The world has largely forgotten history's deadliest air raid. My grandmother survived

The shadow of Hiroshima and Nagasaki looms large over the brutal final months of the Second World War.

An estimated 200,000 died after the US dropped two atomic bombs over three days, and less than a week later, Japan announced its surrender.

While this week marks 80 years since the first and last use of nuclear weapons, the world has largely forgotten another Allied assault on Japan, considered to be history's deadliest air raid.

On the night of 9 March 1945, the US Army Air Forces firebombed Tokyo with 1,665 tonnes of explosives.

The bombs hit the most densely populated neighbourhoods in Tokyo's downtown and killed up to 100,000 civilians - more than the atomic bombing of Nagasaki.

My grandmother Tomoko was among those who survived. 

'We've got to run'

Booming sirens woke them in the early hours, as they had done many times before.

Well-practised, my 14-year-old grandmother, her mother Chii and little sister Takako gathered what they could and prepared to evacuate.

"I was just scared, and we thought, we've got to run.

"All I could carry were my schoolbooks and school uniform. We didn't have any food to take, and we didn't have rucksacks, so we wrapped everything we could in a furoshiki (traditional wrapping cloth).

"We strapped makeshift helmets to our heads, made of a cushion and saucepan - and ran."

As they got outside, terrifying streaks of fire filled the sky.

Hundreds of B-29 bombers were dropping cluster munitions with napalm specially designed to stick to and destroy traditional Japanese homes made of wood and paper.

"Everyone was running, and all around us, the bombs were falling. Everywhere you looked. If you were unlucky, the bombs would hit you and burn you alive.

"But we were completely focused, we couldn't focus on anything around us, except running. There was no time to think. Mother just said 'run!'"

All the local shelters were full, so they kept running. They desperately searched for space and eventually worked their way to the local train station, a 40-minute walk away.

It was filled with hundreds of people when they got there, crammed from corner to corner.

They were engulfed by darkness, broken by the flashes of light from flames and explosions outside as bombs made contact.

"The station was on a lower ground level... above us was a burning furnace, so the noise was unbelievable.

"In the moment, I was so scared, and as I was a child, I didn't really fully register what was happening. I was just holding on to my mother."

Sunrise came, finally, and she made her way to the station entrance. What struck her first was the sheer lack of anything around her.

"There was absolutely nothing left. Everything was burned to the ground. I think now how unbelievable it is that we survived."

Walking down the firebombed streets was like entering the mouth of hell.

"Lots of people were lying dead. All the people who had been living there, most of them had perished ... piles and piles of burnt bodies were heaped on both sides of the street.

"My mother, my little sister and I held hands as we went for support. I had never seen so many dead people before, but I was so numb that I couldn't even feel scared.

"When we finally made it back to where our house stood, there was just nothing. No house, no nothing. But my father survived, thankfully."

Her father, Minoru, had stayed behind to pour buckets of water over the house to try and stop it from burning down.

He was no match for the incendiary weapons.

"There were bomb shelters nearby, so that's where he hid with our neighbours and he miraculously survived. There were lots of people who died within the shelter, but somehow, he survived."

'Once should be enough for war'

Now 94 years old, Obachan, as I call her, has never really spoken about her experiences of the war to anyone.

My mother Reiko, had never had a conversation with my grandmother about her experiences until very recently.

Tomoko has never been a woman of many words, but in my childhood, I always found her silence on the subject of war at odds with how the grandparents of my British friends would tell tales of fighting or evacuation.

If ever pushed further for details, she would say, "the past is there to be forgotten".

This speaks to an often-shared experience for those who survived the war in Japan, that, barring a few notable exceptions, many are ashamed to talk of it. Whether it be about the suffering they experienced, or the fact that Japan lost.

US air raids continued after Operation Meetinghouse on 9 March 1945, with Tokyo firebombed until Japan's surrender.

It was a miracle Tomoko made it through those brutal days.

But she survived and lived through the American occupation, seeing Japan's post-war reconstruction. She became a mother and later, a grandmother, moving to the UK.

She has lived a life full of experiences that she could have only dreamt of as a terrified girl in 1945. The only difference between those that lost their lives and Tomoko is luck.

Now, in a time where conflict seems as present as it did then, she tells me "once feels like it should be enough for war".

"To kill someone is terrible, to be killed is terrible. Why do people have to wage wars? It should never happen again.

"The thing is that people will never understand until they've experienced it themselves. To have your whole body burned to a crisp, to have everyone you know die, unless you've seen these things, people will never understand.

"That's why people continue to wage wars, all the time. If you lost your parents, your siblings, everyone you loved, who do you think would want a war?"