Sir Arthus Harris & the Lancaster bomber
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From the same set of stamps featuring Hugh Dowding, this stamp artwork shows Sir Arthur Harris, with a Lancaster bomber from his command.
Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris is possibly the most famous air commander of the Second World War. Having been as a fighter commander in the Royal Flying Corps, he remained with the Royal Air Force after World War 1 and by 1942 he was Commander-in-Chief of Bomber Command.
A radical change in bombing tactics was approved by the Cabinet in 1942, following a paper presented by Professor Lindemann, Churchill’s chief scientific advisor. Small-scale night-bombing had not been a success. The new plan was indiscriminate area bombing of German cities, destroying houses and civilian morale as much as factories and military targets. Despite reservations, the cabinet were under pressure from the Soviets to pull German resources from the eastern front, and a land offensive was years away.
Harris was the man to carry out this strategy, and he saw it as returning the Blitz to its instigators. He said: "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."
War production was beginning to allow the rapid construction of four-engine heavy bombers. This led to Harris’ ‘thousand bomber raids’, including the infamous raid on Dresden which destroyed the city in a firestorm. Harris’ poor post-war reputation may have something to do with his frequent protestations that his bombing tactics could win the war inside a few months, whenever he was ordered to turn from the cities to more strategic targets.
The Avro Lancaster was the main bomber of the RAF from 1942. Based on an earlier twin-engined design, the four-engined Lancaster was most famous for Operation Chastise, the ‘Dam Buster’ raids on the Ruhr Valley dams.
The other stamps in the set show Lord Dowding with a Hawker Hurricane, Lord Tedder with a Hawker Typhoon, Lord Trenchard and the De Havilland DH9A, and Lord Portal with the De Havilland DH98 Mosquito. The artwork is by B Sanders.