The Oda-Tokugawa alliance won a decisive victory at Nagashino in 1575, when Oda Nobunaga and Tokugawa Ieyasu used lines of fences and massed gunfire to destroy the feared cavalry of the Takeda clan. The battle became a symbol of how firearms were changing samurai warfare forever.
In 1575, on a field in central Japan, one of the most feared cavalry forces of the age charged a line of wooden fences and gunfire, and was destroyed. The Battle of Nagashino pitted the warlords Oda Nobunaga and Tokugawa Ieyasu against the famed horsemen of the Takeda clan, and it became a symbol of how firearms were changing samurai warfare forever.
A siege that set the trap
The battle grew out of a siege. Takeda Katsuyori, heir to the great warlord Takeda Shingen, was besieging Nagashino castle when Nobunaga and Ieyasu marched to relieve it1 with a large combined army. Rather than attack, they took up a defended position across the valley, behind streams and rows of wooden palisades2, and waited for the Takeda to come to them.
Guns behind the fences
Nobunaga had assembled a large force of arquebusiers3, gunners armed with matchlock muskets, and posted them behind the palisades. Tradition credits him with rotating ranks of about three thousand gunners4 to keep up a continuous fire; historians debate the exact numbers and methods, but the principle is clear: massed, protected firepower against a cavalry charge.
The charge and the slaughter
Confident in the cavalry that had won his father's battles, Katsuyori ordered the attack. The Takeda horsemen had to cross open, boggy ground and the palisades under sustained volleys. Wave after wave was shot down or funnelled into killing ground, and many of the Takeda's veteran commanders fell2. The famous cavalry was wrecked in a single day.
The Takeda decline
Nagashino broke the military power of the Takeda clan, which never recovered and was destroyed a few years later4. For Nobunaga it was a long stride toward dominating Japan, and for later generations the battle became the classic image of firearms overturning the age of the mounted samurai, even if the change was more gradual than the legend suggests.
The castle and the messenger
The battle began with the defence of Nagashino castle itself, held for the Tokugawa by the young commander Okudaira Sadamasa with only a few hundred men4 against the Takeda army. With supplies running out, a retainer named Torii Sune'emon slipped out to ask Ieyasu for help. On his way back he was captured4 and, according to the famous story, ordered to tell the garrison that no relief was coming; instead he shouted that the army was on its way, and was killed for it. His act became one of the best-known examples of loyalty in Japanese history.
