Engines thank you for your clear and concise resume of what might be called the perceived view of the Bomber Offensive and of Harris's role in it. It has of course the great advantage to everyone else involved, including Churchill and Portal, of letting them off the hook of any criticism of the offensive and pinning it all on Harris. You say that:
The Air Staff wanted it stopped, but Harris refused.
Let us just think about that. There was one sure way for them to get their way, whatever that might be, and that was to have him replaced. Churchill had no compunction in taking such arbitrary decisions, and broke the reputations of various Generals at a stroke. Yet Harris was allowed to go on seemingly defying Allied Directives and direct orders. Well, that is the conventional wisdom, but I don't buy it. He was very clear about the night bombing campaign. It was of necessity a blunt instrument. Precision targets were the province of the likes of 617 Sqn, and most of theirs were daylight ones anyway. Main Force was a blunt instrument, whose losses meant that its crews had little or no time to finesse their skills before they too fell victim to the grim statistics. Whole cities could be missed (including the subject of this thread) and others or dummy ones bombed in error. He was too good a commander to belittle his crews abilities, but he was realistic enough to know that they did best what he had them go on doing, busting cities. That alone greatly disrupted production and transportation. If the Air Staff were not impressed that suave War Criminal Speer certainly was, for he knew the enormous resources that had to be committed to the Defence of the Reich and thus withheld from the Eastern Front.
You are right of course, there were great misgivings about the offensive, from rival Commands, other Services, and not least from his own Chaplain in Chief. But who would have done different and why was nobody appointed to do so in his place?
This is a story of betrayal. He did not defy his orders, on the contrary he carried them out as best he could. But those who issued those orders created this myth of a rogue commander conducting his own murderous campaign in defiance of his superiors, in order to evade the moral censure that only blossomed with the security and safety of peace. That is a comment on them, from Churchill downwards, rather than on him. It is sad that so many of them were, and are still, of his own Service.