Barking at shovels

"Unprecedented" Bombing

The Pentagon has said and news media keep repeating that the bombing of Baghdad is "unprecedented". I wondered about that, so I went and looked up some numbers from the Second World War for comparison. We're told that around a thousand cruise missiles have been fired at Iraq in the past few days, plus "hundreds" of satellite-guided bombs. The warhead of a Tomahawk is half a ton, so that's 500 tons of explosive from missiles. I don't know what the average weight of the dropped bombs is likely to be, but the general-purpose JDAM comes in sizes up to 1 ton, so I'll take that as plausible guess; thus the total tonnage dropped on Baghdad was possibly around a thousand tons (500 tons each of bombs and missiles). Obviously I'm guessing here, but I think I'm probably within a factor of two, anyway.

On the 12th of March, 1945, the RAF dropped 4,851 tons on Dortmund, carpet-bombing blind through cloud. It seems clear that the attack on Baghdad was hardly competitive for scale, but I think we can be thankful that there's no comparison for precision.

(No, I don't have a point -- this is just a historical fact-check.)

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