Bomber Harris: Raking Through the Ashes of the Strategic Air Campaign Against Germany

Abstract

Don Shaw’s drama Bomber Harris was first broadcast on BBC1 on Sunday 3 September 1989 as part of the BBC’s commemorations marking the fiftieth anniversary of the outbreak of the Second World War. The drama explored one of the most controversial figures of the Second World War, Sir Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris, commander-in-chief of RAF Bomber Command between 1942 and 1945. A hero in 1945, Harris’s reputation steadily declined after the war. Identified as the key architect of Bomber Command’s area bombing policy that resulted in the devastation of German cities and the deaths of thousands of German civilians, he was vilified as a mass murderer and a war criminal. A similar fate befell the crews of Bomber Command. Shunned and isolated, they were excluded from the nation’s panoply of wartime heroes. Any revisiting of the British strategic air campaign against Germany was therefore almost inevitably destined to result in debate and discord. Exploration of this extremely powerful drama, and the reactions to it, reveals the extent to which the British understood, and misunderstood, the history of the Second World War, and how reliant they had become on television interpretations of the experience.