R(C)AF Strategic Bombing Doctrine was set long before 1939.:
http://www.greenwood.com/images/coverImage.aspx?sku=C4997
Objectives:
1) Keep Russia in the war by fighting a Second Front from the air. No one had forgotten the near-catastrophe that followed the Bolsheviks' negotiated peace with Germany in 1917. Stalin wanted D-Day in 1943. 1942, actually. Churchill understood that delaying Overlord until 1944 would allow the Germans and Russians time to
slaughter fatally weaken each other in the East. Stalin was sent updated copies of Harris's "Blue Books". These were his personal photograph albums of the wrecked cities of Germany. The Russians never cared about the economic importance of a target, they just wanted to know how many Germans per acre. After the war, Harris was awarded the Order of Suvorov, First Class, by a grateful Soviet Union.
Bomber Command allowed the Allies to justify delaying Overlord until 1944, while Russia broke the Wehrmacht's back in the East.
2) After WW1, the Nazis had convinced many German people that they had not really been defeated because their homeland cities and towns were not bombed. By 1945, that had changed. It also sent a message to the Russians, when they arrived in Germany, in the disadvantage of war.
You don't hear much about it now, but the plan back then was to turn Germany into a big farm.:
"All heavy industry was to be dismantled or otherwise destroyed."
"is looking forward to converting Germany into a country primarily agricultural and pastoral in its character."
President Roosevelt had this to say: "We have got to be tough with Germany and I mean the German people not just the Nazis. We either have to castrate the German people or you have got to treat them in such a manner so they can't just go on reproducing people who want to continue the way they have in the past."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgenthau_Plan
FDR also ordered the Manhattan Project. Hitler had his V-Rockets, and wanted a bomber capable of hitting New York City. Churchill considered bombing Germany with poison gas. Those were the times.
3) 58% of the Canadians who flew in Bomber Command were KIA. That figure does not include those who were wounded and/or Prisoners of War. Some were hanged by civilians, some were sent to Buchenwald, some were tortured and shot by the Gestapo.
Give them their damn medal.