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[Carpet bombing] ended a war Germany deliberately started. A war it hoped would have it dominating the world under the swastika flag and ridding the world of the Jewish people. After surviving the Luftwaffe's attempts to bomb it into submission and the horrifying V-1 and V-2 rocket attacks the British people didn't give a G-damn how many Nazi bastards and Huns died or how as long as they(the Brits) were ''giving it to them back''. War sucks. There's no way around it. It sucks even more when you start wars and end up losing them.

Except that carpet bombing didn’t end the war. The war ended after Hitler was trapped by the Soviet army and committed suicide.
Strategic bombing didn’t end the war in Japan, either - until the “shock and awe” produced by the two (count them, two) atomic bombs. And that was after Curtis LeMay had killed scores of thousands of Japanese in individual nighttime carpet bombing raids on Japanese cities. He had reached the stage where he was inviting the Japanese civilians of a city to evacuate, then devastating that city with firebombs. It seems clear that interdiction of enemy fuel supplies was the productive use of heavy bombers. It wouldn’t end a war by itself - but it would substantially hobble the opponent’s military capability so that opposing armies could victoriously end the war.

Well first of all I didn't use the term carpet bombing but I understand your point . No single weapon, short of nukes,can end or win a war.However in the skies over Germany the massive fleets of B-17s and B-24s pounded virtually every big city and major town into dust and along with bombing factories, railways, bridges and centers of communication and logistics that in the final weeks of 1945 the 8th.Force(''The Mighty Eighth'') determined there were no more targets of any importance to bomb.Further more the relentless pounding, most all of which was done by the USAAF in daylight certainly aided the troops on the ground by so degrading the ability of the Germans to keep a center of gravity and logistics for defense let alone trying to attack. And it certainly took a lot of pressure off the Russkies who had no strategic bomber force. And as good as the Brits were in no way did they suffer the kind of loses the USAAF did. I had the honor years ago to meet a man who had been a captain in the Eighth. He flew a B-17 and he told me of what it was like to encounter the Me109s and the Fw 190s. He told me ''the minute we were over Germany them sons a bitches were all over us from start to finish and the flak was so thick you could walk on it’’. As to the Japaneses Le May found that precision bombing was all but useless and very taxing on the new B-29. At the high altitudes and the vexing air currents over Japan Le May decided to use incendiaries at lower altitudes and just burn them out. War is Hell. Japan reaped the wind it sowed. But yes, it took two nukes to persuade ''the sons of Heaven'' to give it up. Ah, but war, like hindsight, is 20/20.