Bomber Harris: His Life and Times: The Biography of Marshal of the Royal Air Force Sir Arthur Harris, the Wartime Chief of Bomber Command by Henry Probert. Stackpole Books (http://www.stackpolebooks.com/Stackpole books.storefront), 5067 Ritter Road, Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania 17055-6921, 2001, 432 pages, $34.95.

History records Arthur Harris as Bomber Harris, one of the most controversial figures of World War II. The wartime commander of Britain’s Bomber Command, Harris personified the controversial area bombardment of German cities from early 1942 to Nazi capitulation in May 1945. Both during the war and afterwards, some people vilified this bombing policy as immoral and strategically misplaced while others argued that it was one of the war’s exigencies, designed to bring the conflict to conclusion faster than a slogging ground fight would have, sparing the deaths of additional noncombatants. For 60 years, Harris’s strong personality and his command’s central role in area bombing have made him a focal point of debate regarding the air war. His wartime service has received abundant attention from historians and memoirists alike, to the point that Harris the man has become captive and caricature to the conflict’s larger portrait. In this generally fine biography, Henry Probert, a retired air commodore, sets out to rediscover the person of Arthur Harris and to contextualize his Bomber Command days around Harris’s "earlier life, both in the RAF [Royal Air Force] and as a family man," and his long life after the war (p. 15). In this task, Probert mostly succeeds, although in the process he does not tackle many of the controversies surrounding either Harris or area bombardment.

Harris was born in 1892 and spent his early childhood in India. After attending an English boarding school, he made his way in 1910 to Rhodesia, where he helped run various agricultural concerns. The outbreak of war in 1914 brought him into military service and away from southern Africa, although nostalgia for youth forever after labeled him a Rhodesian in his own mind. With the help of family connections, Harris garnered a commission in the RAF. During the Great War, he served as a pilot on the western front, where he became a disciple to the great promise of aerial bombing as a better, swifter substitute to bitter trench fighting in the conduct of war. In the 1920s, Harris served in various flying capacities in India and the Middle East, where the RAF was busy policing Empire territory. In the 1930s, he served in both operational and staff billets, including a stint as the deputy director of plans in the Air Ministry. This duty led to his ser-vice as the RAF lend-lease representative in Washington during the time Britain was at war but America was not. He left the United States in January of 1942, became commander in chief of British Bomber Command in February, and began the core of his wartime service.

Harris helped lift Bomber Command from a demoralized nadir following the bombing war’s early frustrations. His attention to detail, diligent focus, and forceful advocacy not only cheered the British public but also offered an example to the US Eighth Air Force, with which Harris’s command conducted the Combined Bomber Offensive. Harris contended with the challenges of bombing accuracy, crew morale, equipment upgrades, and diversions from strategic bombing as well as tasks ranging from mine laying to tactical support of the Allied invasion of Normandy. By war’s end, Bomber Command’s contributions to victory were clear, but its place in memory was less secure as Allied public opinion recoiled at the stark horror of bombing cities in Germany. As a result, Harris became a kind of national embarrassment, and the public embraced his legacy with great ambivalence.

Not independently wealthy, Harris returned to southern Africa to become a founder and director of Safmarine, a fledgling but ultimately successful marine line connecting Cape Town to London and New York. By the early 1950s, he was back in En-gland, financially better off, and settled for good. He lived a generally modest and unassuming life, only later emerging to take a more active part in numerous RAF functions and Bomber Command reunions. Harris died in 1984 at the age of 92.

Probert’s approach to Harris is largely descriptive. His treatment of Harris’s life before the war, the dissolution of his first marriage, and the course of his second union do indeed serve his purpose of painting a person beside the portrait of Bomber Harris. Moreover, the author’s care in relating Harris’s postwar life as family man and country gentleman is the book’s major contribution to the broader literature. With access to private family scrapbooks and surviving Harris intimates, Probert is able to complete the circle of Harris’s life as no one else has done.

But analysis suffers from this stress on description. Probert does not delve into many issues surrounding the efficacy of area bombardment in World War II. Although those issues have ample voice in the literature, the value of biography is the intersection of person and policy. In his obligatory treatment of the planes, people, techniques, and effects of bombing, Probert misses an opportunity to tackle these issues with nuance and doggedness within the context of Harris’s personality. Rather, he relies on standard sources and methods to arrive at standard conclusions about the air war. Nowhere, for instance, does he refer to recent scholarship on bombing efficacy drawn from German sources, relying instead on the published writing of Albert Speer and the Allied bombing surveys after the war. Beyond that, Probert does not examine a central matter of the bombing: that it was at its most effective role when diverting German resources to defense. This was not the measure of airpower that prewar theorists had used, nor was it the yardstick that wartime commanders generally employed to gauge the value of bombing. Probert’s descriptive approach largely misses a chance to explicate this doctrinal paradox. All books have limits, of course, but these oversights are weaknesses.

Still, this biography is the new standard for Harris, replacing Dudley Saward’s Bomber Harris. Probert set out to write a book "both critical and sympathetic" and worried that some readers might find his judgments "too kind" to Harris (p. 15). He is probably right on both counts. But his book does a nice job of teaching us about Harris the man, which is the biographer’s first obligation.

Dr. Tom Hughes
Maxwell AFB, Alabama