Žižka was also a skilled commander when it came to the principle of morale. Religion is an incredibly motivating cause, and Žižka used this to his advantage to keep the morale of his troops high. He showed himself to be more religious than the conservatives controlling Prague, but not as radical as the millenarian sects that emerged in the wake of Jan Hus’s death. His belief was never in doubt, even when he made war against the radical factions, made up of the lowest rung of society. He maintained the loyalty of the rank-and-file Hussites and the respect of the conservatives, who looked for some sort of compromise with the church. But it was for social and economic advancement and freedom from outside rule, as well as religious freedom, that his people followed him. Žižka could therefore rely on the support of the country people and urban poor who brought their own weapons with them.64
While religion may have been the glue holding the army together, it was discipline that gave it shape. A disciplined force always has greater unit cohesion and therefore fights better than one lacking in those traits. Žižka set rigid standards: each man was assigned a place in ranks with a specific tactical mission. Straggling, disobedience, and disorderly conduct were severely punished. Promotion was based on ability rather than social status and the serf was considered the equal of the noble.65 We have seen this same attitude in most of the generals discussed thus far: ability trumps birth. That was just as true concerning punishment, and equal justice maintained belief in the system.
And then, of course, there was the man himself. When he still had his sight, he fought alongside his troops. Sharing dangers and conditions always promotes loyalty to a leader. Then, when he completely lost his sight, he still commanded in the field for another three years. For a religious peasant army, that was surely a sign of God’s grace. It also illustrates how Žižka’s reputation became a demoralizing factor for his enemies. Žižka’s regular victories gave him an air of invincibility on both sides of the battlefield, and the songs he wrote for his troops (a mixture of hymn and military instruction) were as frightening to his enemies as the Hussites’ crude weapons.
Jan Žižka is unfortunately not a widely known figure outside central Europe, but no work on him or on the Hussites fails to describe him as a genius, the most talented general of his time. Although his wagenburg was effective for only a short period in military history, it shows what one imaginative leader can do with the materials at hand to exploit an innate but often unseen weakness in his enemy. Unseen, that is, except to a blind old man.
10
Oda Nobunaga (1534–1582)
Japanese Daimyo and Unifier
His skills at organization, his tactical flair and above all his visionary use of military technology placed him in the front rank of generals. His other outstanding characteristic was his great ruthlessness.
—Stephen Turnbull, Samurai Commanders
THE PROMINENT JAPANESE ODA CLAN moved from Echizen Province to Owari Province around the turn of the fifteenth century. Oda Ise Nyudo Josho was appointed deputy military governor of the province by Shiba Yoshishige, the de jure ruler of the province as military governor. Shiba, like most provincial military governors, lived in Kyoto rather than Owari and had little input into the day-to-day operations of the province; that was Oda’s job. All was well until the outbreak of the Onin War (1467–77), a struggle between the military ruler of Japan, the shogun, and a number of the provincial leaders, the daimyo (“great name”). Japan had an emperor but the daimyo exercised local power with little if any attention paid to either emperor or shogun. Neither the shogun nor the emperor had enough power to restrict or control the feudal houses, which numbered some 260 by 1467. Thus, for all practical purposes, Japan by 1467 was in fact 260 separate countries. Each daimyo was independent and maintained personal armies.1 Thus, even when the Onin War officially ended, inter-daimyo conflict continued in what was called the Sengoku (Warring States) Period. Only when Tokugawa Ieyasu established hegemony in the early 1600s did that era come to an end.
