Battle of Nagashino

The trigger for the battle was the offensive between Tokugawa Ieyasu and Takeda Katsuyori over the North Mikawa region. The Takeda and Tokugawa clans had been at war with each other since the lifetime of Takeda Shingen. Nevertheless, the Takeda forces were overwhelmingly superior in terms of strength, and the Okudaira clan and other Okumikawa provincial leaders in the north-eastern part of the Mikawa region sought to prolong their lives by joining the Takeda side. On the other hand, Tokugawa Ieyasu had a powerful ally in Oda Nobunaga, but Nobunaga, who held the capital and was rapidly increasing his power, was by no means an equal ally. Ieyasu's position was that of a subcontractor who could not complain, although he called himself a cooperative company, and was used by Nobunaga as a good bulwark against the powerful Takeda forces. Takeda's forces had overrun Tokugawa territory on numerous occasions, but when Shingen fell ill during a campaign in Mikawa in May 1573, Takeda's forces retreated to Kai Province and worked to transfer power to Katsuyori while concealing Shingen's death. Ieyasu, sensing something unusual in the movements of the Takeda forces, shrewdly set out to rewind the situation. He maneuvered the kunishū (powerful families) of Okumikawa to regain the Northern Mikawa area from the Takeda clan. By recapturing Nagashino Castle, Ieyasu gained a strategic transport point, and made it his base in the region. In response, Takeda Katsuyori, who had finished his succession of power, led the main force of the Takeda army into the Okumikawa region. He then moved south along the Toyokawa River and ravaged the entire East Mikawa region, launching raids throughout the Tokugawa vassals' estates. Aside from that, Tadakatsu also captured many other castles in Tōtōmi Province from the Takeda clan. In 1575, during the conflict between Oda-Tokugawa alliance against Takeda Katsuyori, when the latter invaded Enshū province, Tadakatsu and Sakakibara fought under the Tokugawa forces against Katsuyori, where they captured the Komyo castle in June. ==Battle==

with skull head as standard on his back, at the attack of Nagashino, 1575'', work by Tsukioka Yoshitoshi. Siege of Nagashino Castle In June 1575, Takeda Katsuyori invaded Mikawa Province. Katsuyori surrounded Nagashino Castle, which had only 500 defenders, with a large army of 15,000 men and launched an onslaught to make it a bridgehead for the Mikawa invasion. At the time, Nobunaga had been engaged in battles with the Hongan-ji and Miyoshi clan for several years and was not normally in a position to go to Mikawa. However, he had just rested his soldiers after the battle had been brought to a halt when he attacked a castle built by the Hongan-ji and the Miyoshi clan offered to surrender. Nobunaga decided to throw the main Oda forces into Nagashino at once and left Gifu on 21 June. He led an Oda force of about 30,000 troops to Mikawa with his heir, Oda Nobutada, and joined Ieyasu at Okazaki on 22 June. Arriving at Shitaragahara on 26 June, he halted his march without going to the relief of Nagashino Castle and set up camp there. on the far bottom-left. The headless corpse of Takeda warrior on the far right is Masakage Yamagata. When Takeda's vassals learnt of the arrival of Oda's army, they advised Katsuyori to retreat to Kai, but he decided to go ahead with the decisive battle. Katsuyori had received information of Nobunaga's departure, but was unable to gauge the strength of Oda's forces or Nobunaga's true intentions. However, when he saw that Nobunaga and Ieyasu's forces did not immediately come to the relief of Nagashino Castle and began to fortify the defence, he underestimated the number of allied forces as Nobunaga had planned and judged that the enemy was weak. And he seemed to have decided that Nobunaga would not seriously help Ieyasu as he had done before, so he could strike the enemy forces down before their fighting spirit increased and he decided to go ahead with the decisive battle. Main Battle of Nagashino On 28 June, Takeda Katsuyori marched to the east of Shitaragahara with his main force of 12,000, leaving 3,000 men to maintain the siege around Nagashino Castle. Seeing this, Oda Nobunaga also advanced the Oda-Tokugawa forces, and the two sides faced each other across the Rengo River. Nobunaga moved his headquarters from Gokuraku-ji to Ishiza-yama (Chausu-yama) and took command. Nobunaga adopted a suggestion from Sakai Tadatsugu, a Tokugawa vassal, and ordered a surprise attack on Mount Tobigasu. Sakai set out in the middle of the night with a flying column of about 4,000 men. On the early morning of 29 June, Tadatsugu launched an attack against the Takeda forces defending the fort from behind Mount Tobigasu. As Takeda's soldiers in the fort were defeated, the detachment entered the castle in cooperation with the soldiers of Nagashino Castle, driving off the Takeda forces. This left Takeda's main army with its retreat cut off and the enemy behind it, and it had no choice but to charge at the Oda-Tokugawa force. With nowhere to go, the Takeda army began to attack the Tokugawa and Oda camps in front of it, one after the other. After receiving the report about the battle's development, Nobunaga personally came to Mount Takamatsu, Ieyasu's main camp, to inspect the war situation and took command of the entire army there. He then deployed a matchlock corps led by five bugyō to the front line. Takeda's forces repeatedly charged, but each time they were blocked by matchlock guns and horse defense fences, and retreated. By midday, victory and defeat became increasingly clear and the Takeda forces began their rout. According to Shinchō Kōki, the battle began early in the morning and lasted until around 2 pm. With many of their troops killed, Takeda's army began to retreat, but Nobunaga pounced on them when their ranks gave way, inflicting even more casualties. ==Aftermath==

