Every first hand account of a tremendous fire, be it the fire bombing of a town or a massive wildfire, mentions the tremendous winds. I was just reading an account of one of the German firebombings the other day and one if the things it mentioned was that the winds were too strong for children and the elderly to flee. Not a vortex but it's an aspect if fire that we don't think about.
I think this was mostly good old fashioned incendiary bombs, nothing fancy. It was during ftom the bombing of Cologne in World War II, when this kind of thing was still pretty new. It was one of the first truely massive bomber raids of the war, almost 1000 bombera in the first pass
Oh, American war machine! So predictable. You'd R&D weaponized pigeons if it might kill people efficiently.