Harris had two important prejudices that colored his entire period as commander in chief. He held an exceptional hostility to the Germans, which made it possible for him not only to run a campaign of city bombing with high civilian casualties in mind, but also to relish, in his own choice of words, “this lethal campaign.” Harris was known to see the First World War as unfinished business, and he had an instinctive hostility to totalitarian systems, right or left. But neither perhaps explains sufficiently why he regarded the death of ordinary Germans as something to be sought in its own right.