The battle ended in an overwhelming victory for the allied forces, with the Takeda side losing a number of well-known commanders. Meanwhile, Tokugawa Ieyasu hurried to recover lost territory. In early July, immediately after the victory, he led his army to recapture one castle after another that had been captured by the Takeda forces by then. Nevertheless, Katsuyori was a stubborn competitor and continued to torment Ieyasu by regrouping and regrouping while retreating. In the end, the Takeda clan was not destroyed until 1582, seven years after the defeat at Nagashino and Shitaragahara. ==Analysis==

The Battle of Nagashino is remembered as the battle in which Takeda Katsuyori recklessly drove his cavalry into the long horse defense fences where Oda Nobunaga was waiting with his new weapon of 3,000 matchlock guns, losing many officers and men in the process. Moreover, a myth was created that Nobunaga was a military genius who devised a new battle strategy called "three-stage shooting", in which the shooters took turns one after the other. The three-stage shooting refers to the tactic of organising matchlock guns units into three lines, each line firing constantly in rotation. It has been claimed that Nobunaga invented this tactic to compensate for the shortcomings of matchlock guns, which takes time to reload, and enabled uninterrupted, continuous firing. Specifically, the matchlock corps, divided into three stages, fire at the front line, then fall back to the rear, clean the barrels, load bullets and then move back up to the front line to fire again. The original source for this theory was Nihon Senshi Nagashino no Eki (Japanese Military History: Battle of Nagashino, 1903), compiled by the Imperial Japanese Army General Staff Office based on the war tales Shinchōki written by Oze Hoan, a Confucian scholar of the Edo period. According to Shinchōki, Nobunaga divided the 3,000 matchlock guns into 1,000 each and instructed them to fire one stage at a time, switching from one to the other. After that book, most of the war epics that devoted a lot of paper to the Battle of Nagashino incorporated the three-stage shooting, and the content of those Edo period books was carried over into Nihon Senshi Nagashino no Eki. Regarding the number of matchlock guns, the original entry in the Shinchō Kōki states 1,000 guns. However, some manuscripts have been rewritten as 3,000 guns, although it is unclear whether this was done by Oda himself or others. During the attack on the Mount Tobigasu fort, Nobunaga sent 500 guns with Sakai Tadatsugu's detachment, so it seems that there were at least 1,500 guns in total. Of course, other units would have had guns, so in reality more than 1,500 would have been brought to Nagashino. However, there was no mention of three-stage shooting by the Oda side. In Mikawa Monogatari, written by Ōkubo Tadataka, a vassal of Ieyasu, even the number of guns is not mentioned. The cause of the defeat of the Takeda forces in the battle can perhaps be found in the Oda-Tokugawa allied forces's overwhelming superiority in terms of firepower and troop strength, Nobunaga's clever placement of his forces, and the fact that the Takeda misjudged their opponents' strength and attacked them head on. Nobunaga led a large army of 30,000, twice the size of the Takeda forces, but he caught Katsuyori off guard by stopping his advance in front of Nagashino Castle when he was supposed to be on his way to rescue it, and by placing his main camp in a hollow which made it difficult to see from the Takeda side making it look like he had fewer troops. Katsuyori therefore underestimated the enemy and watched from the sidelines as the allied forces steadily built up their positions. Nobunaga then organised a detachment to occupy Nagashino Castle behind the Takeda forces, forcing the main Takeda army, fearing a pincer attack, to charge into the robust positions of the Oda-Tokugawa allied forces, protected by matchlock guns and horse defence fences. However, Katsuyori's strategy was not necessarily reckless, as it was often seen in battles of the time to charge at the enemy lines. In fact, the battle was not settled until afternoon, and most of the Takeda warlords' deaths occurred during the retreat, not during the fighting. It was also found that the expression "Takeda cavalry" was inappropriate, and that the Takeda forces did not disregard matchlock guns, but were rather less keen to introduce them in large numbers. Traditionally, the rivalry between Oda's matchlock guns unit and Takeda's cavalry has been emphasised, but there was no clear qualitative difference between the Oda/Tokugawa and Takeda armies, and both had a commonplace Sengoku daimyō military unit structure. During this period, the vassals of the Sengoku daimyō assembled a number of soldiers, such as cavalry, spears, and bows, according to their territory and assets, and these types of soldiers acted in groups on the battlefield. This was also true of the Takeda forces, which had no units formed entirely of men on horseback and could be called cavalry units. Katsuyori also prepared a large number of matchlock guns, and Takeda's military service registration and descriptions in Shinchō Kōki reveal that the percentage of matchlock guns equipped was not much different between the allied forces and Takeda forces. == Participating Military Commanders ==

