What country has the US dropped the largest number of bombs on? In terms of quantity? Explosive potential? Damage done by bombings?
In terms of explosive potential: Japan. 2 nuclear weapons trump all in that respect.
Tonnage: almost certainly Vietnam. We dropped more on North Vietnam than we did in Europe during WWII, and South Vietnam took a lot as well. Quantity: same.
Damage done: Germany or Japan. Either one is arguable, and I doubt that you would get any sort of agreement if you asked people from Hiroshima/Nagasaki and Dresden what they thought. Even with the sheer tonnage we dropped on Vietnam we never really did any city bombing (except maybe the 1972 Christmas bombings).
I think Japan may have hade more damage than Germany if you’re only counting the US, but as said, it may also depend on how you consider damage. The British dropped quite a bit on Germany as well.
For one example, the main firebombing raid of Dresden was led by the RAF, though the (US) 8th AF eventually did drop more bombs on the city.( cite)
More statistical records for the US can be found online here
Using those tables, 1.5 million tons were dropped against ‘Germany’, which includes the European & Mediterranean Theaters. 641,201 tons were dropped on Germany itself.
There isn’t the same breakdown for bombs dropped against ‘Japan’, but the total tonnage was 502,781. In this theater, though, a greater proportion of the bombs were incendiary, and the raids were probably more effective at dealing damage.
Tables 199-201 gives the results of XXI Bomber Command, which was the unit that led the firebombing raids on Japan. In Table 199[sup]*[/sup] you can see that Tokyo had it the worst, with 14,000 tons dropped on urban areas, destroying half the city.
*If you’ve seen The Fog of War, these numbers may be familiar.
Just nit picking - that atoll that was used for testing the Hydrogen Bomb probably got the biggest explosive in tons of TNT equivalent.
I think Curtis LeMay’s and Robert McNamara’s fire bombing of Japan wins here.
If the war had gone the other way they would of been convicted of war crimes,
even McNamara admitted that.