I'm John Bachelor with James Scott's new book as Black Snow, Curtis LeMay, the firebombing of Tokyo and the road to the atomic bomb.

Around midnight, March 9th, 10th, 1945, the poorest parts of Japan are asleep.

Families are huddled together.

At one point, James gives us pictures of families sleeping five across five people

on the second floor of the first floor of their very modest paper and wood-built homes all crowded together.

James, you introduce us to survivors who tell the story.

One particular survivor is compelling because she's looking forward to her six birthday.

Shazuko Nizio, when did she first learn that the bombers were something different?

We're not coming tonight and then we're something different.

So yes, she goes to bed that night and she's super excited.

Her father, she lives in the district that's being targeted.

Her father is a physician who treats a lot of the

it's kind of a working class district treats a lot of the folks there.

There's huge shortages in Japan at this point because the American submarine

effort has really robbed the ability of

Japan to import things and so she's super excited for her birthday because her mother has

been able to sort of cobble together enough stuff to make sort of a birthday feast

for her.

And so she goes to bed that night super exciting to wake up the next morning.

And like so many others in Tokyo, of course, little past midnight when the raid begins her father comes in and says you got to get up and so they go into the family bomb shelter and Japan had actually

and finally instructed its residents to build these sort of home shelters and the

reality was they didn't provide any money or really institutional knowledge for

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