Arthur Travers Harris quotes

Arthur Travers Harris was a British air marshal, most famous for leading the RAF Bomber Command during World War II. His strategic bombing campaigns targeted German cities in an effort to weaken enemy morale and infrastructure. He remains a controversial figure due to the scale and impact of the bombing raids he oversaw. Here are 9 of his quotes:

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.

Arthur Travers Harris

In spite of all that happened at Hamburg, bombing proved a relatively humane method.

Arthur Travers Harris

People talk a lot about picking out targets and bombing them, individual small targets – in the European climate? I've come to the conclusion that people who say that sort of thing not only have never been outside, but they've never looked out of a window.

Arthur Travers Harris

I never engaged in these idiotic pamphlet-dropping exercises. They only served two purposes really - they gave the German defences endless practice in getting ready for it, and apart from that they supplied a considerable quantity of toilet paper to the Germans.

Arthur Travers Harris

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.

Arthur Travers Harris

They sowed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind.

Arthur Travers Harris

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.

Arthur Travers Harris

The feeling, such as there is, over Dresden, could be easily explained by any psychiatrist. It is connected with German bands and Dresden shepherdesses. Actually Dresden was a mass of munitions works, an intact government centre, and a key transportation point to the East. It is now none of these things.

Arthur Travers Harris