Veale cites J.M. Spaight's book BOMBING VINDICATED to prove that the British started the deliberate bombing of German civilians on May 11, 1940 which Spaight called the "Splendid Decision."
Interesting. But another quote from Spaight's book goes like this...
JM Spaight's Bombing Vindicated."It could have harmed us morally only if it were equivalent to an admission that we were the first to bomb towns. It was nothing of the sort. The German airmen were the first to do that in the present war. (They had done it long before, too—at Durango and Guernica in 1937, nay, at London in 1915-18.) It was they, not the British airmen, who created a precedent for 'war against the civilian population'."
"As it was he [Hitler] chose to set a precedent for the bombing of centres of population in this war at its very outset and thereby prejudiced his position as the advocate of the mutual abandonment by the belligerents of the practice of strategic bombing. In short, it was he who really began the battles of the towns. He is probably very sorry now that he ever did so."
Prime Minister Chamberlain had given an assurance that "the British Government would never resort to the deliberate attack on women and children and other civilians for the purpose of mere terrorism."
However, Churchill's policy was different, as Spaight put it, "Hitler only undertook the bombing of British civilian targets reluctantly after the RAF had commenced bombing German civilian targets... It gave Coventry, Birmingham, Sheffield and Southampton the right to look Kiev, Kharkov, Stalingrad and Sebastopol in the face. Our Soviet allies would have been less critical of our inactivity if they had understood what we had done... Hitler would have been willing at any time to stop the slaughter. Hitler was genuinely anxious to reach with Britain an agreement confining the action of aircraft to battle zones.'
The difference between the German Air Force and the RAF was that the Germans designed their air force bombers to aid the ground forces in attacks, while the RAF designed heavy bombers for area attacks. Veale discusses the difference between tactical bombing in support of the army vs. terror attacks. Ground attacks on cities supported by bombers (tactical bombing) as the Germans did is very different than targeting civilians for terror as happened in Dresden.
In a nutshell, Spaight admitted that thousands of British died because Churchill wanted Coventry . . . to look Kiev . . . in the face. As to Guernica, the Germans never admitted a policy of targeting civilians, unlike the British, and Guernica had armaments factories - check Wikipedia for info on Guernica, such as the shooting of a captured German pilot by the Communists prior to the bombing.
As Voltaire said, Beware of people who can make you believe absurdities, because they can make you commit atrocities. Even Churchill came to the realization that the RAF had committed an atrocity at Dresden.