Not even the passage of eight decades has dimmed Shizuko Nishio’s memory of the night American bomber planes killed tens of thousands of people in the space of a few hours and turned her city to ash.
In the early hours of 10 March 1945, around 300 B-29 Superfortress bombers dropped 330,000 incendiary devices on Tokyo and killed an estimated 100,000 civilians, in an attack that cost more lives than the atomic bombing, months later, of Nagasaki.