In November 1945, a prince sat in a room overlooking the ruins of Tokyo, facing American investigators. They asked him one question: what made Japan want peace? His answer would shock them—and within weeks, he would be dead. This is the story of how fire from the sky brought an empire to its knees.

For most of the war, Japan was untouchable. Germany burned under bombers flying from England, but Japan sat behind a moat thousands of miles wide. In 1942, no American aircraft could carry a worthwhile bomb load to Tokyo and return. The home islands, where factories built planes and ships and shells, were beyond reach.

That began to change on June 15, 1944. Seventy-five B-29 Superfortresses lifted off from rough airfields in China, targeting the Imperial Iron and Steel Works at Yawata. It was a colossal effort: every gallon of fuel, every bomb, every crate of tools had been flown over the Himalayas—the route crews called “the Hump.” For every combat mission over Japan, six cargo trips were needed just to haul in the fuel.

And after all that, the raid barely scratched the target. Only 47 bombers found Yawata in the dark. Their bombs fell across the city, into fields, into the harbor. The steelworks kept running. Japanese newspapers mentioned the raid almost in passing.

The lesson was brutal and simple: America had finally built a bomber that could reach Japan. It had not yet found a way to reach Japan and matter.

What it needed was closer ground. And three months earlier, far out in the Pacific, the United States had started taking it.

The Boeing B-29 was the most expensive weapon the United States built in the entire war. It cost more than any tank, more than any warship, more than any other aircraft. It cost more, in the end, than the atomic bomb. The entire secret program that built the bomb came in at under $2 billion. The B-29 program cost around $3 billion.

Boeing had been asked to build something that did not exist: a bomber that could fly higher, farther, and faster than anything in the sky. Pressurized, so its crew could work in shirtsleeves at the edge of the stratosphere. Bristling with machine guns aimed by remote control from inside the fuselage.

And they built it. Four engines, each turning out 2,200 horsepower. A ceiling above 30,000 feet—higher than most fighters could comfortably climb to meet it. The range to carry 1,500 miles to a target and 1,500 miles home.

The engines were the problem. The Wright R-3350 ran hot, and when it ran too hot, it caught fire—sometimes burning through the main wing spar in seconds. Crews learned to level off early after takeoff and build speed before altitude, nursing the cylinders, praying they held. Men died in training before a single B-29 ever reached Tokyo.

But the range was real. And in the summer of 1944, the Marines and soldiers took the ground the bomber needed. They took the Mariana Islands: Saipan, then Tinian, then Guam. Specks of volcanic rock 1,500 miles south of Tokyo. Close enough that a Superfortress leaving them could strike the Japanese capital and return.

Navy construction battalions carved the longest bomber runways of the war out of the coral. By late November, more than 100 B-29s sat waiting on Saipan.

The loss of those islands had already shaken Tokyo to its core. When Saipan fell, the government of General Hideki Tojo collapsed. Japan’s leaders could do the arithmetic. From the Marianas, the home islands were now inside the ring.

On November 24, 1944, they found out what that meant. 111 B-29s climbed out of Saipan and turned north for Tokyo. Leading them was a bomber named Dauntless Dotty, flown by Brigadier General Emmett O’Donnell, with Major Robert Morgan—the pilot who had taken the famous Memphis Belle through its tour over Germany—in the right-hand seat.

Their target was the Nakajima aircraft engine plant on the edge of Tokyo, the single factory building the engines for Japan’s fighters. They were flying the way American doctrine demanded: high, in daylight, in tight formation, aiming through the Norden bombsight for one specific building. It was the method that had worked over Europe.

Over Japan, it came apart.

At 30,000 feet, the bombers hit something the weather forecasters had barely understood: a river of wind screaming out of the west at well over 100 miles per hour, sometimes closer to 200. The jet stream. Bombers running with it shot across the target too fast for the bombsight to track. Bombers crawling into it hung almost motionless over the anti-aircraft guns. The precise formations scattered.

Of more than 100 bombers sent, only about two dozen put bombs anywhere near the plant. Most of the rest hit nothing that mattered.

For three more months, it went on like this. The most advanced bomber ever built, flying from bases bought with Marine blood, and it could not hit what it aimed at.

Something had to change. And in January, the man who would change it arrived.

His name was Curtis LeMay. Major General, 38 years old, a cigar clamped permanently in his jaw, and a reputation as the hardest and most demanding bomber commander in the Army Air Forces. He took over the 21st Bomber Command in the Marianas in January 1945. He replaced Brigadier General Haywood Hansell, a true believer in high-altitude precision bombing, who had been handed an impossible job and could not make it work.

LeMay flew the same precision missions for a few weeks. He got the same results. So he threw the doctrine out.

What he decided to do was so dangerous that some of his own staff believed he would wreck the command and end his career in a single night. He would send the bombers in low—not 30,000 feet, but 5,000 to 9,000 feet—under the jet stream entirely. He would send them at night, when the Japanese fighter defense was weakest. He would send them in a long stream, one after another, instead of a tight formation.

And he would strip them bare. Out came the gun turrets, the ammunition, most of the gunners. Every pound saved was a pound of bombs put back on. A B-29 that had been carrying three tons would now carry six.

And the bombs would not be high explosive. They would be fire.

The M69 was a small thing: a steel pipe a few inches across filled with jellied gasoline—napalm—dropped in clusters that broke apart in the air and scattered across a city block. Tokyo was built of wood and paper, and had been for centuries. LeMay’s planners had studied the city the way an arsonist studies a house. The target was the Shitamachi, the low city, the dense working-class districts packed tight along the eastern side of Tokyo, some of the most crowded urban ground on Earth.

On the evening of March 9, 1945, the bombers began to take off.

