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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.

‘And as good as the Brits were in no way did they suffer the kind of loses the USAAF did’

Excuse me?.

RAF Bomber Command lost 55,573 killed out of a total of 125,000 aircrew (thats a 44.4% death rate), with a further 8,403 wounded in action and 9,838 prisoners of war. Almost half dead. Incredible losses.

The USAAF in Europe and N Africa had 350,000 aircrew during the war and suffered 26,000 killed and 23,000 POWs. Thats a death rate of 13.46%. THREE AND A HALF TIMES LESS THAN RAF BOMBER COMMAND.

An RAF Bomber Command crew member had a worse chance of survival than an infantry officer in World War I!.

Your ignorance is frankly shocking.

the massive fleets of B-17s and B-24s pounded virtually every big city and major town into dust . . . 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.

There wasn’t much point to bombing in daylight if all you wanted to do was carpet bomb. Much safer to do that at night, as LeMay did to Japan with his firebombs. In Europe it was the British, and Bomber Harris in particular, whose thing was carpet bombing - and they did that at night. According to

Fire and Fury
The Allied Bombing of Germany, 1942-1945
Randall Hansen
the British had excellent intelligence that the American anti-petroleum efforts were squeezing Germany effectively, and Harris was ordered by his British superiors to take every occasion to use his bombers to follow up at night on American efforts in that direction - but of course Harris had discretion, and he aggressively exploited it to evade that command and continue his anti-civilian bombing as his de facto priority until, indeed, there weren’t any more German cities which still constituted a viable target.
Part of the controversy over the Dresden raid was exactly that they had gone that far into the war without bombing it, and it seemed somewhat gratuitous to do it when they finally did. Had Harris hit Dresden a year earlier, it would have been only one more German city he had attempted to raze to the ground.
I was much taken by

The New Dealers' War:
FDR and the War Within World War II
by Thomas Fleming

Information there about the politics of WWII which I hadn’t known, and also some military facts. Fleming asserts that the reputation of the Norden bombsight was deliberately overhyped for domestic American political purposes. There was then, as now, moral objection to carpet bombing civilians. But the Norden bombsight couldn’t actually “put a bomb in a pickle barrel” as was then claimed. It is only now that we’ve started using bombs which are actually hi-tech guided missiles that “putting a bomb in a pickle barrel” is remotely descriptive of the accuracy actually attained in high-altitude level bombing.
Not only for military effectiveness, about which the Americans and British disagreed, but also to assuage the conscience of the American civil population, the American Air Force promoted precision, daylight, bombing of military targets. That was a reflection of American culture - to such an extent that the American bomber flying leadership was shocked at the order to carpet bomb Dresden, and had to be bullied into it.
By the time it got to carpet bombing Tokyo, attitudes were different - not least because the Japanese, with their Banzai charges, had established the principle that their own lives were cheap. In addition to racism, which in the Pacific was a two-way street.