Jane-Doh:-
The problem with the way Bomber Command was used was that civilian deaths weren't an unfortunate result of the bombing; they were largely the primary goal. Sure by burning down a whole city you'd wipe out some industry, but as Winston Churchill said, they were bombing cities largely for the sake of increasing terror under a pretext.
Most of this was inspired by General Giulio Douhet who felt that to win a war, one should bomb cities and population centers, destroy industrial targets and kill lots of civilians and terrorize them so they'd rise up, overthrow their leaders; then surrender.
It's kind of ironic that the international laws such as the Hague Conventions were created to reduce civilian casualties in war and people like Giulio Douhet, Hugh Trenchard, Arthur Harris among others sought to maximize them.
The one thing that Bomber Command could hit consistently with Main Force were cities. The reason that Harris targeted them is because he was ordered to do so by the War Cabinet (headed by Churchill), via the Air Board. All WWII adversaries who had the means to target cities did so, and for the same reasons (the USA included!). As with all weapons of war, the 1940's bomber was both terrible in its destructive power and yet very limited in practice. You can read all the books that have been published on the subject, but you would have had to be a young inexperienced crew member to know the sheer challenge it was to fight your way through the night in the company of hundreds of other bombers that you could not see (or even follow!), try to stay on track and hence find the target, let alone manage to hit it, fight your way home and safely land on your own runway (if you could find it). No modern aids, those that you had could and would be subverted by the enemy, just an air plot, a compass, and a stop watch to fall back on. Despite all that, this was indeed a terrible weapon that killed hundreds of thousands, mainly civilians.
WWII was a peoples war, for the very reason that (with the exception of the USA) it was brought to and fought by its civil populations. It doesn't matter what Douhet, Trenchard, Harris or their US counterparts (who you omit to mention) thought or said, the Strategic Bombing of cities happened because it could happen, endex. It was a weapon of war in a total war, just as Mr Maxim's was in an earlier one. The Allied Bombing Campaign had a profound effect on the outcome of WWII, to the extent that there would have been no second front without it (or rather it was indeed a second front in itself!) nor a German defeat on the Eastern Front, in my opinion. The reason that such statements became utter heresy is not for moral reasons, for war is immoral anyway, but for expediency as old enemies became allies and vice versa. The victims of that expediency are the old boys that people profess to admire so much. Just tell them that what they did, though so terrible, was so necessary. I would have thought that little enough to ask, especially of their modern counterparts!