THE SHIBA CLAN FOUGHT among themselves during the Onin War, and the Oda took advantage of the rift to take over control of Owari Province. This, however, resulted in a split in the Oda clan. Two factions controlled half the province each: the Ise no Kami occupied the “upper” districts nearer the capital city of Kyoto, and the Yamato no Kami controlled four counties farther away in the “lower” districts. Through most of the first half of the 1500s the Ise no Kami branch was under the leadership of Oda Nobuhide, who seems to have held true power despite his subordinate position to Oda Michikatsu, the deputy military governor. In the 1540s Nobuhide organized attempts to expand his domains at the expense of neighboring provinces, a project in which he was only partially successful. In 1547 he lost a major battle to Saito Dosan, but the campaign had an interesting outcome. In 1549, Nobuhide married his second son and heir, Nobunaga, to one of Saito Dosan’s daughters. This marriage cannot be seen as a sign of Nobuhide’s deference, as it was Saito’s daughter who moved to Owari Province. Rather, it seems to have been a formal acknowledgment by Saito Dosan of Oda Nobuhide’s military strength.2
The second son mentioned above, Nobunaga, was born on 9 July 1534. Nothing is mentioned of his upbringing and youth other than that in his teen years he adopted a very eccentric behavior pattern that made many think he was mentally deficient. Whether this was youthful ego or a carefully designed facade is impossible to tell. Neither is it clear why he, as second son, would be heir. He did, however, inherit both a strong domain and influential in-laws when he took over leadership in April 1551 when his father died of disease. When constant prayers by local Buddhist priests did not bring about his father’s recovery, Nobunaga took revenge. In the only full-length biography of Oda Nobunaga in English, Jeroen Lamers writes, “Nobunaga then had the bonzes [priests] thrown into a temple with the doors locked from the outside; he told the bonzes that, as they had lied to him about the health of his father, they had better pray to their idols with greater devotion for their own lives. After surrounding them on the outside, he shot some of them to death with harquebuses.”3 Some historians assume that this was a motive for Nobunaga’s campaign to annihilate area monks later in his career.
Nobuhide had not been able to completely assimilate all of Owari, and the Ise no Kami faction was further split between Nobunaga and his brothers. It took four years for Nobunaga to begin his move to exercise preeminence. In 1555 he conspired with an uncle against a local official who was plotting against Nobunaga. This resulted in the acquisition of Kiyosu Castle and the end of the Yamato no Kami branch of the family. The following year he beat back attacks from two brothers; one, Nobuhiru, decided afterward to join Nobunaga, but the younger brother, Nobuyuki, remained hostile. In response, Nobunaga tricked Nobuyuki out of his castle in 1557 and had him murdered. It took two more years to capture the final resisting stronghold, but the successful siege of Iwakura, home of the original military governor, gave Nobunaga control of all of Owari Province.
Warfare of the Time
MEDIEVAL JAPANESE WARFARE prior to the Sengoku period meant samurai warfare. Although battles occurred with large numbers of conscript infantry, they carried no historical significance. In traditional samurai warfare, battles were large collections of individual combats. Warriors would announce themselves, pair off with opponents of similar rank, and fight with the high-quality swords for which the era is so famous. That formality began to disappear during the Mongol invasions of the 1100s, when a samurai who singled himself out before the steppe warriors immediately found himself pincushioned by arrows. The samurai thereafter became expert horse archers, with retainers and conscripts in support as infantry. The bow of the time (yumi) was some seven to nine feet tall, with the grip offset below center. It was a laminate of wood and bamboo. Like the Mongols, the Japanese designed their arrowheads in multiple shapes for differing functions and fired them from a finger-and-thumb release. The role of samurai as archer, however, was changing by the time of the Sengoku period, when firear
ms were introduced into Japan.
