While Emperor Taisho inquired closely with his successor, Prime Minister Terauchi, about the Army's setbacks in breaking through the Nakudong River Delta, the heavy repercussions of the bombs could be felt all night in the Emperor's basement beneath the Imperial Palace Library - he barely stressed the urgent need for more effective measures to deal with the frequent air raids.

Although the Wehrmacht air raids caused severe losses to the Japanese mainland, especially Tokyo, the Wehrmacht did not consider the effect to be satisfactory. Since 11 April, China's standard air force has made an average of 2.4 sorties per day, with a total of 15,000 tons of bombs, but it has not yet achieved the goal of destroying Japan's war potential; on the contrary, Japan has taken the opportunity of China's strategic bombing to call for "unity and joint resistance to violence" at home, playing the sad card in the international arena, and winning the sympathy of international public opinion. Now the three giants of the Air Force understand that a harsh assessment has reached the Ministry of Defense, claiming that "Japan's war capability has not been fundamentally weakened, and the air force is wasting combat resources." It took only 48 hours for the three giants, Yang Shihai, Wei Lihuang, and Yin Chengzong, to "abandon the plan" and abandon the multi-point precision bombing and instead organize a devastating attack on one target. For these three generals, it was also the biggest gamble of their life's work. There are many factors that will determine the success or failure of this new strategy, such as ammunition delivery, wind direction, ground support, navigation in the long night sky, interception by Japanese fighters and anti-aircraft artillery, mechanical failures, espionage, etc., and one mistake can lead to the complete bankruptcy of this important air attack strategy.

This time, the new strategy of the air force is that each aircraft should carry all incendiary* bombs, not high-explosive aerial bombs, and the planes will carry out a formation low-flying attack after dark, and the long plane will decide when to drop the bombs, and the other planes will drop the bombs in order. Yang Shihai speculated: "According to the study of the photographic situation, Japan is not on guard for low-altitude night attacks. It did not have any effective searchlight equipment and anti-aircraft guns. I should take advantage of its weaknesses and take advantage of it as much as I can. ”

On May 9, air crews gathered in mobile homes at military airports in Gwangju, Daejeon, and Songsan to listen to mission briefings. When they heard that all the guns on the plane, except for the tail guns, were to be unloaded, they were shocked in disbelief that even the navigators were not involved in the bombing, except for the flight crew and one of the machine gunners (there were navigators on the long plane). The weight savings from disassembling the guns and removing the gunners, combined with the fuel weight saved by not having to form a joint tight formation or not flying over 9,150 metres, increased the bomb load by 45 per cent per B4 "ballistic" bomber. Swiftness and surprise will be a new defense strategy for the B4 "ballistic" bomber.

Although the aircrew were told that if they were shot down, they would fly to the sea and then parachute, but it still did not alleviate their anxiety. They parachuted out to sea, at least with a chance that they could be rescued by Wehrmacht rescue ships. Now the main target of the pilots will be Japanese citizens, who can expect the "roughest treatment" if they are captured in a parachute jump in Japan. Before takeoff, the pilot received an unlucky instruction: "If you are shot down, try to capture the Japanese military as quickly as possible, and the Japanese civilians will kill you on the spot." ”

If the pilots will take greater risks, then the actual requirements for their new tasks will be much less. They don't have to drop bombs very precisely from an altitude of 8 kilometers, each B4 only needs to lower the altitude and carpet bombard densely populated urban areas from an altitude of less than 3,000 meters. "You're going to unleash fireworks that the Japanese have never seen before," Yin told his pilots as he explained the mission he called Operation Bonfire. However, it was not until a few hours before Major General Yin Seungzong explained the plan of action to his pilots that the Wehrmacht General Staff gave final approval for the attack on Shitamachi, a commercial suburb of Tokyo. It is estimated that there are more than 750,000 people in this area, most of whom are poor and low-income workers, who live in slatted houses along the east bank of the Numasumi River River. Obviously, the very flammable buildings in this densely populated area, with two floors adjoining each other, separated by less than a meter, made the Shitamachi district an ideal target for the air team to test the effects of throwing incendiary bombs. General Yang Shihai has long said that he will burn down Japan's "paper cities" and carry out an air raid that will burn thousands of Japanese citizens to death, and his strategic and military justification is to make up for the lack of obvious bombing effect due to the scattered nature of Japanese industrial production.

Past high-altitude attacks have shown that Japan's air defense and firefighting defenses are not equipped to deal with air strikes on urban areas, even though bombers from China have been constantly invading Japanese airspace for many months. Except for the fact that each house has a designated foxhole-style bomb shelter and each house has a bucket of water or a few bags of sand, the common people of the city have no real protection. For a 300-square-kilometer urban area with millions of inhabitants, only 2,700 trained firefighters, 1,000 auxiliary personnel, and 234 fire trucks are not enough for the whole of Tokyo. Moreover, the fire-fighting water pipes are pitifully short, the fire-fighting is limited to only two hours of gasoline, the pressure of the city's water main pipe depends on the electric pump, and the circuit is cut off, and the water pump cannot be used. There used to be some fire lines that ran through some of the crowded streets of Shitamachi, but because of the resistance of the residents, these fire lines were not widely spread and often ended at a dead end. Even with adequate fire prevention tools, the Japanese suffered greatly from their training, which relied on ritual rather than science, and the leader of the fire brigade often jumped into the flames himself to encourage his colleagues, but it did not have much of a stimulating effect. It is therefore inconceivable in every sense that all of Tokyo's defences could cope with the massive air raid carried out by the Wehrmacht on the night of 9 May. Because more than 400 B4s carry high-performance incendiary shells of more than 400 tons, it is enough to light Tokyo, Japan, and make it a sea of fire.

