Short answers, pulled from the story.
The most commonly cited estimate is 333,000 killed and 473,000 wounded. Other estimates of total fatalities range from 241,000 to 900,000, reflecting uncertainty in the historical record.
The Doolittle Raid on the 18th of April 1942 was the first American bombing attack on Japan, carried out by sixteen B-25 Mitchell medium bombers launched from an aircraft carrier. Japanese casualties were 50 killed and over 400 wounded. The attack prompted Japan to transfer fighter groups from the Pacific to defend the home islands, launch the offensive that ended in defeat at Midway, and conduct the Zhejiang-Jiangxi campaign in China that resulted in the deaths of 250,000 Chinese soldiers and civilians.
Operation Meetinghouse was the firebombing of Tokyo on the night of 9 and the 10th of March 1945. It was the single most destructive air raid of World War II. 279 B-29s dropped 1,665 tons of bombs, destroying 16 square miles of the city and killing an estimated 83,793 people according to Tokyo police and fire department records, with postwar estimates ranging from 80,000 to 100,000 dead.
High-altitude precision bombing proved ineffective because persistent cloud cover and high winds over Japan prevented accurate targeting. Much of Japan’s industrial output also came from small workshops and homes in urban areas rather than concentrated factories, making area attacks more damaging to the war economy. LeMay ordered the shift to low-altitude nighttime incendiary raids beginning March 1945 after tests at Eglin Field and Dugway Proving Ground had confirmed the vulnerability of Japanese-style wooden construction to incendiary bombs.
Operation Starvation, conducted primarily by the 313th Bombardment Wing, sank 293 ships through aerial mines, representing 9.3 percent of all Japanese merchant shipping destroyed during the Pacific War and 60 percent of shipping losses between April and August 1945. Major harbors including Tokyo, Yokohama, and Nagoya were closed to shipping. The 313th Bombardment Wing lost only 16 B-29s in these operations.
Japan’s home island defenses were inadequate from the start. In early 1942, only about 100 army and 200 navy fighters were assigned to home defense, many of them obsolete, alongside roughly 700 anti-aircraft guns. The fighter aircraft and guns had difficulty reaching the high altitudes at which B-29s operated during daytime raids, and were less effective against night attacks. Fuel shortages, poor pilot training, lack of coordination between army and navy units, and insufficient radar coverage all compounded the weakness. By June 1945, the Japanese military had decided to stop contesting most raids, preserving aircraft for the anticipated Allied invasion.