Wouldn’t bombing the factory and dock workers actively manning Nazi production plants be a valid reason for targeting?

They weren’t some neutral pacifist city caught off guard by a violent attack. The firestorm occurred in neighborhoods predominantly committed to housing longshoremen building U-Boats at the docks, working civilian jobs at the port such as resupplying U-Boats, and working at the synthetic oil refineries near the docks.

Displacing those workers essentially throttled U-Boat construction in Hamburg, which otherwise would have been impossible to do since the U-Boat pens were in all effect impervious, and the workers had repeatedly and quickly repaired damage done to the refineries.

For all the evil of the anglos, I will not shed any tears over Nazi military industrial workers and their families dying. Each U-Boat those longshoremen built would kill hundreds of British, American, and Soviet sailors, and each drop of oil and petrol those refineries produced would fuel Nazi tanks and planes on their missions.