As to the supposed ease with which so called pinpoint targeting was possible by night later in the war, each aircraft was on its own
We did what we could reasonably do with our limited resources and any injury we could inflict on the hated Germans was welcomed
With respect, 1000+ heavy bombers is a very potent weapon - not really 'limited resources'. The resources which were limited were those fields of operation which lost out due to the emphasis on building and crewing bombers. And with such a large force, there was no need for pinpoint targeting - if you put hundreds of bombers over a target, enough of the bombs will hit. Just look at the Americans who regularly had to bomb through cloud, smokescreens etc but did enough damage to make a difference.
Harris, with the enthusiastic support of Churchill (well, until that memo), sought to do just that.
Again, with respect, I disagree, on two counts. I think that Racedo has it right when he says:
Bomber command was as much about making Germany pay for starting it as it was about damaging war industry.........no element of post war revisionism will change that.
But was it worthwhile haemorrhaging tens of thousands of our own brave men, and severely depleting our resources, year after year, just to make Germany pay for starting it? I'm sure that in 1942, bombing cities was universally felt to be the best way (from very limited options) to chip away at Germany's ability to wage war. It probably was the best way to do something. But by 1944, there were far better things to be done with 1000 bombers than turning even more cities into rubble. The Germans themselves were amazed by the complete failure to target their power stations; as late as 1945, they had plans to attack Moscow's power stations as they knew that a similar attack against their own would cripple them. Yet, with one famous exception, German power stations were unscathed except by the odd stray bomb.
I also disagree with
'well, until that memo'. Of course Churchill had enthusiastically embraced bombing as a course of action in the early war years (and previously). But it's absurd to suggest that he suddenly changed his view in the space of a few days. Dresden was simply the straw which broke the camel's back. After all the arguments about changing strategy during 1944, there was Harris, still wasting his people, aircraft, petrol and bombs going after German civilians when the end of the war was in sight and there was still nothing to show for the years of bombing cities. Churchill was perhaps especially uncomfortable about Harris' obstinacy given the Americans' signal success in changing tactics until they found the chink in the German armour.
I can well understand the desire among both British civilians and Bomber Command aircrew (and the commanders and politicians) to mete out retribution for the Blitz; when Harris took over, being seen to be striking back was at least as important as doing any worthwhile damage to Germany military/industrial might. I am well aware of the various accounts of RAF personnel who were thanked by random civilians for 'what they were doing', in the same way that during the Blitz, the AA guns kept lobbing shells into the sky, despite the near-impossibility of hitting anything, just to show that we were trying to fight back. But military strategy is not decided by the man in the street, nor by the footsoldiers.
The audience included many WWII bomber aircrew and one of them asked the question "Were you bothered about the number of civilian casualties caused" to which he replied "I never lost any sleep over killing the spawn of Schicklgruber". This was met by loud applause.
But how about the deaths of 55,000 of his friends and colleagues, and the terror which every crew endured? Was it really worth losing so many of our own, and devoting so much effort, to killing Germans for the sake of it?
Seventy years ago there was no time for liberal views. It really was Big Boys Rules
Absolutely. But there was time for commanders to assess the cold hard facts and re-evaluate strategy where needed.