A German historian spoke on BBC Radio 4 this morning stating that many of the German civilian deaths from indiscriminate British bombing raids in WWII were unnecessary and made no military sense.

Winston Churchill's grandson denies this.

See: BBC News item

Overall, I think that the British night bombing campaign was a failure. It failed to force a German surrender by itself, which is what the British intended it to do, and also failed to seriously inhibit German production of war materials - since the German industry simply went underground or decentralised. Far from being cut back, German production kept increasing right up to 1945.

The British would have done better with a larger army than with a very large heavy bomber force.

With that in mind, killing all those German civilians was a mistake, because it failed to shorten the war, but wasn't a war crime - just a military strategy that failed.