Survivors recall horror of Tokyo firebombing 80 years on

On her sixth birthday 80 years ago, Shizuko Nishio clung to her mother as US B-29 bombers started a firestorm that turned humans to ash and Tokyo into a wasteland. At least 80,000 people died, according to Japanese and US historians. Five months before the United States dropped atomic weapons on Japan's Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the nighttime raid on March 9-10, 1945 was World War II's deadliest using conventional bombs.

Before its surrender to the Allies in August 1945, Japan had conducted a brutal imperial expansion across Asia. China alone says more than 20 million of its citizens died as a result of Japanese invasion, occupation and atrocities.