World Battlefronts: BATTLE OF EUROPE: High Road to Hell

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The air offensive against Germany and Axis Europe is suffering from understatement. The objective is not merely to destroy cities, industries, human beings and the human spirit on a scale never before attempted by air action. The objective is to defeat Hitler with bombs, and to do it in 1943.

Two men in Britain share a conviction that it can be done and the responsibility for trying to do it. They are Air Marshal Chief Sir Arthur Travers Harris, chief of the R.A.F. Bomber Command, and Major General Ira Clarence Eaker, commander of the U.S. Eighth Air Force. They have assured their military superiors, who in turn have passed the word to Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt, that Germany can be bombed out of the war this year—on one condition. The condition is that nothing whatsoever—whether it be a second front in Europe, expanded action in the Pacific or a Burma-China campaign—be allowed to reduce the forces recently allocated to the bombardment of Germany.

Winston Churchill indicated the scope of the assurance and the nature of the condition. He also stated the reaction of the global strategists when he said: The experiment is well worth trying, so long as other measures are not excluded. Although this was a qualified statement, it may be assumed that the allocation to the European air campaign in the European theater had been made with due regard to "other measures."

Since the experiment is definitely to be tried, Harris, Eaker & Co. can reasonably expect to get enough planes, men and bombs for an all-out trial. Mr. Churchill, Mr. Roosevelt and the heads of their armies and navies are duty bound to rate the air offensive as an uncertain experiment. They must assume that it will fail to knock out Germany, and that the bombers over Europe are hammering out a prelude to victory by invasion. But the airmen doing the bombing are under no such compulsion. It is now their business, and their inclination, to bomb for a knockout.

If that knockout is delivered from the air this year, its chief author will be Air Chief Marshal Harris. Except perhaps in the last rounds, the chief instrument will be his Bomber Command. His friend and poker foe, General Eaker, is just as much of an airman, and he had a great deal to do with presenting and championing the airmen's proposition. But, in comparison with the R.A.F., the Eighth Air Force and its Bomber Command are still small and young. American bombers first attacked Occupied France last August, first flew into Germany last Jan. 27. The American force is growing fast; the effectiveness of its blows has lately been out of all proportion to its numbers; and Harris himself has often said that the final, crushing weight of Allied air power would come from America. But during the greater part of 1943 most of the bombers and bombs thrown at Germany from Britain will be R.A.F. bombers and bombs.

So Bloody Inhuman. A hackneyed remark about Sir Arthur Travers Harris is that he has "a gentle face and a furious tongue." At home with handsome Lady Harris (his second wife, whom he married in 1938) and their four-year-old daughter Jackie, he can indeed be gentle. But men who serve with him learn sooner or later that his gentle face is a sort of booby trap, luring the unwary to the lash of his tongue.