The samurai warrior wore rawhide or iron lamellar armor. Like the samurai sword, the iron plates would be manufactured with the iron being repeatedly beaten and folded over, to a final thickness of 2 mm. A complete suit of armor could weigh as much as thirty pounds. In the sixteenth century the breastplate became solid rather than layered, more like the European armor of the time. The samurai resembled the European knight, in fact, with the addition of the sashimono, an identifying device such as a flag, worn on the back. Samurais carried a te-yari (hand spear) or mochi-yari (held spear), which could vary in shaft length between 3.2 and 4 meters. Blade lengths varied enormously, from about 10 centimeters to 1.5 meters.4 With or without armor, the samurai always wore one or two swords, even though by the Sengoku period the samurai was primarily a lancer, with the archery being taken over by lesser infantrymen. The yari spear gave its wielder an advantage, being a weapon as useful on foot as on horseback. The range of options for the samurai was thereby extended from their being elite archers to a role of greater versatility. The yari permitted the samurai to defend himself or take the fight to his enemy, in a way that the exclusive use of the bow had never allowed.5 By the Sengoku period the samurai in battle was a swordsman almost as a last resort.
The bulk of the Japanese armies consisted of ashigaru, foot soldiers without sociopolitical rank. Traditionally these were peasant conscripts, which limited warfare to the off period between planting and harvest. They wore what was called a folding cuirass: folding armor consisting of dozens of small, card-sized plates of metal connected by metal rings. The cheapest armor had the plates sewn directly to a quilted lining.6 The ashigaru may have worn sleeve armor, but almost certainly did not wear any leg armor. By the mid-1500s all armor was lacquered in the daimyo’s personal color, usually with his crest painted on the ashigaru’s cuirass. The greatest difference in appearance and protection came with the headgear. In place of the samurai’s helmet and face mask, the ashigaru wore a simple iron jingasa, or war hat, which was usually shaped like a lamp shade, with a cloth neck guard hanging from the rear.7
As seasonal conscripts the ashigaru could use little more than farm tools or spears for weapons. By the Sengoku period, these peasant soldiers had become more valuable, both because damiyo preferred to limit casualties among their samurai and because missile weapons were more widely used. The bow and arrow take time and practice to master, so it became necessary to have full-time infantry to learn the weapons. When firearms were introduced, their shallow learning curve meant farmers could easily learn their use, but the need for more year-round campaigning again meant a reliable soldiery that the farmers could not provide. Nobunaga was the first commander who separated his soldiers from the agricultural laborers, and by doing so obtained a free hand to begin operations at any time of the year he chose.8 This also gave them a greatly increased status and the ability to progress through the ranks. Toyotomi Hideyoshi, one of Nobunaga’s primary generals (and his successor), advanced in this manner. The primary weapon for the ashigaru was the spear, used for both offense and defense. Nobunaga equipped his men with the longest possible spear at six and a half meters, more than three times the height of the man wielding it.9 The spearmen formed the bulk of the front battle line, with archers and gunmen arrayed among them.
It is the firearms that make this period of Japanese military history significant. Accounts of the introduction of matchlock weapons to Japan are contradictory, although the generally accepted story is that Portuguese merchants shipwrecked on the island of Tanegashima sometime between 1542 and 1545 gave a demonstration of the weapon that so impressed the local daimyo that he ordered his metal workers to immediately begin copying it. Some historians question this version, pointing out that the “contemporary” account was actually written sixty years after the fact and that the possible introduction by the Mongols would significantly predate the Portuguese. Paul Varley notes that “there are other scattered accounts in the records of firearms—perhaps Chinese or Southeast Asian—in Japan before 1543, although none gives a clear idea of what these weapons may have looked like.”10
