Germany was responsible for the terror bombing not just of London, where more than 28,000 people perished during the Blitz, but many other cities, including Birmingham, Liverpool, Portsmouth, Swansea, Belfast, Cardiff and Clydebank, the port near Glasgow where only eight of 12,000 houses survived undamaged. The Germans had no scruples about using incendiaries, delayed action aerial mines and huge V2 rockets either.

The RAF strategic bomber offensive followed miserable performances by the British army in overseas theatres. Bombing was the one sure way of striking back, directly, at the enemy's productive vitals, and yes, civilian morale, a euphemism for indiscriminate loss of life due to the inaccurate technologies involved. An openly contemptuous Stalin was mollified when Churchill offered to share aerial photos of damage to German cities. A nation that had worshipped military might since Bismarck got a major shock when a firestorm wiped out 43,000 people in Hamburg. If you start a fight, you had better know how to finish it, especially one with hard and implacable men like Churchill and Harris.

Though the impact of bombing on industrial production remains contested, it forced diversion of prodigious resources into defensive tactics. Germany had to manufacture fighters, rather than bombers, as well as deploying nearly 9,000 88mm guns, which would have been used to halt Soviet tanks.  Some 90,000 men operated anti-aircraft guns, with a further million engaged in clearing rubble. By destroying transport links, the Allied air campaign progressively chopped the German economy into isolated boxes.

Insidious attempts have been made to forge a moral equivalence between strategic bombing and the Holocaust. This is done by transposing technical terms, so that civilians were "gassed" in fiery "furnaces" by which the authors mean casualties of smoke inhalation in basement shelters. Nothing Bomber Command did contravened the laws of war of the day, which governed combatants and PoWs, not civilians whose efforts and skills Nazi propagandists bruited as a vital front. 

Unlike Nazis shooting defenceless women and children into ditches, or herding them into purpose-built gas chambers, RAF air crew faced the nightly risk of violent death. Their survival rate was worse than that of a junior officer on the Western Front in the First World War a 44.4 per cent  fatality rate in a slugging match that went on, night after night, for years on end. 

Germans should count themselves lucky that the Allies did not develop a deployable atomic bomb earlier, rather than attempting to criminalise Allied fighting men who terminated that barbarous regime. One of the most militarised societies of the time also had war burned out of its soul. We all owe a very great debt to the heroes of Bomber Command and Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris.