At 01:04 PM 11/05/1999 -0500, Ulf Undmark wrote: >On Fri, 5 Nov 1999 11:39:33 +0900, Karl Friday <[log in to unmask]> >wrote: >>They lost in part >>because the gov't army outnumbered them, and in part because they >>approached the fighting with a largely traditional samurai mindset and >>tactics. The main drama of the rebellion, and the principal military >>history lesson to come out of it, wasn't so much that machine guns can >>defeat swordsmen, but that the era of the hereditary, professional warrior >>was over--peasant troops could easily be more than a match for samurai. >Was this plain stupidity or was it "makin' a statement"? >Not the knowledge of the fact that they would be heavily outnumbered, this >was not much to be done about...But fighting in a "traditional" way? >Hadn't it been proved several times earlier in history that matchlock-men >easily could wipe out Samurai cavalry? Hadn't they learnt the lesson, >didn't they have the knowledge, or was this a mass-suicide? I think you could call it a little of both plain stupidity and "makin' a statement." As far as matchlocks vs. cavalry providing lessons, there really isn't much relevance. First, this whole picture of Light Brigade style charges against gunners is dramatically overblown; there's a ton of new research coming out that shows that guns didn't dramatically alter the shape of Japanese warfare, they simply replaced the bow and arrow. An analysis that I was just looking at this morning, of documents reporting battlewounds, for example, shows that between 1500 and 1560, out of some 620 casualties described, 368 were arrow wounds, 124 were spear wounds, 96 were injuries from rocks (thrown by slings or by hand), 18 were sword wounds, 7 were combined arrow and spear wounds, 3 were combined arrow and sword wounds, 2 were combined rock and spear wounds, and 2 were combined rock and arrow wounds. Between 1563 and 1600 (after the adoption of the gun) some 584 reported casualties break down as follows: there were 263 gunshot victims, 126 arrow victims, 99 spear victims, 40 sword victims, 30 injured by rocks, and 26 injured by combinations of the above (including one poor SOB who was shot by both guns and arrows and stabbed by spears, and one who was speared, naginata-ed, and cut with a sword). In other words, long distance weapons (arrows and rocks) accounted for about 75% of the wounds received in the pre-gun era, and about 72 % (arrows + guns + rocks) during the gunpowder era. Which is to say that "traditional fighting" does not appear to have been heavily centered on close-quarters clashes of swords or even of spears, except in literary sources. Second, and more to the point, what matchlocks could do to and for 16th century armies is pretty much irrelevant to the issue in 1877. As I said earlier, even Saigo's rebel army made some use of modern firearms--and of course they also had matchlocks, as well as swords and such. They even had some experience in modern Western tactics and drill, although they weren't committed to this new paradigm to the extent that the gov't army was. The big shock/drama/lesson though, was not so much tactics and/or hardware per se, as the fact that an army of samurai--hereditary, professional fighters--could be beaten by one composed of conscripts. The whole episode was, in fact, essentially suicidal from the outset, and Saigo knew it. It began when some of his followers took it onto themselves to raid a gov't army, and Saigo fatalistically decided that the die had been cast. He had already decided that he was something of an anachronism anyway (which is why he had retired to Kyushu in the first place) and seems to have looked on this as an opportunity for a glorious death. Karl Friday Dept. of History University of Georgia Athens, GA 30602 ph. (706) 542-2537 [log in to unmask]