Oda-Tokugawa Allied Forces ; Main force of the battle of Nagashino :; Generals of the Oda Army :: Oda Nobunaga, Oda Nobutada, Oda Nobukatsu, Shibata Katsuie, Niwa Nagahide, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, Takigawa Kazumasu, Sakuma Nobumori, Mizuno Nobumoto, Takagi Kiyohide, Sugaya Nagayori, Kawajiri Hidetaka, Inaba Yoshimichi, Hineno Hironari, Ikeda Tsuneoki, Mori Nagayoshi, Gamō Ujisato, Sassa Narimasa, Maeda Toshiie, Harada Naomasa, Fukutomi Hidekatsu, Nonomura Masashige, Niwa Ujitsugu, Tokuyama Norihide, Nishio Yoshitsugu, Yuasa Naomune :; Generals of the Tokugawa Army :: Tokugawa Ieyasu, Imagawa Ujizane, Matsudaira Nobuyasu, Matsudaira Nobukazu, Matsudaira Sadakatsu, Matsudaira Shigekatsu, Matsudaira Tadamasa, Amano Yasukage, Ishikawa Kazumasa, Kōriki Kiyonaga, Honda Shigetsugu, Honda Tadakatsu, Honda Masashige, Honda Nobutoshi, Sakakibara Yasumasa, Torii Mototada, Ōkubo Tadayo, Ōkubo Tadasuke, Ōsuga Yasutaka, Hiraiwa Chikayoshi, Naitō Nobunari, Naitō Ienaga, Watanabe Moritsuna, Tanaka Yoshitada, Kōriki Masanaga, Yasutada Shibata, Asahina Yasukatsu, Kusakabe Sadayoshi Takeda Army :; Generals of the Takeda Army ::Takeda Katsuyori, Takeda Nobukado, Takeda Nobutoyo, Mochizuki Nobunaga, Ichijō Nobutatsu, Takeda Nobutaka, Anayama Nobutada, Oyamada Nobushige, Yamagata Masakage, Yamagata Masatsugu, Naitō Masatoyo, Baba Nobuharu, Tsuchiya Masatsugu, Tsuchiya Masatsune, Tsuchiya Sadatsuna, Sanada Nobutsuna, Sanada Masateru, Sanada Masayuki, Kanbara Shigezumi, Hara Masatane, Atobe Katsusuke, Nagasaka Mitsukata, Obata Masamori, Obata Norishige, Amari Nobuyasu, Yasukage Yokota == Notes ==