Sir Arthur 'Bomber' 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.”

“The aim of the Combined Bomber Offensive...should be unambiguously stated [as] the destruction of German cities, the killing of German workers, and the disruption of civilized life throughout Germany.”

“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 on with the war. That is our object; we shall pursue it relentlessly.”

“The bombers alone provided the means of victory.”

“It is not for me to judge the morality of the bombing. That is a matter for the historians and the philosophers. I was given a job to do, and I did it to the best of my ability.”

“There are no political targets. The political target is the German nation.”

“War is a brutal business. It is not a game of cricket.”

“If we had had the same air superiority as we finally did in the last six months of the war from D-Day on, the war would have been over, without a Russian in it, without a landing on the Continent, a year or 18 months sooner.”

“One has to be careful what one says in this world, but I am convinced that the bombing of Germany has been a decisive factor in the war.”