Dresden had a lot of old wooden structures, so the town burned to beat hell. As someone mentioned, "Slaughterhouse 5" was inspired by Kurt Vonnegut's having lived through the bombing as a POW, and for that matter may have led to his having become a writer in the first place.
Strategic bombing in WWII was shown (even during the war, to some extent) to have failed to make much of a dent in German industrial output, in part because Germany used so many underground facilities, and also in part because the bomb accuracy was pretty poor. Luis Alvarez discusses this in his memoirs, which I'm reading right now; there's an article by Freeman Dyson in the recent Technology Review (I think that's the name of the mag) regarding his work for the Allied aerial bombing efforts that sort of overlaps. Omar Bradley discusses the lack of bombing accuracy including friendly fire type losses both in the invasion of Sicily and in Overlord and Cobra.
As a sidebar, a couple of years ago there was an interview with a German air veteran who described (in one of those war mags) having to bomb bridges inside Germany to slow the Russian advance. In at least one case, the roads still go to the bend in the river, but the bridge was never rebuilt, perhaps because it's no longer German on both sides. :') Early on, German Stukas were used to good effect against Russian tanks (the Russian T-34 is generally considered the best WWII tank or one thereof). Luftwaffe bombing over British targets was mostly a form of terrorism, as there were no German invasion plans. Luftwaffe losses were considerable due to radar coordination of British defenses, and somewhat pointless. The V1s (small, pulse-jet, nuisance weapons) were built in large numbers, and launched in large numbers, but were shot down in large numbers. The V2 was the trump card, but came too late, and didn't have much of a warhead for the expense involved.