Kelsey McGovern, Staff Writer

The Great Tokyo Air Raid occurred on March 10, 1945, when the United States dropped incendiary bombs on Tokyo, killing an estimated 100,000 innocent Japanese civilians. Survivors of the raid were left with the most horrific memories of what happened that night. 

Shizuo Nishio is an 86-year-old survivor who tells her story at the Center for the Tokyo Raids and War Damage. She was six years old when the U.S. B-29 bombers began to bomb her home. 

On March 10, 1945, Shizuo Nishio was excited to go to kindergarten with her classmates. Her father told her family to go to the school nearby the house because it was made of cement and not wood. Shizuo recounts how the shelter was so packed that she and her mother went to find safety someplace else, leaving her 19-year-old cousin and the nurse behind. Shizuo thought they would be fine since they were in the school, but “hours later they were among 200 people discovered dead in a steamed state, cooked alive in the shelter by the raging fires outside”(Center of the Tokyo Raids and War Damage). Shizuo and her mother found safety in another school, and when the bombings were over, Tokyo was barren like the moon. She recounts seeing bodies on top of one another like the picture below.

Yoto Kitamura was 8 years old when the bombings occurred and remembered the sky being an eerie red. She remembers hearing “that the river was filled with bodies” (Center of the Tokyo Raids and War Damage). She recounts the sky looking as if it was daytime when it was at night. She recounts a flame catching on a person in front of her, but she could not ask if the person needed help because she was fleeing for her life. After the air raid, victims were being buried in masses and bodies were unidentifiable. Lots of survivors took their pain and turned it into their career. Kitamura and Nishio became doctors because they wanted to help people. Kitamura discusses wars going on today and says, “When I was watching television of the Ukraine situation, there was a little girl crying at a shelter. . . I thought, this is me!” 

The “New York Times” article “Survivor of Tokyo firebombing chronicled its horrors” by Phil Davison outlines the experiences of survivor Katsumoto Saotome. She was 12 years old during the firebomb living with his parents and sisters. Mr. Saotome was at home when “334 low-flying American B-29 ‘Flying Fortress’ warplanes firebombed the city, leveling much of it.” He explains that the flames made the world look like there was a red filter over it. He describes that the fire was living due to how fast it spread. He emphasizes how the Great Tokyo Air Raid has been forgotten over the decades due to the atomic bomb being dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 

The Saotome family fled to the river to escape fires, but the napalm bombs were so strong the jelly made it hard for residents to reach water. In the article, Davison mentions how one of the U.S. Air Force pilots said, “At 5,000 feet you could smell the flesh burning. . . . I couldn’t eat anything for two or three days. You know it was nauseating, really. We just said ‘What is that I smell?’ And it’s a kind of a sweet smell, and somebody said, ‘Well that’s flesh burning, had to be.’” These pilots described the burning flesh odor to be so nauseating that they felt relief when steering the plane toward the Pacific ocean exiting the smoke.

Mr. Saotome notes that although the atomic bomb on Hiroshima had a larger death toll, the Great Tokyo Air Raid resulted in more casualties than the bomb on Nagasaki. Mr. Saotome dedicated his life to writing, and reached out to the “New York Times” decades after the air raid questioning why none of their lectures included the air raids. The “New York Times” expressed that they did not have many sources to write about, and Mr. Saotome recognized what his new purpose was.