Terminology

• An air strike is a smaller attack, usually on tactical targets. Bombing a military unit or a naval convoy constitutes an air strike, while the usual meaning of 'air raid' involves bombing a town or a large industrial facility.
  
  Carpet-bombing -- "to cover the ground with bombs, like a carpet" is a subjective term meaning the saturation bombing of an area.
  
  Firebombing is an attack with weapons intended to start and spread fires, as opposed to explosive bombs.
  
  

Early History

• The first aerial bombing took place within a decade of the Wright Brothers' first successful powered flight. On November 11, 1911 an Italian pilot threw hand-grenades out of his plane near a Turkish camp in Libya.
  
  On October 16, 1912, Bulgarian pilot Radul Milkov dropped bombs on a Turkish military base near Edirne, in the Balkans. Milkov's plane used specially-designed compartments, making it the first 'bomber' in history.
  
  

The First World War

• "Air raids", as the term is now known, were first used in World War I. On January 19, 1915, German Zeppelin blimps dropped bombs and incendiaries on towns in Eastern England, causing some civilian casualties. These raids continued and increased through the First World War. The first heavier-than-air aircraft used for strategic bombing was the Gotha bomber.
  
  

Between the Wars

• Aircraft technology improved significantly in the 1920s and 30s, allowing bombers to fly further and higher, carrying larger bombs. A prevailing belief at the time was "the bomber will always get through." It was thought that air raids would cause immense civilian casualties.
  
  

The Second World War

• When the World War II started, inter-war predictions about the effectiveness of bombing turned out to be overstatements. Technology such as radar made it easier to deploy fighter squadrons to shoot down bombers, and the bombs themselves were not as effective as had been believed.
  
  Most of the major powers in World War II used air raids, however. The German Luftwaffe launched a series of air raids on southern England through late 1940 and early 1941, which became known as 'The Blitz.' In the later part of the war, Allied bombers conducted hundreds of air raids on Germany and Japan, seeking to destroy their industrial facilities.
  
  

Notable Air Raids

• On April 26, 1937, German and Italian aircraft bombed the Spanish town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War. More than a thousand civilians were believed at the time to have been killed.
  
  On December 7, 1941, Imperial Japanese aircraft attacked the U.S. Navy facilities at Pearl Harbor, starting World War II in the Pacific.
  
  The German city in Dresden was firebombed on two consecutive nights in mid-February 1945. These raids have been called war crimes, with critics saying that Dresden was of little or no military significance.
  
  Atomic bombs have been dropped by air twice, on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These ended World War II in the Pacific.