"I rebuked him so severely that I doubt that even our own men will expect us to use the plan. Call Tadatsugu, and give him permission to make a surprise attack on Tobigasu."
"I'm sure it is his fondest wish to hear just that."
Ieyasu summoned Tadatsugu and related Nobunaga's wishes.
Tadatsugu needed no further urging to go into action. Under extreme secrecy, he finished the preparations for his unit and then had a private audience with Nobunaga.
"I'll be leaving at sunset, my lord," were Tadatsugu's only words.
Nobunaga, too, said little. Nevertheless, he assigned five hundred of his gunners to Tadatsugu. The entire force comprised more than three thousand men.
They left the encampment at nightfall, in the absolute darkness of the Fifth Month. About the time they got under way, stripes of white rain were cutting diagonally through the darkness. The downpour drenched them to the skin as they marched along in silence.
Before climbing Mount Matsu, the entire company hid in a temple compound at the foot of the mountain. The soldiers took off their armor, left their horses behind, and shouldered whatever equipment they would take with them.
The slope was painfully steep and muddy from the torrential rain. Every time the men took a step forward, they would slip back. Hanging on to the shafts of the spears and grasping the hands of their comrades above them, they scaled the three hundred fifty yards to the summit.
A pale whiteness was beginning to appear in the night sky, announcing the coming dawn. The clouds began to part, and the splendor of the morning sun pierced the thick sea of mist.
"It's clearing!"
"Luck from heaven!"
"Conditions are perfect!"
At the top of the mountain the men put on their armor and divided into two groups. The first would make a dawn raid on the enemy fortress on the mountain, and the other would attack Tobigasu.
The Takeda had underestimated the danger, and now their waking shouts broke out in confusion. The fires set by Tadatsugu's forces sent black smoke rising from the mountain stronghold. The Takeda fled in a disorderly rout toward Tobigasu. But by then Tadatsugu's second division had already breached the castle walls.
The night before, after Tadatsugu's departure, Nobunaga's entire army had been given the order to advance. But this was not to be the outbreak of the battle.
The army defied the driving rain and moved on toward the neighborhood of Mount Chausu. From that time until dawn, the soldiers pounded the stakes they had carried into the ground, and bound them together with rope to create a palisade that looked like a meandering centipede.
As dawn was nearing, Nobunaga inspected the defenses on horseback. The rain had stopped, and the construction of the palisade had been completed.
Nobunaga turned to the Tokugawa generals and yelled at them with a laugh, "Wait and see! Today we're going to let the Kai army come close, and then we'll handle them like molting skylarks."
I wonder, each of them thought. They imagined that he was just trying to reassure them. But what they could clearly see was that the soldiers from Gifu—the troops who had shouldered the stakes and ropes all the way from Okazaki—were now on the battlefield. And the thirty thousand stakes had become a long, serpentine palisade.
"Let the picked troops of Kai come on!"
The construction itself, however, could not be used to attack the enemy. And to annihilate the enemy in the way Nobunaga had described, they would have to draw him toward the palisade. To lure him, one of Sakuma Nobumori's units and Okubo Tadayo's gunners were sent outside the palisade to wait for the enemy.
Suddenly a chorus of voices lifted skyward. The Takeda had been careless with their enemies, and their shouts of dismay came when they saw the black smoke rising from the direction of Tobigasu, behind them.
"The enemy is behind us, too!"
"They're pressing in from the rear!"
As their agitation began to turn to panic, Katsuyori gave the command to charge. “Don't delay for a moment! Waiting for the enemy will only give them the advantage!"
His own self-confidence, and the faith of his troops that was based on that self-confidence, amounted to this creed: Don't even question me! Have faith in a martial valor that has never known defeat since the time of Lord Shingen.
But civilization moves on like a horse at full gallop. The Southern Barbarians—the Portuguese—had revolutionized warfare with the introduction of firearms. How sad that Takeda Shingen had not had the wisdom to foresee this. Kai, protected by its mountains, ravines, and rivers, was cut off from the center of things and isolated from foreign influences. In addition, its samurai were consumed by an obstinacy and conceit particular to the men of a mountainous province. They had very little fear of their own shortcomings, and no desire to study the ways of other lands. The upshot was that they relied completely on their cavalry and picked troops. The forces under Yamagata fiercely attacked the troops of Sakuma Nobumori outside the palisade. In contrast, Nobunaga had planned a fully scientific strategy, using modern tactics and weapons.
The rain had just stopped; the ground was muddy.
The left wing of the Kai army—the two thousand troops under Yamagata—received their general's command not to attack the palisade. They took a roundabout route to by-pass it. But the mire was horrible. The downpour of the night before had caused the brook to overflow its banks. This natural calamity was unforeseen even by Yamagata, who had fully surveyed the lay of the land beforehand. The soldiers sank into the mud up to their shins. The horses were unable to move.
To add to their troubles, the Oda gunners under Okubo began to fire at Yamagata's flank.
"Turn!" Yamagata ordered.
With this short command, the mud-covered army changed its direction once again and thrust toward Okubo's gunners. Tiny sprays of mud appeared to spatter all over the two thousand armored men. Struck by the rifle fire, they fell, yelling as red blood spurted from them. Trampled by their own horses, they cried out in pathetic confusion.
Finally the armies collided. For decades, warfare had been changing. The ancient fighting style in which each samurai called out his own name and declared that he was the descendant of so-and-so, that his master was the lord of such-and-such a province, was fast disappearing.
Thus, once hand-to-hand fighting broke out—naked blade biting against naked blade and warrior grappling with warrior—its horror was beyond words.
The best weapons were first the gun and then the spear. The spear was not used for stabbing, but rather for brandishing, flailing, and striking, and these were the methods taught for the battlefield. Advantage, therefore, was perceived in length, and there were spears with shafts anywhere from twelve to eighteen feet long.
The common soldiers were lacking both in the training and in the courage that the siuation demanded, and were really only capable of striking with their spears. Thus there were many occasions when a skillful warrior would rush into their midst with a short spear, thrust in every direction, and, almost with ease, win himself the fame accorded a single warrior who had struck down dozens of men.
Attacked by swarms of these men, both the Tokugawa and the Oda forces were helpless. The Okubo corps was wiped out almost instantly. The reason the Okubo corps and the Sakuma forces were outside of the palisade, however, was to draw the enemy in, not to win. For this reason it would have been all right for them to turn and run. But as soon as they saw the faces of the Kai soldiers in front of them, they were unable to keep years of animosity from igniting in their hearts.
"Come and get us!" they cried.