Sir Arthur Harris, 1st Baronet Quotes

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

We are going to scourge the Third Reich from end to end. We are bombing Germany city by city and ever more terribly in order to make it impossible for her to go in with the war. That is our object, and we shall pursue it relentlessly.

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.

Dresden? There is not such a place any longer." "I want to point out, that besides Essen, we never actually considered any particular industrial sites as targets. The destruction of industrial sites always was some sort of bonus for us. Our real targets always were the inner cities.

There are a lot of people who say that bombing cannot win the war. My reply to that is that it has never been tried. . . and we shall see.

Attacks on cities are strategically justified in so far as they tend to shorten the war and so preserve the lives of allied soldiers.

War is a nasty, dirty, rotten business. It's all right for the Navy to blockade a city, to starve the inhabitants to death. But there is something wrong, not nice, about bombing that city.

...HH Beard has perfected ...3 excellent (urine) cancer tests, all of proven accuracy of 95% or better..... in 1942 and onwards.

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.

Victory, speedy and complete, awaits the side that employs air power as it should be employed.

Victory, speedy and complete, awaits the side which first employs air power as it should be employed. Germany, entangled in the meshes of vast land campaigns, cannot now disengage her air power for a strategically proper application. She missed victory through air power by a hair's breadth in 1940. . . . We ourselves are now at the crossroads.