I was reading a review of a new book on the Blitz recently, and this bit caught my eye, especially the Attlee quote:

If authorities had wildly miscalculated the number of fatalities, they had correctly estimated the number of houses that bombs would render uninhabitable. For every person killed, 35 were “bombed out.” One in six Londoners would be made homeless at some point during the Blitz; although few houses were destroyed, repairmen couldn’t nearly keep up with the rate of damage. The greatest problem that confronted Londoners and the authorities charged with their welfare wasn’t shelter from the bombs—the image of Tube stations crammed with plucky cockneys singing “Roll Out the Barrel” may dominate the public imagination, but in fact even at the height of the Blitz only one in seven Londoners used the public shelters— but homelessness. That the Luftwaffe concentrated its attacks for the first several days of the Blitz almost exclusively on the militarily legitimate target of the East End docklands enormously exacerbated the potentially disastrous consequences of homelessness. The poor and working-class neighborhoods there—dense, flimsily built, and badly governed—engendered tens of thousands of confused, angry, near- hysterical bombing victims. Every subsequent analysis confirms the government’s internal intelligence assessment at the time: during the first week of the Blitz, parts of the East End came perilously close to a breakdown of public authority and to mass panic.

Once again, Germany’s mercurial bombing strategy delivered the British. After six days, the Luftwaffe extended its range of targets to include the heavily residential and prosperous West End. Although the Germans made the change in part to intensify the coercion of the city’s population, its effect was exactly the opposite. The shift somewhat relieved the East End from intense bombing, which bought the authorities time to establish systems to aid the bombed-out. More important, the Germans mended the socially corrosive rift their initial strategy had (unintentionally, if usefully) created between London’s poor and bombed and its rich and safe. As Clement Attlee, the deputy prime minister and Labour Party leader, told Nicolson, “If only the Germans had had the sense not to bomb west of London Bridge there might have been a revolution in this country.” After Buckingham Palace was bombed on September 13, the queen declared: “I’m glad we’ve been bombed. Now I feel we can look the East End in the face.”
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200804/britain-blitz

My knowledge of the Blitz and the Battle of Britain is pretty minimal, but have others read the same thing? I've always thought of strategic bombing/Douhetism as BS, but does this example suggest it's viable if it can exploit internal divisions in a country?