28 June in military history: Assassination in Sarajevo, 1914

On 28 June 1914 Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, and his wife Sophie visited Sarajevo. As they were driven into the city, Nedeljko Čabrinović threw a bomb at their car; it bounced off and exploded under the car behind, injuring several people.¹

Later that morning the route was changed, but the drivers had not been told. Near the Latin Bridge the leading cars turned off onto the old route and had to be called back, and at that street corner Gavrilo Princip fired two shots that killed Sophie and Franz Ferdinand.²

Austria-Hungary blamed Serbia and sent it an ultimatum whose demands, the Vienna museum writes, could not all be met; the crisis grew into World War I. How far Serbia's government was involved is still debated: the historian Susanne Brandt writes that the head of Serbian military intelligence, Colonel Dragutin Dimitrijević, can be assumed to have been involved, but that the government's direct role has not been clearly established to this day. The note to Serbia and Austria-Hungary's declaration of war are on our 23 July page and our 28 July page.³

A castle under siege

Takeda Katsuyori was a son of the warlord Takeda Shingen, and he took over the house of Takeda when his father died in 1573. Tokugawa Ieyasu used the moment to retake Nagashino castle, which guarded a road from the mountains of Shinano down into his province of Mikawa. Katsuyori struck back. In 1574 he took the Tokugawa castle of Takatenjin in Tōtōmi, and in the fourth month of 1575 he laid siege to Nagashino.⁴

The castle was held for Ieyasu by Okudaira Sadamasa, also known as Nobumasa. According to nippon.com, its garrison numbered fewer than 500 men and held out for nearly 20 days. Ieyasu called on his ally Oda Nobunaga, and the two marched together to relieve the castle. The allied army numbered about 38,000 and the Takeda about 15,000; nippon.com, which splits the allied total into 30,000 of Nobunaga's men and 8,000 of Ieyasu's, notes that the figures for both sides vary.⁵

Japanese records date the battle to the 21st day of the fifth month of Tenshō 3, that is 1575. The battlefield lies in what is now the city of Shinshiro in Aichi Prefecture. This page lists it under 28 June; according to the Keisan date converter, however, the Japanese date corresponds to 29 June 1575 in the Julian calendar, then in use in Europe; the Gregorian calendar replaced the Julian only in October 1582, and at first only in Catholic countries, and in it the day would be 9 July.⁶

Fences across the valley

The allies did not attack the besiegers head on. They took up a position at Shitaragahara, a long, narrow valley west of the castle, behind the small Rengo River and its flooded rice paddies, and put up a wooden palisade that nippon.com and AichiNow describe as about two kilometers long. Behind it Nobunaga posted his matchlock gunners.⁷

On the 21st Ieyasu's senior retainer Sakai Tadatsugu attacked the Takeda fort on Tobigasuyama, a height above the castle. According to the Nipponica account, his men got reinforcements into Nagashino, and with its rear thrown into confusion the Takeda army chose to fight at Shitaragahara.⁸

The attackers had to cross the paddies and the stream before they reached the fence, and the gunners behind it shot them down. They came on in attack after attack, led by their mounted men, and lost many officers and men to gunners commanded by Nobunaga's close retainers. In the end the Takeda army was crushed. Katsuyori himself, in the Nipponica account, escaped to Shinano with nothing but his own life.⁹

How many guns, fired how?

The number usually quoted for Nobunaga's guns is 3,000. The Shinchō kōki, the life of Nobunaga by Ōta Gyūichi that historians rate highly as a source, gives 1,000 or 3,000 depending on the manuscript. According to the historian Atobe Ban, the printed text says 1,000, while in Ōta's own manuscript in the Ikeda collection of Okayama University Library a "three" has been added beside "a thousand guns", generally thought to be by a later hand. Sassa Narimasa and Maeda Toshiie were among the five commanders placed over the gunners.¹⁰

The tactic the battle is famous for, three ranks of a thousand gunners each firing in turn, goes back to the Shinchōki of Oze Hoan, an Edo-period retelling of the chronicle; according to Fujimoto Masayuki, as Goza Yūichi reports, it first appears there. In Hoan's version, as Goza Yūichi quotes it, Nobunaga orders: "If the enemy rides in, do not let the guns fire until he is within one chō. Draw him in close, fire a thousand guns at a time, and have them shoot rank by rank, one rank relieving another" (our translation). The Imperial Japanese Army General Staff took the story into its official history of the battle, and it became accepted fact.¹¹

In 1980 the historian Fujimoto Masayuki called the Nagashino gun tactics a fiction, and he and Suzuki Masaya argued that the hastily gathered gunners could not have fired such volleys. Later work has qualified that verdict. Kaneko Hiraku of the University of Tokyo's Historiographical Institute says the classic three-rank volley can be considered rejected, but not every kind of firing in turns, and that nothing can yet be called certain. One idea reported by nippon.com is that gunners worked in teams of three, so that one was always ready to fire. According to the historian Hirayama Yū, as nippon.com reports, the Takeda had many guns of their own but were short of bullets and powder.¹²

The messenger

The best-known story of the siege belongs to Torii Sune'emon, a retainer of Okudaira's. He slipped out of the surrounded castle and asked Ieyasu for help, but he was captured on his way back. The Takeda promised to spare him if he told the garrison that no relief was coming and that it should surrender. He pretended to agree, then called out to the castle that help was near, and the Takeda crucified him.¹³

Kaneko gives the 16th day of the fifth month as the day Torii is said to have died, five days before the battle, the same date as Kodansha's dictionary of Japanese biography. That dictionary records as his death poem: "Why should I begrudge the thread of my life, given in place of my lord's? This is the way of the warrior" (our translation). The University of Tokyo's Historiographical Institute keeps a famous banner said to show him on the cross.¹⁴

The cost

Takeda losses are put at about 10,000 men; the Nipponica account says that the dead are said to have numbered that many. AichiNow puts the Tokugawa and Oda dead at 6,000. Among the Takeda dead were veteran commanders from Shingen's time: Yamagata Masakage, Baba Nobuharu, also known as Nobufusa, and Tsuchiya Masatsugu.¹⁵

A folding screen of the battle kept by the Inuyama Castle Hakutei Bunko, thought to be the model for later screens, shows Yamagata falling to gunfire and a retainer carrying off his head so that the enemy could not take it. The same screen shows together all three of the men who would each in turn rule Japan: Nobunaga, Hashiba (later Toyotomi) Hideyoshi and Ieyasu.¹⁶

The end of the Takeda

The house of Takeda never recovered. Katsuyori lost one stronghold after another, and in 1582 Oda and Tokugawa forces invaded his lands; in the third month he killed himself near Tenmokuzan, and the house of Takeda came to an end.¹⁷

The Nipponica account treats Nagashino as a turning point, from fighting by individual mounted warriors to massed tactics built around foot soldiers with guns. Kaneko adds a warning about where that picture comes from: the battle screens were made in the Edo period from later records, and the modern image of Nobunaga's gun victory overwrote an older, Tokugawa-centered telling of the battle. The battle is told in full in our article on the Battle of Nagashino.¹⁸