I'm disappointed in Stephen Ambrose in that video, MrNubbz. He's saying things that he should know better about. Heller and Vonnegut aren't historians. They can only talk about what they saw, and for the most part that's what they're doing, although Vonnegut overstates what he knows about Dresden. I think his service in the sorry-ass 106th Infantry Division colored the whole war in his eyes. And I don't get Heller saying that he never encountered any officers whom he did not respect and yet in Catch-22 the entire chain of command is portrayed as knaves and fools.
But Ambrose should know better than to assert that any bombing of targets other than frontline troops is somehow illegitimate.
Also, Ambrose claims that the Dresden bombing was mostly done by the Brits. Per the USAF official history, Dresden is one of the few German cities that the Americans bombed more heavily than the Brits did.
These are the bomb tonnages of the seven largest German cities.
Population Tonnage
City (1939) American British Total
Berlin 4,339,000 22,090 45,517 67,607
Hamburg 1,129,000 17,104 22,583 39,687
Munich 841,000 11,471 7,858 19,329
Cologne 772,000 10,211 34,712 44,923
Leipzig 707,000 5,410 6,206 11,616
Essen 667,000 1,518 36,420 37,938
Dresden 642,000 4,441 2,659 7,100