RAF Squadron Leader Peter de Wesselow:

"It was better to kill German civilians than let them cause the deaths of other, entirely innocent civilians. So if a communications centre, or an industrial area, involved German civilians, that was fate, tragic indeed. Finally, what could German civilians take? If Dresden was worse than Hiroshima, might it not have caused surrender, as Hiroshima did? We didn't know that argument then, but it was in the background. That's how we saw it then." From The Devil's Tinderbox: Dresden 1945 by Alexander McKee