>It started when the Luftwaffe firebombed Rotterdam.
Never happened. The Germans bombed the train station with conventional explosives and the whole city went up because it was a mostly wooden city. They had big plans for the factories and losing them in the fire was viewed as loss for Germany.
The allies and the mass terrorbombing advocates started calling it a terror bombing just as they called the perfectly normal bombing of Warsaw a terror bombing. The allied propaganda machine had a negative effect in the defence of the Netherlands as they so over played what happened that rest of the country surrendered to avoid another Rotterdam to avoid what was described by the propaganda.
The only not tit for tat terror bombing that the Nazi’s did was at Gruneka during the Spanish Civil War. The Luftwaffe concluded that the terror bombing campaign increased enemy resolve to fight rather than weaken it and the tactic was dropped from thier war plans.
>The Germans made the rules. We played by them. Too bad for them.
The British made the rules and the allies persisted in them long past the point where it was clear they didn’t work.
>Would you have preferred a different outcome?
Yes, we start bombing the German transportation grid in 1943 and win the war in 1944.
No Mr. Goebels, Rotterdam wasn’t an attack on a train station. The entire wooden medieval city center was attacked along with wide areas of residential neighborhoods.
The Krauts were not trying to stop the Dutch train network from helping the war effort. They were demanding a Dutch surrender and the bombing of the cite was an “or else”. The Germans weren’t after a military target.
Same for Warsaw, the Germans went after a wide area of the city center with HE and firebombs with the goal of spreading panic. They weren’t going after a military target.
And as for Germans deciding they can’t terrorize a population, they kept trying to do so until the Luftwaffe and SS were crushed. Hell, they even named the V-1 and V-2 “vengeance” weapons. They launched them into a circle 7 miles wide if they were on their game. They did this until the month before the war ended. They were working on America bomber and rocket with the goal of hitting New York. The Germans obviously believed in terror bombing until they were blasted into being nice people.
Germans and Japanese both are very nice now, and it took Dresden attacks to do it.
The center of Rotterdam was burnt out and 800 people lost their lives. The Germans bombed the city even though the Dutch had capitulated. The Germans launched a war they had every intention of winning by any means necessary. As to Dresden and Hamburg and every other German city: Tough sh!t.