The arquebus, or teppo, used in Japan was not as heavy as the original matchlocks of Europe, for it was not necessary to shoot from a rest. As leading Western expert on samurai warfare Stephen Turnbull describes the weapon, “The arquebus was a simple muzzle-loading musket fired by a lighted match that was dropped on to the pan when the trigger was pulled. It was already revolutionising European warfare, and similar models had helped bring about the victory of the Spanish general Gonzalo de Cordoba at Cerignola in 1503.”11 Although with a maximum range of 500 meters it outdistanced the bow, its maximum effective range against samurai armor was 50–100 meters or roughly twice that of the bow. Whatever the original source, Japanese ironworkers by the middle 1500s were making firearms in large numbers, as well as improving them. The danger of having a burning match three-quarters of an inch from the pan struck the Japanese as foolishly unsafe, so they made a modification by adding a pivoting pan cover that was kept shut, covering the priming powder, until the arquebusier was ready to fire. Flintlocks in Europe would later have the same pan cover.12 Among other improvements were a larger bore to increase the bullet’s effectiveness as well as standardizing the number of calibers so bullets could be mass produced. Japanese gun makers refined the comparatively crude Portuguese firing mechanism, developing a helical main spring and an adjustable trigger pull.13
By the time Oda Nobunaga came to power firearms had been in use long enough to make them a fairly normal part of the battlefield, even if not yet the dominant arm. Archers were never superseded by musket-firing infantry, but fought side by side with the gun companies; their rate of fire was much greater and their effective range was comparable. It is false to assume that the introduction of the firearm completely altered Japanese fighting methods; the arquebus was just one factor that contributed to a process that was already under way.14 Nobunaga, however, was one of the first to appreciate the potential of the weapon, ordering 500 from the ironworks at Kunitomo in 1549. He heard about the power of the teppo, that supposedly nothing could stand against it, and he was very impressed. Nobunaga hired the best teppo marksman in Japan to be his teacher, and the troops learned to handle the weapon with fervor and a great amount of drill.15
On the other hand, Nobunaga did not immediately embrace firearms as a revolutionary weapon. According to Noel Perrin in his work on the history of firearms, Nobunaga is supposed to have told his followers, “Weapons of war have changed from age to age. In very ancient times, bows and arrows were the fashion, then swords and spears came into use, and recently guns have become all the rage. These weapons all have their advantages, but I intend to make the spear the weapon on which to rely in battle.”16 That attitude began to change over time, however, for by the 1570s he was depending on the firearms. Oda Nobunaga understood the importance of the new weapon quicker than any other daimyo, and he moved swiftly to gain control of all the gun-producing locations in central Japan. In the end he had five major and a number of minor arms foundries under his partial or full control and would develop a new fighting style based on the new weapon.17
The armies of Japan were organized along a standard format. In what could be seen as a Japanese version of the gleve system of the Holy Roman Empire, a daimyo like Oda Nobunaga could call on subservient nobles to provide manpower based on their income. Turnbull describes the system: The wealth of a landowner, or a fief holder, was expressed in koku, one koku being the amount of rice thought necessary to feed one man for one year. Feudal obligation required the supply of troops according to wealth. As a rule of thumb two mounted men and 20 foot per 1,000 koku would be supplied, although the proportion varied enormously from year to year and from daimyô to daimyô.”18 The army that resulted was a conglomeration of family, vassals, and ashigaru. “It could be computed, and was visibly identifiable, being made up from a hierarchy of units, each of whom had a vertically supportive role,
and involved distinguishable weapon troops. … Each of these contingents was assigned its place on the battlefield, and fought independently under the overall command of one supreme general.”19 The commanding general, protected by his personal guard (hatamoto), would usually place himself on high ground in the central part of the battlefield in order to oversee the battle and send messengers to order unit movements. The messengers, or aides-de-camp, were called tsukai-ban. During a battle these elite mounted warriors, chosen from men who were already elite, would be in constant motion between the commander and the generals of the individual clan armies, taking messages and reporting back, surveying the situation, warning of new developments, and generally providing a battlefield communications system.20
The armies by the Sengoku period were primarily spear-carrying infantry. Analysis of paintings concerning battles of this period show that archers and gunners were arrayed on the front line amid spear units, acting primarily as skirmishers who did not engage in close combat. Nearly all the fighting was done by infantry armed with spears and swords, with spears by far the more prevalent.21 Cavalry were outnumbered perhaps twenty to one, mainly seen as infantry unit commanders or tsukai-ban. Although Takeda Shingen’s army, one of Nobunaga’s main rivals, was well known for the discipline and aggressiveness of its cavalry, the decline of its importance was already well under way.
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