I'm John Batchelor with James Scott. His new book is 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 across five people on the second floor, 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 sixth birthday.

Shizuco Nishio, 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 that night, super excited to wake up the next morning. And like so many others in Tokyo, of course, a 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 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 people on how to build them. So most families

built what amounted to a foxhole in their yard. And these foxholes are really small. I mean,

so you could just kind of climb down in there. And her father very quickly realizes that there's going to be

no protection from a storm, from a firestorm and from a raid like this.

And it's such a primitive shelter and that they need to get out of that shelter and get to a

larger structure.

And what Japan had done is they designated a handful of concrete and rebar structures like schools, train stations,

things like that, as communal shelters. And so her father tells her, because he has to go work.

...