Notes:
-Populations are approx. for city at time of event
-Metro areas are not included (Gush Dam in Israel=metro area)
-Vietnam War cities do/don't meet top 10 pop. based on timing
-NYC may/may not meet definition (I posted updated graph in comments without NYC as well)
Please feel free to correct, and let's all hope for peace for all.
Edit to add: Thanks for the input so far.
In the comments I added 2 additional graphs.
One removes NYC, and the other is by % of world population at time of event.
When a city's % of world population is included Tehran falls to 6th, WW2 cities are all on top.
Labels of Operation/event were also added to graphs in comments section.
Sources: Wikipedia, League of Nations Statistical Yearbooks, UN, cross-checked with Gemini and Copilot.
by voxpopper
17 Comments
Yeah NYC definitely does not meet the definition for bombardment.
Gunna go out on a limb here and say London and Tokyo circa 1940s is A LOT different type of aerial bombardment than Tehran in 2026.
Carpet bombing versus precision bombing with air supremacy is a huge difference.
Not rationalizing or supporting this war that’s on going. Just saying those are probably two very different lived experiences.
I really don’t think you can equate 9/11 with “aerial bombardment;” that’s just intellectually indefensible.
***Don’t pull the thang out, unless you plan to bang.***
I think this would be much more valuable if the population were scaled somehow.
Tehran is large today, but it wasn’t in the past, say when London was being bombed. At that time it was ~550,000 people. Flipping that over, London is about 9.8 today.
Almost all cities are larger today, so comparing “at the time” seems misleading. Do we think of London as smaller than Tehran because it *used* to be? Or vice versa?
Tokyo and NYC are much bigger than that when you include entire metro area
At the very, very least, you need to add in a number killed. London at some 30000 no way in hell belongs on the same graph as New York without a note.
You could use color/fill to indicate another aspect of these data. Having two scales (x axis and fill) depicting the same data is redundant. For instance, you could color by type of bombing, as some commenters have suggested there are qualitative differences between some of these. Or perhaps by civilian death toll (to date, in the case of Tehran). Or by country doing the bombing. Depends on what you want to convey, I guess.
This isn’t inclusive of all cities that have been, nor all times they’ve been subject to aerial bombing campaigns.
A better title would be: “The biggest cities that I think people will recognize, and their most recent aerial bombings. “
I legitimately laughed when I saw NYC on there.
This is a great way of producing misleading data. Good lesson for everyone
This is a weird chart. We fire bombed Tokyo and killed 100,000+ people in a single day. Iran has claimed 1,000 total dead in all of Iran over the last week and I’m not sure how many of those were military vs civilians.
This is still a relatively small conflict. Russia v Ukraine is approaching 2m in casualties.
Rule 3: Where are your sources and tools used?
Since half were in the 20th century and half in the 21st century, my hope is that the next set of record-breaking aerial bombardments is in the 22nd century
List of aggressors:
US
Nazi Germany
Al Qaida
US
PakistanÂ
US
US
Nazi GermanyÂ
Russia
It’s a neat graph, but boy are there some differences in the bombardment of Tokyo/Berlin/Osaka/Leningrad vs Tehran in 2026.
You could add flags of the attacker