The US firebombing campaign against Japan was extensive — over 67 cities destroyed prior to Hiroshima and Nagasaki being attacked. So in terms of miles destroyed, firebombing definitely wins.

Seventy years ago today, US forces firebombed Tokyo to force the Japanese to an early surrender in the dying months of World War II. The atomic bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have dominated the retelling of WWII history, but as a single attack the bombing of Tokyo was more destructive.

In the space of a few hours, they dropped 1,667 tons of napalm-filled incendiary bombs on the Japanese capital, killing more than 100,000 people in a single strike, and injuring several times...

While the atomic bomb has overshadowed the firebombing in most realms in the nearly seven decades since 1945, notably as a major factor in assessing US-Soviet conflict and explaining the structure of a “Cold War” in world politics, we have shown not only that the firebombing took a greater cumulative toll in human life than the atomic bombs ...

The Tokyo firebombing raid was a relatively slow (compared to an atomic bomb), massively-distributed attack. The Tokyo raid involved hundreds of B-29 bombers arriving and attacking over the course of several hours.