HARRIS, SIR ARTHUR TRAVERS, 1ST BARONET

born April 13, 1892, Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, Eng. died April 5, 1984, Goring-on-Thames, Oxfordshire byname Bomber Harris British air officer who initiated and directed the saturation bombing that the Royal Air Force inflicted on Germany during World War II. Harris was reared in Rhodesia and educated in English public schools. He joined the first Rhodesian Regiment at the outbreak of World War I and served in South Africa and South West Africa. Following his return to England in 1915, he joined the Royal Flying Corps and eventually commanded various squadrons in France and at home. After the war he was given a permanent commission in the RAF. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, he served at several posts in Iraq, India, and Britain and in the Air Ministry. Made an air commodore in 1937, Harris was named air vice marshal in 1939 and rose to air marshal in 1941 and commander in chief of the RAF bomber command in February 1942. As a firm believer in mass raids, Air Marshal Harris developed the saturation technique of mass bombingthat of concentrating clouds of bombers in a giant raid on a single city, with the object of completely demolishing it. He applied this method with great destructive effect on Axis-occupied Europe from 1942 to the end of World War II. Harris was made marshal of the Royal Air Force in 1945 and retired soon after. He had been knighted in 1942 and was created a baronet in 1953. From 1946 to 1953 he was managing director of the South African Marine Corporation.