Just after midnight, the first pathfinder B-29s came in over Tokyo and laid down lines of fire in a great flaming cross over the Shitamachi, marking the aiming point for everyone behind them. Then the stream arrived. 279 bombers, one after another, pouring more than 1,600 tons of napalm into the districts below.

The separate fires found each other. Within half an hour, they had merged into something the planners had hoped for and the people below had no name for: a firestorm. A single mass of flame drawing in air from all around it, generating its own wind—wind strong enough to uproot trees and throw people off their feet. Heat strong enough to boil the water in the canals where families threw themselves to escape it.

The men in the bombers, flying low, could smell it. The stench of burning came up through the aircraft. The heat threw the heavy planes upward on violent columns of rising air, and the pilots fought to hold them level. Tail gunners looked back at a city turning the underside of the clouds orange for a hundred miles.

On the ground, it was beyond description, but some who lived through it have spent the rest of their lives trying.

Haruyo Nihei was eight years old that night, in the eastern districts with her family. She remembered the crowds running and the fire catching them as they ran. She remembered people with babies on their backs, the babies already alight, the flames consuming them until, in her words, they turned into balls of fire. She was knocked down in the crush. Strangers fell on top of her, and then more people on top of them—a pile of bodies in the street that nearly crushed the air out of her. It also saved her life. The people who smothered her, who shielded a child they had never met, took the heat that would have killed her. Most of them never got up. It was, she said, as if the world had ended.

By dawn, the fire had burned out nearly 16 square miles of Tokyo. The exact death toll will never be known, because entire neighborhoods and everyone in them simply ceased to exist. The most careful estimates put it at around 100,000 people killed in a single night. More than a million were left with nothing. It was and remains the deadliest air raid in human history. More people died under the fire that night than would die in the first moments at Hiroshima.

14 B-29s did not come home. Against the scale of what they had done, LeMay considered it a cheap price.

And then he did it again.

Over the next ten days, the bombers barely rested. Nagoya, Osaka, Kobe, Nagoya again. In ten days, they flew close to 1,600 sorties and burned the hearts out of Japan’s largest industrial cities—until the incendiary bombs ran out and they had to stop and wait for the ships to bring more fire.

Then they carried the war to the sea itself. Beginning in late March, B-29s from Tinian flew a different kind of mission at night. Low over the straits and harbors, dropping not bombs but mines, floating them down on parachutes into the shipping lanes. The campaign was called Operation Starvation, and the name was honest.

Japan was an island empire that lived and died by the ships moving food and oil and ore between its home islands and its conquests. The B-29s sowed more than 12,000 mines in those waters. They sank or crippled some 670 ships. The great artery through the Shimonoseki Strait saw its traffic collapse almost to nothing. A nation that had conquered half the Pacific could no longer safely sail a freighter between two of its own islands.

By summer, the bombers had moved on from the great cities to the medium ones, and then to the small ones. 66 Japanese cities were burned one after another. Often the aircraft dropped leaflets first, naming the city, warning the people to flee. There was no longer any pretense that this was precision bombing. There was no longer any need for one. Japan had almost nothing left in the air to stop it.

After the surrender, a body called the United States Strategic Bombing Survey went into Japan to measure exactly what the air war had done. It sat the enemy’s own leaders down and interrogated them one after another, and it wrote down what they said.

Admiral Soemu Toyoda told the survey that American bombing of the home factories was the single biggest cause of the collapse in Japan’s aircraft and weapons production. Baron Kantaro Suzuki, prime minister at the very end, was blunter still. On the basis of the B-29 raids alone, he told the Americans, he had become convinced that Japan had to sue for peace.

The survey uncovered something that cut hard against the myth of a nation of fanatics ready to die to the last man. The will of Japan’s leaders broke long before the will of its people. The bombing proved to the men at the top, night after night, that the United States owned the sky over Japan completely—and that nothing they could do would ever take it back.

Which brings us back to the room. November 1945, the ruined city outside the window, the investigators with their notebooks open, and Prince Fumimaro Konoe, three times prime minister of Japan, sitting across from them. It would be a mistake to remember Konoe only as a man who wanted peace. He was one of the men who had built the war. He was prime minister when Japan plunged into its brutal war in China in 1937. He was prime minister when Japan signed the pact that bound it to Nazi Germany in 1940. The road that ended in the ash outside that window was one he had helped to pave.

But in November of 1945, the Americans were not asking him to account for any of that. They were asking him a historian’s question. What, at the end, made Japan want peace?

And his answer, written down in the survey’s record, was this: “Fundamentally, the thing that brought about the determination to make peace was the prolonged bombing by the B-29s.” Not the two bombs the world remembers. The prolonged bombing—the months of fire, the thing he had watched do to his country what he, of all people, had never believed could be done to it.

He did not live to repeat it at a trial. On December 6, the Americans put his name on the list of war crime suspects to be arrested. He was ordered to report to Sugamo Prison by the 16th. On the night before, at his home outside Tokyo, Konoe took a vial of poison. He left a note. “Since the China incident,” he wrote, “I have committed many political faults, for which I feel deep responsibility.” He said he could not bear to be judged as a war criminal in an American court.

The man who had helped start the war and who named the weapon that ended it would answer for neither. Outside the window, the gray plane of ash stretched to the horizon. The sound that had made it was already gone—the aircraft long since flown home across the ocean, back to the coral runways 1,500 miles away. But the people who had lived beneath that sound would go on hearing it in the dark for the rest of their lives. A prince looked out at what the airplane had done and told the truth about it, and then chose not to live in the country it had left behind.

Was Konoe’s answer the truth of a broken nation—or the final evasion of a man who built the war and refused to face its reckoning? Tell us what you think in the comments.