Years later, in 1977, Harris was interviewed by the British Forces Broadcasting Service. He’d had more than thirty years to think about his actions.ii But when he spoke about one of his most infamous missions, when his bombers reduced the city of Dresden to rubble, there was no remorse:
Well, of course people are apt to say, “Oh, poor Dresden, that lovely city. Solely engaged in producing beautiful little china shepherdesses with frilly skirts.” But as a matter of fact, it was the last viable…governing center of Germany. And also, it was virtually the last way through from north to south for German reserves, moving in front of the Russian, and our own, army advances.
Ostensibly to prevent the movement of troops through Dresden, Harris had his bombers take out 1,600 acres in the city’s core and kill twenty-five thousand civilians over the course of three days. When asked why he targeted civilians instead of military installations, Harris challenged the question:
We weren’t aiming particularly at the civilian population. We were aiming at the production of everything that made it possible for the German armies to continue the war. That was the whole idea of the bombing offensive. Including, as I said, the destruction of the facilities for building submarines and the armament industries throughout Germany and the people who worked in them. They were all active soldiers, to my mind. People who worked in the production of munitions must expect to be treated as active soldiers. Otherwise, where do you draw the line?
They were all active soldiers, to my mind. Children. Mothers. The elderly. Nurses in hospitals. Pastors in churches. When you make the leap to say that we will no longer try to aim at something specific, then you cross a line. Then you have to convince yourself that there is no difference between a soldier on the one hand and children and mothers and nurses in a hospital on the other.
The whole argument of the Bomber Mafia, their whole reason for being, was that they didn’t want to cross that line. They weren’t just advancing a technological argument. They were also advancing a moral argument about how to wage war. The most important fact about Carl Norden, the godfather of precision bombing, is not that he was a brilliant engineer or a hopeless eccentric. It’s that he was a devoted Christian.
As historian Stephen McFarland puts it,
You might wonder, if he thought he was being in service to humanity, why he would develop sights to help people drop bombs. And the reason was because he was a true believer that by making bombing accuracy better, he could save lives.
He truly believed what the Army and Navy were telling him. And that is that we’re going to destroy machines of war, not the people of war. We’re not going to do like [we did in] World War I, where we slaughtered millions of soldiers. We’re not going to try to slaughter millions of civilians. We’re only going to try to blow up factories and blow up machines of war. And he bought into that. That was part of his basic philosophy of life, his Christianity.
So for Commanding General Ira Eaker, that midnight trip to Casablanca to save precision bombing was the most morally consequential act of his life. And when he came back to his air base in England, he said, We need a new plan for the war in Europe, one that will show the British that there is a better way to wage an air war. And whom did he pick to think up that plan? Haywood Hansell, now General Hansell, one of the brightest of the young lights in the US Army Air Forces. The same Hansell who would one day abruptly lose his job to Curtis LeMay on the island of Guam.
Footnotes
i I explore more about Lindemann in “The Prime Minister and the Prof,” an episode from the second season of my podcast, Revisionist History.
ii In 1969, Kurt Vonnegut published his novel Slaughterhouse-Five. Although it is framed as science fiction, the novel is in large part based on Vonnegut’s experience as an American POW in Dresden during the RAF bombing campaign. The novel stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for sixteen weeks.
Chapter Four
“The truest of the true believers.”
1.
Haywood Hansell came from an aristocratic southern military family. His great-great-great-grandfather John W. Hansell served in the American Revolution. His great-great-grandfather William Young Hansell was an Army officer in the War of 1812. His great-grandfather was a general in the Confederate Army, his grandfather a Confederate officer. And his father was an Army surgeon who came to dinner in a white linen suit and a panama hat. Haywood liked to carry a swagger stick, as the British Army officers did. Everyone called him Possum, his childhood nickname.
Hansell was slender and short—a skilled dancer, a poet, and an aficionado of Gilbert and Sullivan operettas. His favorite book was Don Quixote. He put flying first, polo second, and family a distant third. Once, early in his marriage, the story goes, he heard a baby cry and turned to his wife. “What in heaven’s name is that?” “That’s your son,” she said. On his final combat mission as a pilot, a bombing run over Belgium, Hansell entertained his exhausted crew with a rendition of the popular music-hall song “The Man on the Flying Trapeze.” As C. P. Snow would have put it, Hansell is the kind of character who makes a novelist’s fingers itch.