Arthur Travers Harris

From Wikiquote
Jump to navigation Jump to search
I do not personally regard the whole of the remaining cities of Germany as worth the bones of one British Grenadier.

Marshal of the Royal Air Force Sir Arthur Travers Harris, 1st Baronet (13 April 18925 April 1984) was a British air marshal during World War II.

Quotes[edit]

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. … They sowed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind.
  • In spite of all that happened at Hamburg, bombing proved a relatively humane method.
    • Statement on the July 1943 bombings of Hamburg, as quoted in The Valour and the Horror : The Untold Story of Canadians in the Second World War (1991)by Merrily Weisbord and ‎Merilyn Simonds Mohr, p. 107
  • 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.
    • Letter to Sir Norman Bottomley (29 March 1945), quoted in Bomber Harris: The Story of Marshal of the Royal Air Force Sir Arthur Harris (1985) by Dudley Saward, p. 294
  • 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.
    • The World at War: the Landmark Oral History from the Classic TV Series (2007) by Richard Holmes, p. 296
  • 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.
    • The World at War: the Landmark Oral History from the Classic TV Series (2007) by Richard Holmes, p. 298
  • 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.
    • Tail-End Charlies: The Last Battles of the Bomber War, 1944-45 (2005) by John Nichos

External links[edit]

Wikipedia
Wikipedia
Wikipedia has an article about:
Commons
Commons