The 32nd and 36th Bomber Wings, which were tasked with the task of attacking Tokyo, were personally commanded by Major General Yin Chengzong, chief of staff of the Air Force. At 5:34 p.m. on May 9, Republic 14, a green flare streaked across the night sky of Daejeon Airport, and the first "ballistic" bombers entered the runway. The rumble continued over the Samhan Peninsula for more than two hours as a large group of four-engine B4s roared into the sky and flew north along the road to Tokyo that their pilots named the "Tokyo Express". The Chinese pilots were worried about the first low-flying attack on the Japanese capital, and on the way to their target, they looked down on Dokdo and could use it as a friendly refuge if the plane was hit by Japanese artillery fire. With the exception of a few puffy clouds, the night sky was unusually clear, the light-controlled Honshu coastline was displayed in the navigator's eyepiece, and the pilots began to put on their armor against anti-aircraft fire and put on steel helmets. "The hours before dawn are the darkest," said a broadcaster from the Japan Broadcasting Association, who ended the day's broadcast with a cliché after predicting on Radio Tokyo that the weather would be sunny at the Army Day parade the next morning. When the pilot planes of the entire cluster rumbled to 452 meters above the Tokyo effect area of the Japanese capital at 01:15 at night, and dropped a batch of 30 centimeter-long incendiary* bombs of the dispersor type in the lower town area, the air defense sirens had already screamed, and the Japanese air defense personnel who were caught off guard had not yet been able to use the light of the first searchlight to aim at the attackers in the dark sky, and the two bombers led by the Wehrmacht had already flown away at a speed of 480 kilometers per hour. A 16-kilometre-long promenade of burning fireworks remained. When the other 10 pilot planes flew in to refuel the fire, their pilots radioed and said, "The target can be seen." Seeing a large area on fire. The anti-aircraft guns were not fierce, and fighter resistance had not yet appeared. ”

The scene of the B4 bomber throwing incendiary bombs made the French journalist Farrah? Raphael feasted his eyes on the safe heights west of Shimada, observing the air raids from the residential area of Yamada. "Bright flashes of light light up the night sky," he wrote, "and the Christmas tree blooms in the middle of the night with a burst of flames, and then a large string of fireworks falls in a lightning, zigzag shape and shush." Only 15 minutes after the air raid began, the fire spread to wooden houses all over the city. Fortunately, once again, the area where I lived was not directly attacked (or rather, it was all due to the air force's elaborate arson plan). The bomb caused a large area of light to appear over the center of the city. Now it was clear that the light was winning the battle - the fire drove away the darkness, and in the sky, a B4 appeared here, a B4 appeared there. For the first time, they flew at low or medium elevations at various altitudes. Columns of crooked smoke began to rise in the city, in which one could see the long metal wings of the B4, with sharp edges, dazzlingly illuminated by the reflection of the firelight, casting black reflections in the fiery red sky, and sometimes it appeared in the vast expanse of the sky with silver glitter, or like blue meteors in the flash of a searchlight, the searchlight flickered on and off on the horizon ....... The Japanese people in the courtyard near the tunnel were outside, or standing at the mouth of the cave, and I heard them sigh in praise of this spectacular, almost theater-only scene (what a typical Japanese way). ”

Bombers rained down tons of incendiary bombs, turning the 6.5-kilometer-long and 4.8-kilometer-wide Shitamachi area, the most densely populated suburb on earth, into a giant bonfire. This horrific catastrophe lasted for more than three hours. Half an hour after the air raid, the raging fire spread uncontrollably, and the Japanese had to give up their plans to put out the fire. Gale winds of 30 knots per hour made the fire even more terrifying, blowing reddish slags into nearby streets filled with people fleeing for their lives. "The sparks carried by the winds of the fire spread along the streets. I watched adults and children run for their lives, rushing around like rats. The flames chased them like living creatures, knocked them down, and they died hundreds and hundreds in front of me. A factory worker, Toulun, wrote. At that time, he survived death by immersing himself in a water tank on the roof of a school with his wife and two children. "The dazzling light, the thunderous sound, the whole scene reminded me of an oil painting about purgatory—a truly horrible scene in the abyss of hell." The family in Toulon was much luckier than most of its compatriots. Many Japanese huddled into temples and buildings for shelter, but were still unable to avoid being reduced to ashes in the suffocating heat. Or boiled alive in pools and rivers in parks. These pools and rivers became cauldrons, and tens of thousands of people who wanted to jump into them and flee for their lives at the sight of water died in these cauldrons. The flames and scorching gases destroyed much of the Shitamachi area, causing more heat than the mysterious bombing campaign that destroyed the Yawata Iron Works a few years ago. The strong sea breeze that blew through Tokyo that night prevented the storm fire from developing, but it sent oxygen into the raging fire, causing it to become even hotter. The fire on the ground raised the temperature by 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit, the metal melted, and people and many wooden buildings spontaneously caught fire.

Tokyo, the economic heart of Japan, has now become a crater of fireworks, so Raphael concludes his report with this sentence to sum up his horrific observations throughout the night: "Tokyo, tonight is the city at the entrance to hell." ”