He was there.
Yes, I saw that, and I read SlaughterHouse-Five a long time ago (there’s the movie too). That’s the reference I was making. Kurt Vonnegut was there too.
Regarding the bombing of civilian targets....
Much of the reason we used nuclear weapons against Japan was the estimated one million Allied causualties that were to be the result of the invasion of mainland Japan, and the noted suicidal tenaciousness of the Japanese on the various islands we encountered on the way to the mainland. By shocking the Japanese with one big bomb at a time, one plane per bomb, we upped the psychological ante a hundred-fold, even compared to the Tokyo raids of March ‘45, that resulted in over 80,000 or more deaths (in two nights). We demonstrated, and implied further, that we could wipe out an entire high-profile city with one plane, one bomb. The result was the Emperor overruling his Bushido-traditioned, fanatical military leaders, to end the war.
If we had developed the bomb before February 1945 (Dresden), who knows. Long before then we were involved in “total war” with the Germans and Japanese, in which civilians were considered targets too. It probably started with the German’s bombing of London in 1940 (Battle of Britain). But it certainly didn’t end there. Area bombing was considered more effective than precision bombing because, well, there really wasn’t any precision high-altitude bombing in WWII. The accuracy was terrible. The Allies, as policy, used “area bombing” to “ravage the German economy, break the morale of the German people and force an early surrender”.
Another reason we wanted to end the war sooner was the fact that the Russians were about to overrun Europe — if they had progressed further west the Iron Curtain might have been much further west too.
I don’t believe the bomber crews that devastated Dresden were murderers.