THE TIME IS UPON US AGAIN!　 #FridayNightHistory is the thread, military engineering in the taking of Mino Province is the topic, and yes, folks, we're talking bridgeheads tonight!

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Military engineering to a greater or lesser extent has always played a role in warfare. You don't just win a battle by shooting guns or swinging swords-- walls and bridges and powerplants and obstacle-clearing and housing also play a role in warfare.

I used to live in Lebanon-- Tyre is shaped the way it is today in part because Alexander the Great's military engineers turned an island into a peninsula during the campaign to take that island.

A quote is ascribed to Carthaginian general Hannibal: "I will either find a way or make one."

You need military engineering to make that happen.

The campaigns of Oda Nobunaga, the first of Japan's Three Great Unifiers, are well known. It's an early one (1560s) that's our focus tonight-- the taking of Mino Province from the Saito clan.

Mino isn't that far from Owari-- it's the next province north-- but there are a lot of rivers between Owari & Mino. The Saito clan's castle at Inabayama may have been seemingly impregnable on its own, but the Saito also had vassals with smaller local forts in strategic locations.

Smaller forts scattered around a riverine environment meant that it wasn't exactly an option for the Oda to sneak up on the Saito.

Enter a place called Sunomata, at the confluence of the Sai and Nagara Rivers.

Please direct your attention to Map 1, here:

I live in Pittsburgh now, which grew up around Fort Pitt, a fort at the confluence of the Monongahela and Allegheny Rivers. A fort at a confluence is really useful, whether you're facing the French Empire or the house of Saito.

Two terms I want to bring in here from modern military language: forward operating base and lodgement. A forward operating base is defined by the Joint Chiefs of Staff's JP 3-09.3 as "An airfield used to support tactical operations without establishing full support facilities."

JP 3-18 defines a lodegment as " a designated area in a hostile or potentially hostile operational area (OA) (such as an airhead, a beachhead, or combination thereof) that affords continuous landing of troops and materiel while providing maneuver space for subsequent operations."

Now I know what you're saying: "Hey Doc, why are you using modern terminology to talk about 16th century stuff?"

The answer is simple: because there's way too much exoticization of Japanese military history as being full of mysterious esoteric magic that drove its major episodes

I'm also using modern terminology because there wasn't anything mystical or magical about what we're going to talk about-- it was warfare, plain and simple. I also want to make a point about how these are concepts that are still part of how armies do their work today.

The term "-shiro" (also read as -jo), following a proper noun, is the most common way to refer to a castle in Japanese (e.g. Himeji-jo), but smaller structures weren't *quite* -jo-- the term toride 砦, rendered as fort or stockade.

Not your full blown fancy castle-- this is a battlefield structure set up for practical rather than showy use.

Anyway, so, ignore the bit about the airfield-- point is, seizing a beachhead as lodgment, and a location for a forward operating base, would afford the Oda clan "continuous landing of troops and materiel while
providing maneuver space for subsequent operations."

Well, near-continuous-- this is still the 16th century, and the quality of roads and bridges in this era are far from uniform, and the weather can always come in and fuck things up.

When Nobunaga consolidated his control over his native Owari Province and secured his eastern flank with the destruction of the Imagawa clan,
he started to march north on the Saito.

He got either tied up in the rivers or hit enemy forces in stronger position on higher ground. What's the lord of Kiyosu to do?

Enter a dude named Kinoshita Tokichiro: of humble enough roots that he didn't have a surname at the start of his career.

Here he is in a 19th century print by Tsukioka Yoshitoshi.

Tokichiro was a peasant by birth, and got his start carrying and warming Nobunaga's *sandals*. Yes, sandals. But this is an era of wars, and even the lowly see action.

By seeing frontline action and securing one distinction after another, he had risen enough to be one of Nobunaga's junior commanders during this campaign.

The confluence of the Sai and Nagara rivers was where the Oda clan needed to seize- it was in sight of the castle at Inabayama. Taking the confluence would mean that bringing reinforcements up and effecting a crossing to the far side of the Nagara river would be that much easier.

The *legend* has it that Tokichiro mobilized the troops either under his command or local strongmen (read: bandits, depending on who you ask) which he could convince to fall in with him and built the fort at the confluence in ONE NIGHT!!

...take a breath. There's a "but" coming.

So the fort at Sunomata, at the confluence of the rivers, was there *before* Tokichiro, and was held by a Saito vassal at one point.

However!

Tokichiro rallied his forces upstream, including forces led by local small-time strongmen like Hachisuka Koroku and Maeno Shoemon, and built pre-fab sections of walls and other building components which they floated downriver to the confluence, where it established a beachhead.

Then, under what was likely several *days* of on-and-off getting shot at and ambushed, Tokichiro's force reinforced the run-down installation into what we might think of as a forward operating base, today.

With a position at the rivers' confluence, the campaign against the Saito clan took a turn for the better, and ultimately Nobunaga took Inabayama (with Tokichiro leading a small assaulting force that took the castle from behind), renamed it Gifu.

Check out Map 2 for reference:

Nobunaga used Gifu as his own base for his campaigns beyond Mino.

Here it is as restored today.

While the "one-night castle" thing may be a myth, what's beyond dispute is the skillful execution of mobilizing of troops and materiel upriver, landing all that downriver & taking the confluence, and building a staging ground and observation post to facilitate the Oda drive north

Nobunaga went on to unify central Japan, and after his assassination in 1582, Tokichiro- by then called Toyotomi Hideyoshi-- had continued enough in his meteoric rise that he was again positioned to seize the day, this time becoming de facto ruler of Japan until his death in 1598

Depicted as he was at the height of his power.

Not bad for a dude who started as a sandal-warmer without a surname.

Tokichiro-- alias Hideyoshi-- had *another* "one-night" castle built during the siege of Odawara in 1590. But that's another story for another night... ;)

#FridayNightHistory is a labor of love, brought to Twitter by readers like you. Become a patron here http://bit.ly/2lVqvv2 , or send 1-time donation here: http://bit.ly/2lQfdZ8  - in a time where I've lost 1 of my 3 jobs, even your modest support makes a hell of a difference.

So that's the story of Sunomata Castle! I'm Nyri and this has been an engineers' #FridayNightHistory!

Questions?

/thread

References:
https://sirotabi.com/7858/ 
https://www.city.ogaki.lg.jp/0000000723.html 
Ota Gyuichi, The Chronicle of Lord Nobunaga, tr. J. S. A. Elisonas, Jeroen Pieter Lamers (Brill, 2011)
Walter Denning, The Life of Toyotomi Hideyoshi (Hakubunsha, 1888)

References, cont'd:

US Joint Chiefs of Staff. Joint Publication 3-09.3: Close Air Support. 25 Nov. 2014.
US Joint Chiefs of Staff. Joint Publication 3-18: Joint Forcible Entry Operations. 27 June 2018.