those resources could have made another Lancaster, even though if England loses the convoy war they're going to collapse a lot faster than Germany looks like at this rate. He disdained the use of his men as "flying artillery", even though that CAS doctrine worked wonders for Germany and later the USSR, on a far lesser expenditure of factory resources in planes. He didn't even want to do the oil campaign, which very likely could have crippled Germany had it been focused upon.
Henry Morgan
He was a bulldog, and his main merits were in internal organizational fighting, a tremendous advocate for and the rise of an independent air force. And he did finally get the British to take the kid gloves off when it came to strategic bombing, ending all the waffling about what was a legitimate target and what wasn't in an age of total war where they probably couldn't afford it. At the very least, under his watch you didn't have any more insanity naval raids of 40 and early 41. As the commander of a strategic bombing effort, he was mediocre at best, trying to stop actually good ideas like Pathfinder units, or a targeted economic aspect to strategic bombing, since that would imply that his bombers were to support a larger war effort.
(Sorry, didn't format well, needed 4 posts to avoid awkward breaks)
Benjamin Ross
>tfw German Antifas literally worship the guy
>literally worship him bombing your own country
Nuke Germany already, its so fucking Pathetic
Sebastian Bailey
>implying the Dresden firebombings ever happened
>believing the Kraut lies
Henry Nguyen
Didn't they switch to firebombs because those did more damage to residential areas?
Jaxson Sanders
Elijah Ross
There were always incindiaries and high explosive mixes. The incindiaries gained ground as a percentage of the overall load in late 42, and declined again by 44. It wasn't just residential areas they were targeting, there were (abortive) efforts to burn up cropland, as well as just anything there in German cities.
Charles Sullivan
He meant that he was happy to be a disproportionately reacting eternal anglo butcher, because to his autistic brit-brain can't into proportions.
.t baby killing retard.
Owen Bennett
do it again bomber harris
Ryder Anderson
Do it again!
Jayden Butler
do it again bomber harris
Lincoln Bell
From a purely strategic standpoint, I appreciate his work because he turned Bomber Command into an effective weapon.
Though the raids might not have been very effective in terms of hitting strategic targets, they did force the Germans to devote tons of resources to defending the Reich, and they caused civilians to flee the cities. Operation Gommorah, for example, saw over a million people flee Hamburg in the aftermath of the raids.
Thomas Campbell
Morale bombing doesn't work. It has never worked. It never will work.
That said, bombing oil infrastructure, trains, canals, and ports fucked Germany senseless.
Robert Ross
Thanks a lot, very informative. So in definitive, you'd say that strategic bombing was ineffective at damaging Germany's industrial capacity/raw material tranportation/military communications system? Even by the end of the war?
Connor Parker
You're kind of mixed up there - it was the USAF that was launching most of the precision raids against strategic targets. The RAF was mostly doing area bombing that had little impact on strategic targets.
However, you can't really say that the RAF campaign was useless. The Germans had to devote an absurd amount of resources to defenses for their cities and the night fighter network, and the destruction caused by the massed firebombing raids did succeed in causing tons of people to flee the cities.
Brody Hill
No, I would not say that. I would say that doing so ran counter to Harris's priorities and where Harris tried to take Bomber command. There was considerable economic devastation wrought, and a ton of German resources tied up in defending against strategic bombing, but it could have been significantly more devastating had Harris not been so focused on morale effects and focused more on breaking of German industry.
as this user said, it was really the USAAF which was focused on material bombing, as opposed to morale bombing, although in practice, both did quite a bit of each.
Ryan Wilson
That wasn't an RAF vs USAF kind of post
I just think morale bombing was an inefficient doctrine.
This is retarded, but I always wondered if it would be possible to create extremely long range dive bombers for more precise bombing.
Asher Bailey
>German anti-fascists love a guy who bombed German fascists
Whoa that's so strange, I don't get it?!
Oliver Rogers
One more significant thing to note is the impact it had on the Luftwaffe. The combined bomber offensive forced the Luftwaffe to devote tons of resources to the defense of the Reich that could have been spent elsewhere, and you had plenty of promising aces killed over Germany.
Hell even Gunther Rall was shot down and put out of action for the rest of the war on like his third or fourth combat sortie when he was deployed to Germany IIRC.
Brody Ramirez
>One more significant thing to note is the impact it had on the Luftwaffe. The combined bomber offensive forced the Luftwaffe to devote tons of resources to the defense of the Reich that could have been spent elsewhere, and you had plenty of promising aces killed over Germany.
Oh, for sure. And here's a link I have, admittedly mostly to tweak sovietboos:
don-caldwell.we.bs
By mid-late 43, you have close to 50% of the Luftwaffe's day fighters being assigned to try to stop strategic bombing, and a lot of them died there. And that's not counting the thousands of artillery factories that were churning out AA to defend everything, or the people that were deployed to operate the flak.
Brayden Torres
do it again Bomber Harris
Blake Green
he was a right ol chap, banged the bosch n this n dat, innit
Jack Long
>"I do not personally regard the whole of the remaining cities of Germany as worth the bones of one British Grenadier. It therefore seems to me that there is one and only one valid argument on which a case for giving up strategic bombing could be based, namely that it has already completed its task and that nothing now remains for the Armies to do except to occupy Germany against unorganized resistance."
Pretty cool guy desu.
Joseph Myers
Fucking beautiful
Gabriel Cook
do it again Bomber Harris
Jayden Stewart
Only antigerman antifa likes Bomber Harris.
The antigermans are weird. They say they're leftists but they support American Imperialism and Zionism.
Ryder Evans
They don't care about "German fascists" all they want is literally the destruction of their own people as they consider them all to be "fascists"
Ian Mitchell
>"It therefore seems to me that there is one and only one valid argument on which a case for giving up strategic bombing could be based, namely that it has already completed its task and that nothing now remains for the Armies to do except to occupy Germany against unorganized resistance."
This is the thing the relentlessly pisses me off about the bombers. They are unwilling to even consider that it was a waste of time and efforts.
Cooper Butler
cry more
Grayson Jenkins
I think he should Do It Again!
Joshua Gonzalez
do it again Bomber Harris
Eli Sullivan
fyi you've used the original, but incorrect, pepe with US pattern goggles.
David White
The raids to the cities of the Reich were not only deadly for the population but also horrible for the crews.
Regardless the German war industry reached its maximum output in 1944 and the bombing of the cites did not have that military effects f.e. the daylight bombings of the USAF has when they hit the infrastructure.
After the war the total destruction of the towns and cities led to employment for rebuilding, optimization and finally to a strong economy in West-Germany, full employment for the economic miracle to come ...
I think Harris wouldn´t do it again, if he´d knew how few success the burning of the cities finally had ... maybe with the nuke there would be a bit more to impress the nazis?
Leo Robinson
Get real. Nothing short of total exterminations will ever stop the Nazis.
Ryder Young
Just a religious nut that got the job done.
Jace Kelly
Hey Wernher need a job after the war? ... in the picture you see wernher with his old friends ;-)
Josiah Wright
... and here one of his new friends ... no one cared really about Nazis, don´t they?