I donāt think there are too many, if any, examples of [given that this thread is primarily about Bomber Harris] intentional British bombing of purely civilian targets in Europe. The only one I can think of is a low level raid on a French or Belgian prison to release prisoners of the Germans.
The problem with high altitude aerial bombing in WWII, for all sides, was that it was largely inaccurate for various human and technical reasons. Those problems were amplified by flying onto heavily defended targets. Major British bombing in Europe was made even less accurate by concentrating on night raids. Not that daylight raids by the Americans were huge successes, either. Thatās not to say that British and Allied raids on Europe (and American raids on Japan) werenāt highly destructive, because they were, but their success in hitting their targets was fairly low as a percentage of bombs dropped.
As for killing civilians to destroy the will to fight, the purpose in all air forces was not to kill civilians per se or even at all, but to destroy the capacity to make war by destroying enemy forces, enemy weapons and enemy weapon production capacity and to impose burdens on the target nation which diverted its resources from war purposes, whether by absorbing hospital and related medical resources and thus denying them to the armed forces; or impeding electronic and physical communications; or clogging transport routes with refugees to impede military traffic; and so on. Whether that was successful and proportionate to the attacking nationās effort is a different question, but it made sense at the time.
Looking at another target of Allied bombing, being Japan, what is generally ignored in outrage about the pre-atomic bombing and firebombing of Japan in the last year of the war is that it is simplistic to say that civilians alone were targeted. Japan then, and even now although to a much lesser extent, had a highly diversified industrial supply network with manufacturing of components starting in large numbers of tiny home factories which fed up the line to increasingly larger factories.
The diversified industrial production in Japan illustrates the problem in trying to draw a clearly articulated line between military and civilian targets, but those making the decisions are forced ultimately to draw an arbitrary line beyond which there are no targets. At the lowest level, was strafing a farmer and his horse ploughing his field a war crime upon an innocent civilian (and an undoubtedly innocent horse) or a legitimate step to deny the enemy the production of food for troops, or munitions workers, or other civilians contributing to the war effort, which might come from that field and ploughing?
But does it matter in the end when aerial bombs are often woefully inaccurate, to the extent that the Orwellian term ācollateral damageā was, depending upon oneās source, coined a quarter (Vietnam) to half a century (GW1) after WWII by the masters of aerial bombing, the Americans, to excuse hitting the wrong targets?
