"Harris: 'Butch' or 'Butcher'?" Topic

Hi all,

I see these nicknames cited in various printed/online sources, with Harris's detractors seemingly preferring 'Butcher' and less hostile sources seemingly preferring 'Butch'.

If the latter was used at all (esp. within RAF Bomber Command), was it meant admiringly: i.e., tough guy? Or was it simply short for 'Butcher' (i.e., servicemen's black humour)?

If he was generally known in the RAF as 'Butcher', did this reflect the way German civilians were being killed, or RAF Bomber Command aircrew (around half of whom were killed, of course)?

I find it very hard to pin down what most RAF Bomber Command aircrew felt about Harris. Ambivalence, maybe? Or
was he genuinely popular/respected?

Any thoughts would be much appreciated – thanks in advance.

I've only ever heard him referred to as Bomber Harris.

If you read actual memoirs and primary source materials (not too hard to "pin down") there is nothing but respect and admiration for Bomber Harris from the people who know what was going on at the time.

Views to the contrary are from modern liberal revisionist s talking out of their arses.

I have only heard "Bomber" Harris used.

He and Curtis LeMay both admitted separately that had they lost the war they would be war criminals.
Good thing they won.

I've only heard him called Bomber Harris.

Same here – Bomber – nothing else.

From my reading it seems that "Butch" was the nickname used by Bomber Command Aircrew and was short for "Butcher". It seemingly referred to their view of his attitude to Aircrew losses, they felt that they didn't matter to him, only achieving the objective mattered.

From my readings and most importntly the comments of my father and his fellow veterans of Bomber Command, Mr Sponge is correct. They called him Butch to his face and Butcher amongst themselves Harris was aware of this and did not care as long as "his "crews did their job.

The slights to Bomber Command is not a resut of modern revisionists but began at the conclusion of WW2 when no Bomber Command medal was issued .Under pressure from veterans a Bomber Command" clasp to the 1939/45 Str was mde available in 2013 but to date no campaign medal has been issued

I respect Bomber Harris, though he was a little too single minded about winning the war by bombing alone.
I remember seeing a veteran talking on 'The World at War' – a 1970's docu series. He seemed to think Harris was inspiring.
After suffering at the hands of the Luftwaffe, bombing was the only way of 'Hitting back'.

War is all Hell!

Rather interesting that the British command deliberately provoked the switch from strict military targets to civilian by the Luftwaffe.

And that after seeing the fact that bombing civilian targets had not been decisive for the Luftwaffe that the Allied air forces thought that it would succeed against Germany and Japan. It was though a strategy that pre-WWII was considered to be capable of winning a war singlehandedly.

I will say that LeMay at least had leaflets dropped prior to bombing raids on Japanese cities (aside from Hiroshima and Nagasaki) in an attempt to lessen civilian casualties.

…commonly known as "Bomber" Harris by the press and often within the RAF as "Butcher" Harris…

link

Sourced to pg. 69 of Havers, Robin (2003). The Second World War: Europe, 1939–1943, Volume 4. Abingdon, Oxford, UK: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-96846-1.

Indiscriminate targeting of civilian areas was contrary to the Geneva Convention's intentions. Yeah, the Nazis hadn't signed so it doesn't apply in law. And it technically only specified shelling at the time, which is a weasel loophole to use (as if it matters whether bombs are dropped or lobbed).

So ethically he was committing war crimes. That based on his own country's legal position at the time.

That he was on "our" side is irrelevant.

That his command loved him doesn't matter either. Would Himmler be excused on that basis?

My father was in Bomber Command during WW2 and always referred to Harris as Butch and always in admiration. If you can show that the allies had a different way of attacking Nazi Germany, or that the targets had no military value then you can call my father and the rest of Bomber Command war criminals. I have gone through all of my father's 30 missions and every target was a military one. War production factories in the Ruhr, the Phillips works in Eindhoven, V1 sites, a gun battery in Normandy, a tank depot in France, docks in Setting and Le Harve. It is easy to sit back 70 odd years later and criticise, but from 1940 to summer 1944 there was no other way to attack the Germans who had no issues with killing anyone, military or civilian. Germans in cities had shelters and anti-aircraft defences, Himmler's victims had no such look. To make such a comparison is a gross insult to the almost 50% of Bomber Command who lost their lives.

This short article/review is very interesting:
link

I had not heard of Adam Tooze's economic study of Nazi Germany, and am fascinated to hear that it seems to show, very clearly, that Harris's RAF offensive against the Ruhr from mid-1943 stopped in its tracks the *steady increase* in German weapons production that had begun in early 1942 (and which the Nazis had expected to continue).

On this webpage, Tooze is interviewed by Lawrence Rees and seems to argue that Harris's mistake (the biggest mistake of the war, he seems to say?) was to shift the RAF campaign from the Ruhr to Berlin in late 1943 – he says the Nazis were 'deeply puzzled' by the switch:
link

Apologies if this is old news!

In their own words: A description of the January 2 attack by the RAF:

"Nuremberg as a scene of so many disappointments for Bomber Command, finally succumbed to this attack. The centre of the city, particularly the eastern half, was destroyed. The castle, the Rathaus, almost all the churches and about 2,000 preserved medieval houses went up in flames."

