BEagle, you may have a point about counter-force compared with counter-value, but I recall various targets that were supposedly counter-force, or would have been so claimed at the subsequent war-crimes trials in Rio or wherever. "The target it the HQ of the Western TVD," that the HQ was essentially an administrative centre, would have been vacated early in the conflict, and was the centre of a large city was brushed aside.
The problem with a counter-force strategy early in the war would have suffered from two main drawbacks - lack of assets to effect that strategy and lack of target concentration to deliver the blow.
Attacks on German naval units - Tirpitz and the submarine pens, on the rocket launch sites and Peenemunde - were all counter-force. Attacks on oil production and ball-bearing production were 'panacea' targets. Attacks on viaducts and the railway system were valid interdiction targets.
Harris would, I suggest, have asserted that attacks on cities in the Ruhr were indeed counter-force with attacks on Berlin, Hamburg and Dresden similarly attributed much as we would have claimed for Leningrad, Moscow and Kiev.
In the other direction London and Lincoln could have been claimed as counter-force, or collateral damage whereas Birmingham was your atypical counter-value target.