S'land I would hope that the Mods would not wish to remove your post from this thread, it needs everyone that it can get and certainly one as central to the issue as yours! Say "Bomber Command in WWII" and within seconds Dresden will be mentioned. I have never understood why the inhabitants of that city should have been spared as against any other in the Reich, but just as with the direction that the Belgrano was steaming when torpedoed, this has become the sound bite on which to hang the entire Bombing Offensive against Nazi Germany in WWII, and strangely only by Bomber Command as against the USAAF. Was the bombing of Dresden by both Air Forces an evil thing? Yes! Was the whole damn war an evil thing? Yes! Was the greater evil not fighting that evil regime in Berlin and overcoming it? Yes! If you have to fight a war you should do so to win, as thoroughly and as quickly as possible, right to the end. That is what we did, and the overwhelming method used was Strategic Bombing, with all the inherent technological limitations that implied even in 1945. I should like to know how else we could have won otherwise. I should like to know how else we could have landed the armies to liberate Europe, including Germany, otherwise. Or is the DS solution to have left it all to the Red Army? In that event our laws would now be being passed in Berlin or Moscow (rather than Brussels!), either way 1,000 years might well have been a reasonable guesstimate for such an Empire to last.
If those who find the figures pushed out by Goebbels more comforting in reinforcing their prejudices wish to slur the British High Command for this campaign that is their democratic privilege. If in doing so they seek to deny the proper recognition of those who fought night after night from the start to the end of the war, as often not surviving, that is unacceptable and a dreadful shame on this nation for letting such sentiments prevail.
P.S. As regards the PPRuNe clock, it has a rather endearing will of its own, defying all attempts to make it conform. I cannot but admire its wilfulness!