As the first person to mention the example of Dresden in the thread, I suppose I should also comment.
As I alluded to in that post, there’s been a fair amount of new contributions on Dresden in recent years. One of the striking patterns in this recent literature on the subject is that, despite reaching broadly diametrically opposed moral assessments, the two major British books - Frederick Taylor’s Dresden and Firestorm, the collection of papers edited by Paul Addison and Jeremy Crang - agree on the origins of the raid.
No-one doubts that the essential aim of strategic bombing was to rain as much death and destruction on German cities as possibly. Advocates of the policy explicitly saw this as the quickest way of ending the war. Following the unexpected firestorm at Hamburg, repeating this feat became the hoped-for means of maximising their efforts. That they eventually did so at Dresden was, in that sense, utterly intentional.
But Hamburg proved hard to reproduce. The Allied forces thus spent several years trying to refine their methods of attack with this aim in mind. At the same time, the overall advantages were shifting in their favour and by 1945 they were able to mount massive raids deep into Germany against previously unattacked targets. Everything - including such factors as the weather - then comes together at Dresden, with horrific consequences. Yet that this was the target where this would happen wasn’t specifically foreseen.
Put another way, the recent consensus is that Dresden was planned as an essentially typical raid. It was basically the next large city on the list and treated as such.
While the planners hoped to produce a firestorm, past experience suggested that this was unlikely to happen and so the raid’s aims had to be couched in less apocalyptic terms. And destroying the railway junction was thus the immediate intention of the raid.
The consequences were obviously untypical. And that’s created and shaped the debate about the raid thereafter.
Which is why the famous Churchill memo quoted by crowmanyclouds isn’t necessarily relevant as evidence of what the planning for the raid was. It is exceedingly good evidence that he was shocked by what had happened and so was questioning the general policy that had led to this. But Churchill hadn’t been involved in planning the raid and probably had no specific knowledge about the target choice or the tactics. So the memo is weak evidence about the latter issues, however powerful it is in general.
Taylor develops the argument that the city’s tradition of craftsmanship in trades like clockmaking had transferred into precision work for the war industries. Bomb sights and the like. Thus little heavy industry, but plenty of war work.
The issue of the total population on the 13th February is closely tied to that of the total deaths. Until recently, most people tended to quote variations of David Irving’s estimates of the deaths, which ran into the hundreds of thousands and upwards. Many of these were supposedly such refugees.
However Richard Evans demolished Irving’s numbers while an expert witness during his “Holocaust denier” libel trial at the High Court. It’s not really exaggerating to say that Evans showed that Irving had started from Goebbels’s numbers and inflated from there. Based on the contemporary documents written by the Nazi authorities in the city at the time, Evans suggested 30-40,000 as a more reasonable estimate of the death toll.
With that sort of range, the traditional vast tide of refugees sheltering in the city becomes unnecessary. There is evidence of some refugees in Dresden - as you’d expect - but the Nazi authorities were actively discouraging them from entering the city. That they were swelling the city is a myth.