More people were killed in the 1945 attack than the atomic bombing of Nagasaki a few months later, but there is no national memorial, accurate death toll or compensation for survivors

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.