Then, as if adding an afterthought, as if less of a priority:

"The industrial area in the south, containing the important Man and Siemens factories, and the railway areas were also severely damaged. It was a near-perfect example of area bombing."

And then from an account by Freeman Dyson on his time with ORS during the war -

For a week after I arrived at the ORS, the attacks on Hamburg continued. The second, on July 27, raised a firestorm that devastated the central part of the city and killed about 40,000 people. We succeeded in raising firestorms only twice, once in Hamburg and once more in Dresden in 1945, where between 25,000 and 60,000 people perished (the numbers are still debated). The Germans had good air raid shelters and warning systems and did what they were told. As a result, only a few thousand people were killed in a typical major attack. But when there was a firestorm, people were asphyxiated or roasted inside their shelters, and the number killed was more than 10 times greater. Every time Bomber Command attacked a city, we were trying to raise a firestorm, but we never learnt why we so seldom succeeded.

link

And Albert Speer said that another 4 or 5 raids like Hamburg would have brought Germany to its knees. As Harris said, Germany sowed the wind and reaped the whirlwind. Perhaps the critics of Bomber Command feel that they should have just continued dropping leaflets politely asking the Germans to stop being naughty? Area bombing was the only method available to the RAF at the time and how many civilians were not part of the war machine in some way or another? As to the original question of Butch or Butcher, I suspect that the view of the aircrew depended on when in the campaign they flew. The losses in winter 1943/4 were extremely high, so Butcher was probably more likely. As losses declined later in the campaign attitudes probably eased. As an aside, Harris used to sign messages to his "boys" as Bert.

As noted vigilant – massacring the inhabitants of cities worked for a number of conquerors over the centuries as a way to force submission.

Terrorists are still trying to follow that example.

Noted at the site providing that first quote on Nurmeburg, Bomber Command lost 549 men and 95 planes in a raid in the final days of the war that was targeted to destroy the center of a city that contained no targets of military significance. Rather a large number of 'boys' Bert got killed just to further strike a beaten foe.

James M. Spaight (1877-1968), CB, CBE, Principal Secretary to the Air Ministry in his book Bombing Vindicated:

"Hitler only undertook the bombing of British civilian targets reluctantly three months after the RAF had commenced bombing German civilian targets. Hitler would have been willing at any time to stop the slaughter. Hitler was genuinely anxious to reach with Britain an agreement confining the action of aircraft to battle zones… Retaliation was certain if we carried the war into Germany… there was a reasonable possibility that our capital and industrial centres would not have been attacked if we had continued to refrain from attacking those of Germany… We began to bomb objectives on the German mainland before the Germans began to bomb objectives on the British mainland… Because we were doubtful about the psychological effect of propagandist distortion of the truth that it was we who started the strategic bombing offensive, we have shrunk from giving our great decision of May 11th, 1940, the publicity it deserves."

Nuremburg was a major political centre for the Nazis. The figures quoted by Goragrad are for the March 1944 raid, not 1 at the end of the war, so by no means fighting a beaten foe. As to Hitler wanting to confine aircraft operations to battle zones, of course he did. His air force was designed for just that role and after Dunkirk there was no European battle zone, so that would basically give him a free hand. Do you really believe that he would not have targeted British cities if he had been able to invade? His record in Poland and the Low Countries would suggest that British cities would have suffered the same fate as Warsaw or Rotterdam. The British spent the 1st year of the war dropping leaflets on Germany for all the good it did. As to indiscriminate bombing of civilians it was the Germans that developed missiles like the V1 and V2 that were designed solely as terror weapons. Ask anyone who lived in Britain during the war if they think that we were wrong to bomb the Germans I doubt that you would find many who objected at the time.

The 8th (ETO) and 15th (MTO) Air Forces put about 32% of their bombs within 1000' of their target. That's about 1/3 of the bombs inside a circle about 3/8's of a mile across (600 meters). Do the math. 2/3's of the bombs fell 1/4 mile, or more, away from the target. That is "Daylight Precision Bombing". [1] I understand that in the dark it is harder to do.
"There are lies, there are damn lies, and then, there are statistics." That Bomber Command suffered 50% casualties is a statistic. Budding aircrew would first go into an Operational Training Unit (OTU). If they survived to graduation (10% casualty rate), they would be posted to an operational squadron for a tour, 30 'ops' flying over Nazi occupied Europe. If they finished 30 (one in four, to one in six, did), they rested. And then because there was a war and because " England expects" they 'volunteered' for a second tour. If they survived 40 ops (one in twenty five, to one in forty chances), again they rested. And again they volunteered, 90 ops. In the end there were "Centurions", veterans of 100 operations over Nazi occupied Europe. You can still see them, 3 Lancasters, a Halifax, even a few Mosquitos. In the museums, well cared for, venerated… aircraft.
The men ? Shot down, killed or captured, wounded, accidents. For 90, the odds were just too great. Some early war OTU classes had loses of over 90%.

No one wins a war. One "not loses" a war by making the other side lose more than they can afford to lose before they do that to you.

I will pause before I ask those who were there what it took to not lose.

[1] Correll, John (October 2008). "Daylight Precision Bombing" Air Force Magazine: 64. PDF link