The strategic bombing campaigns over European cities has led to a number of disagreements among governments, veterans associations, and museums in Canada, the UK, and elsewhere--not to mention historians. The term "strategic bombing" itself belies the general inaccuracies of Bomber Command during the Second World War. There was really no guarantee that certain historical sites would be spared the ravages of war. This is one of the reasons why SHAEF established and deployed Civil Affairs units, first in Sicily in 1943 and then in larger numbers after the Battle for Schelde in November 1944. CA officers were specialists in various areas, such as architectural restoration, agricultural production, finance, etc. The film "Monuments Men" is an extremely poor representation of these units, riddled with historical inaccuracies about what CA did in Europe, but it in general the film provides an idea about what the Allies hoped to achieve after Allied bombing campaigns destroyed many towns and cities.

Many historians in the English language have become more concerned about the morality and purpose of strategic bombing on cities like Hamburg and Dresden. Randall Hansen, for example, wrote a book called Fire and Fury: the Allied Bombing of Germany, 1942-1945 (Doubleday, 2008) in which he argues that strategic bombing over Germany had very little effect other than to demoralize and kill civilians. In this narrative, Hansen presents Arthur Harris as a butcher who sought to inflict maximum damages on German cities. At almost the exact same time, Randall Wakelam wrote a much more cogent book called The Science of Bombing: Operational Research in RAF Bomber Command (University of Toronto Press, 2009). The central purpose of this book was to explore just how accurate bombing could have been. Wakelam demonstrates that in the raids from 13-14 February 768 aircraft dropped 2,646 tons of ordnance on Dresden, while the next day US bombers dropped an additional 782 tons. Operational research shows that about 84% of all ordnance dropped missed the targeted zones.

Broaching questions about the morality of Allied bombing raids is often met with controversy, especially from veterans associations of RAF, RCAF, and other air forces. In Canada, for example, there was an extensive debate about how the Canadian War Museum cast doubt on the efficacy of strategic bombing. Some veterans voiced vehement opposition and an exhibit had to be heavily edited to not question the morality of such bombing operations.

In the end, the RAF Official history concluded that "although the Combined Bomber Offensive against Germany did not begin to meet its objectives--the progressive, if not sudden, decline in enemy war production and, later, civilian morale--until the last months of 1944, four full years after it began in earnest, it is also true that, bit by bit, bombing at least played some part in slowing down the rate of expansion in the German war economy and so contributed to the Allies' already significant material superiority. Precisely by how much, however, is difficult to determine." (pp.866-867). In other words, for official historians the casualties and destroyed sites are not really of chief concern, but rather the effectiveness of strategic bombing concerning German morale and materiel.

One of the reasons this question, and the debate that often ensues, becomes heated is that questioning the morality of what the RAF/RCAF and US Air Force did over Germany is often understood as an attack on the veterans themselves. We have fairly reliable data regarding how many losses Bomber Command suffered. For example, of the 7,654 graves in the Reichswald cemetery, 4,000 of them are airmen. Bomber Command arguably suffered some of the highest casualty rates out of all the armed forces during the Second World War.

In sum, the Allies bombed dykes and flooded out swathes of territory in the Netherlands (particularly in the southern province of Zeeland), bombed and flooded areas in western France and Germany, and destroyed many landmarks in Caen, Hamburg, Dresden, and countless other cities. SHAEF's main priority was the prosecution of the war and consequence management was of secondary concern.

You see whole towns/cities destroyed by both Allied and Axis bombing, but many cathedrals, churches, and other well-known historical monuments survived with some damage but fairly unscathed when compared with the surrounding neighbourhood.

I would just note that some of this depends on the type of bombing. Bombing with high explosives is very damaging to whatever it hits. Bombing with napalm, however, creates fires that burn wooden structures to the ground but just gut structures made out of stone. With a close examination of the buildings in question, it's not always clear how "unscathed" they are — if they are in a firebombing raid, they are likely gutted to some degree, and what you are seeing is a stone "shell."

An easy example of this is the Genbaku Dome in Hiroshima, which was very close to the epicenter of the blast. Superficially from aerial photos it looks reasonably intact. From closer-up photos you can see that it is just a husk — everything flammable on the inside burned.

I know more about Japanese raids that European ones, but their general approach from March 1945 onward was to say, "here's a target area of interest, chosen because it has several industrial and/or military targets inside of it. Let's saturate the whole area with incendiary bombs and see how much of it we can burn out." There was no way, in this scheme, to avoid hitting civilian or cultural buildings. (Prior to March 1945 they were still doing high-altitude "precision" bombing. I don't know if they try to spare cultural buildings — I doubt it.)

The only case I know of in Japan's case where cultural monuments were deliberately spared was when the Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, removed Kyoto from the atomic bombing list. It had no real military importance and was on the list primarily because of its cultural value and because of its high numbers of intellectuals (who were thought to be able to appreciate the importance of atomic bombing better). Stimson had been there himself on his honeymoon and considered it too important culturally to destroy, that if they destroyed it wantonly the Japanese people would not forgive them. Some effort was made to retain it on the list but it was eventually scrapped.

The heavy bombers had a CEP (Circular Error Probable, the radius of a circle in which 50% of bombs would fall) that's widely quoted as 3300ft*. They essentially aimed for an area of a city, rather than anything more precise, and even then often missed.

• e.g. in The Oxford Companion to American Military History

Thank you all for your answers! Especially differentiating between the types of bombs dropped--I had just assumed a bomb was a bomb. Also thank you for your references--I plan on taking a look at those very soon. I really appreciate everyone taking the time to respond to my question.