ARTHUR TRAVIS HARRIS

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. At Rotterdam, London, Warsaw, and half a hundred other places, they put their rather naive theory into operation. They sowed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind.

I do not personally regard the whole of the remaining cities of Germany as worth the bones of one British Grenadier.

In spite of all that happened at Hamburg, bombing proved a relatively humane method

War is a nasty, dirty, rotten business. It's all right for the Navy to blockade a city, to starve the inhabitants to death. But there is something wrong, not nice, about bombing that city.

There are a lot of people who say that bombing cannot win the war. My reply to that is that it has never been tried. . . and we shall see.

Victory, speedy and complete, awaits the side that employs air power as it should be employed.

Victory, speedy and complete, awaits the side which first employs air power as it should be employed. Germany, entangled in the meshes of vast land campaigns, cannot now disengage her air power for a strategically proper application. She missed victory through air power by a hair's breadth in 1940. . . . We ourselves are now at the crossroads.

By burning down their reed-hutted villages, after we'd warned them to get out, we put them to the maximum amount of inconvenience, without physical hurt [sic], and they soon stopped their raiding and looting. The Arabs and Kurds now know what real bombing is like; in casualties and damage, they know that within 45 minutes a full-sized village can be practically wiped out and a third of its inhabitants killed or injured.

Attacks on cities are strategically justified in so far as they tend to shorten the war and so preserve the lives of allied soldiers.

We are going to scourge the Third Reich from end to end. We are bombing Germany city by city and ever more terribly in order to make it impossible for her to go in with the war. That is our object, and we shall pursue it relentlessly.

In spite of all that happened at Hamburg, bombing proved a relatively humane method

I do not personally regard the whole of the remaining cities of Germany as worth the bones of one British Grenadier.

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. At Rotterdam, London, Warsaw, and half a hundred other places, they put their rather naive theory into operation. They sowed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind.

By burning down their reed-hutted villages, after we'd warned them to get out, we put them to the maximum amount of inconvenience, without physical hurt [sic], and they soon stopped their raiding and looting. The Arabs and Kurds now know what real bombing is like; in casualties and damage, they know that within 45 minutes a full-sized village can be practically wiped out and a third of its inhabitants killed or injured.

Attacks on cities are strategically justified in so far as they tend to shorten the war and so preserve the lives of allied soldiers.

There are a lot of people who say that bombing cannot win the war. My reply to that is that it has never been tried. . . and we shall see.

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.

Victory, speedy and complete, awaits the side that employs air power as it should be employed.

War is a nasty, dirty, rotten business. It's all right for the Navy to blockade a city, to starve the inhabitants to death. But there is something wrong, not nice, about bombing that city.

Victory, speedy and complete, awaits the side which first employs air power as it should be employed. Germany, entangled in the meshes of vast land campaigns, cannot now disengage her air power for a strategically proper application. She missed victory through air power by a hair's breadth in 1940. . . . We ourselves are now at the crossroads.

We are going to scourge the Third Reich from end to end. We are bombing Germany city by city and ever more terribly in order to make it impossible for her to go in with the war. That is our object, and we shall pursue it relentlessly.