Return from the wilderness: an assessment of Arthur Harris’s moral responsibility for the German city bombings

Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris divides public, military and academic opinion like few military figures before or since. For some, Harris was, and remains, a hero of the titanic struggle against Hitler’s Reich and the evil it spawned across Europe; for others he was a fearsome and inspiring leader who sparked great loyalty among those who took to the skies at his command; yet others regard him as a war criminal who evaded prosecution only because he found himself on the winning side. This article will consider another image of Harris, the scapegoat to whom it fell to publicly bear the moral culpability of others who bore greater responsibility for the shedding of blood and innocence in those dark hours when explosives and incendiaries were dropped on the cities of Germany. The paper concludes that to some degree it was his own cussed stoicism and lack of political intuition that made his emergence as scapegoat both convenient and almost inevitable.