The following is a graphical breakdown of bombings conducted by allied forces in each theater of operation during World War II. Due a lack of a complete and thorough dataset, these charts are drawn from a dataset of 145,762 bombings that were scrubbed from a dataset of 178,281 documented bombings. Unfortunately, the original dataset had 5,025 documented bombing missions that did not indicate a target country and/or location. The original dataset was scrubbed down to columns with less than or equal to 55,000 missing values, then narrowed to a dateset that indicated mission date, theater of operation, target country, target location, and tons of high explosives dropped, and finally scrubbed of any rows containing one or more missing values.
According to the first chart, 1944 and 1945 were the years with the most bombing mission conducted by allied forces during WWII. During those two years, France, Germany, Italy, and Japan were the most heavily bombed countries in the world. If you interact with the charts you will be able to see the amount of tons dropped on each country.
The most heavily bombed countries of WWII were Austria, France, Germany, Italy, and Japan. As a matter of fact, 134k tons of high explosives were dropped on Austria compared to 86k tons dropped on Japan. It’s funny how this little bit of history gets overlooked.
This chart represents the amount of bombs dropped by allied forces on each city in the world during WWII. It’s clear that the most active year was 1944.
Here we see each city in the world ranked by the amounts of high explosives dropped during the war. The most heavily bombed cities were in Germany.
This is the amount of high explosives dropped on each ETO country for each year of the war.
This charts ranks each city of all countries in the European theater of operation (ETO) according to the total amount of high explosives dropped on them during the war. Berlin was the most heavily bombed.
This chart ranks all ETO countries according to the total amount of high explosives dropped on them during the war. France and Germany were the most heavily bombed.
Here we can see that countries in the Mediterrean theater of operation (MTO) were consistently bombed during 1943.
And the most heavily cities in the MTO were Ploesti in Romania, Budapest in Hungary, and Bologna in Italy.
Yet Italy was the most heavily bombed MTO country for the entire duration of the war.
Here we see that the Pacific theater of operation (PTO) received little attention until 1942.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the most heavily bombed PTO cities. However, these two cities were only bombed once each when America dropped atomic bombs on them. Aside from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the most heavily bombed PTO cities are Wewak in New Guinea, Iwo Jima of the Bonin Islands, Nagoya and Tokyo in Japan, and Cape Gloucester in the Bismark Archipelago.
Though Japan was the most heavily bombed PTO country during the war, the Philippines and New Guinea received a lot of attention from allied forces.
The China-Burma_India theater of operations (CBI) is also known as the forgottent theater.
Of all CBI cities Burmese and and a few Chinese cities were the most heavily bombed.
Burma and China were also the most heavily bombed CBI countries.
“| LiveStories.” | LiveStories, United States Department of Defense, www.data.mil. Accessed 10 Mar. 2017.