These are not fair comparisons, because you are talking about bombs dropped from the air, whereas WW1 was about shells fired from artillery. According to wikip

These are not fair comparisons, because you are talking about bombs dropped from the air, whereas WW1 was about shells fired from artillery. According to wikipedia [1], about 1 ton of explosives was fired per square meter of combat territory. If the Zone Rouge originally covered 460 square miles (= 1200 km^2 = 1.2 billion m^2), this works out to 1.2 x 10^9 tons of explosives (can that be really true? wow! [2]). In Vietnam, "only" 7.6 million tons were dropped from the air. That's a few orders of magnitude less. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_harvest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_harvest 2. My numbers don't add up. I just saw a BBC story about WW1 industrial production (tl;dr: allies vastly outproduced the central powers by more than 2 to 1). There's a graph showing that Germany produced 400,000 tons of explosives from 1914 to 1917. Four times that amount is less than 2 million tons, so the number in wikipedia (1 ton per m^2) is definitely wrong.