Ask most people to name the most destructive single air attack of World War II and they will point to Hiroshima or Nagasaki. But the raw numbers point to the night of March 9 and 10, 1945, when a conventional incendiary raid on Tokyo known as Operation Meetinghouse killed an estimated 90,000 to over 100,000 people and left a million homeless. This episode explores how a cold shift in military tactics, not a new scientific weapon, created a perfect storm of devastation.

We start with the failure of high-altitude precision bombing over Japan, where cloud cover, engine fires and the newly discovered jet stream scattered bombs miles from their targets. Then we follow Curtis LeMay’s radical gamble: stripping the B-29s of their guns, flying at night below 7,000 feet, and loading them with M69 incendiary clusters tested on replica Japanese buildings in Utah. We reconstruct the flaming X laid down by Pathfinders, the failure of Tokyo’s defenses, the firestorm that created its own hurricane-force winds, and the moral debate that historians continue today.

• Why General Hansell was relieved and what pressure LeMay faced to make the B-29 program succeed
• How the shadow industries of the Shitamachi district became the justification for burning a neighborhood
• Why Japanese radar and anti-aircraft guns were calibrated for the wrong altitude
• Hand-pumped hoses, foxholes and a school swimming pool that boiled in the radiant heat
• How the raid is remembered in Japan, and why civilian survivors never received compensation