ТОП просматриваемых книг сайта:
Samurai Swordsman. Stephen Turnbull
Читать онлайн.Название Samurai Swordsman
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781462908349
Автор произведения Stephen Turnbull
Издательство Ingram
A conch shell signalling trumpet.
Suenaga’s attitude towards fighting the Mongols in 1274 was one that conformed rigidly to samurai tradition. He still fought as a mounted archer, and the demands of personal glory were as dominant as ever. But by 1281 even Suenaga had changed, and his military record became more impressive when he took part in one of the famous “little ship” raids against the Mongol fleet, described in the next section. Using only his sword and his quick wits, Suenaga cut off enemy heads, showing that when the situation was appropriate, the sword could be wielded every bit as skillfully as the bow.
The most interesting section of the Mōko Shūrai Ekotoba shows Suenaga’s horse being shot from under him, while immediately in front there is an explosion from the Mongols’ “secret weapon.” The samurai had to contend not only with the unfamiliar formations adopted by the Mongols, but with exploding iron bombs thrown by catapult, as well.16 This was the first experience that the Japanese had of gunpowder weapons, which had been in use in China for over a century. They operated on a time fuse, and exploded as they passed into the Japanese ranks, shooting out iron fragments from inside the bombs, together with jagged pieces of the casing, in a deadly form of shrapnel.17 The Hachiman Gudōkun account says:
A war drum, which would be carried by two men.
One of the “little ship” raids on the Mongol fleet, where the samurai sword came into its own.
Whenever the Mongol soldiers took to flight, they sent iron bomb shells flying against us, which made our side dizzy and confused. Our soldiers were frightened out of their wits by the thundering explosions, their eyes were blinded, their ears deafened, so that they could hardly distinguish east from west.18
Until recently, no one was exactly sure what these bombs were. Earlier scholars suggested cannonballs, and put them forward as evidence that the Mongols used gunpowder as a propellant in the later thirteenth century. This has since been disproved, first of all by Needham, who made the link between the Chinese exploding bombs and those used in Japan.19 The invention of these bombs is credited to the Jin dynasty, and their first recorded use in war dates from the siege by the Jin of the Southern Song city of Qizhou in 1221. The fragments produced when the bombs exploded at Qizhou caused great personal injury, and one Southern Song officer was blinded in an explosion that wounded half a dozen other men.
Underwater archaeology over the past thirty years has added greatly to our knowledge of the Mongol invasions in general and the exploding bombs in particular, although physical evidence of the latter has taken years to acquire.20 In 1994 archaeologists discovered three wood and stone anchors at Kozaki harbor, a small cove on the southern coast of the island of Takashima. The largest anchor was still stuck into the seabed with its rope cable stretching toward the shore, and provided a tantalizing clue that a wreck lay nearby. In the 1994–1995 season, a diving team recovered 135 artifacts near the shoreline, then slowly traced the finds back into deeper water through the 2001 season. In October of that year, the patient fieldwork paid off with the discovery of the ship’s remains. The main portion of the wreck site lies in forty-five feet of water and was buried beneath four feet of thick, viscous mud. It was completely excavated by the end of 2002.
The objects found ranged from personal effects, such as a small bowl on which was painted the name of its owner (a commander called Weng) to provision vessels and the implements of war. The vessels include a large number of storage jars in various sizes, all of them hastily and crudely made, which hints at the rapid, if not rushed, pace of the Khan’s mobilization for the invasion. So, too, do the anchor stones. Chinese anchor stones of the period are usually large, well-carved, single stones that were set into the body of the stock to weight the anchor. Examples may be found on display in the Hakozaki Shrine in Fukuoka and at Setaura on Iki. Those found at Takashima are only roughly finished and made of two stones. More easily and quickly completed than their longer, more finished counterparts, they are not as strong as the single-stone anchors. It may be that these hastily fabricated anchors contributed to the fleet’s demise in the famous storm that dashed Khubilai’s hopes for the conquest of Japan (see the following section).
As the advancing Mongols came within bowshot, Shoni Kagesuke suddenly turned in his saddle and sent a well-aimed arrow into the Mongol leader. This scene is depicted on the side of the memorial to the heroes of the Mongol Invasions, in Hakata.
The weapons recovered from the site included bundles of iron arrow-tips or crossbow bolts, spearheads, and more than eighty swords. But the most exciting finds were the ceramic projectile bombs, of which six were recovered from the wreck. Some are filled with gunpowder, others with iron shards also, just as we would expect from the Chinese sources.21
The Second Mongol Invasion
The Mongol invaders returned to Japan in 1281, and this time they were determined both to conquer and occupy the country, as evidenced by the inclusion of farm implements on board the invasion fleet.22 The vanguard of the force attacked Tsushima and Iki and then attempted to land in Hakata Bay. As before, the ferocity of the Japanese defense forced them back, but the Mongols established themselves on two islands in the bay, one of which, Shiga, was connected to the mainland by a narrow spit of land. From these islands they launched attacks against the Japanese for about a week.
The Japanese responded with night raids against the Mongol ships. The small boats, holding between ten and fifteen samurai, would close with a Mongol ship under cover of darkness, and lower their own masts to make bridges for boarding. The samurai would then engage in hand-to-hand fighting with their swords. On one occasion, thirty samurai swam out to a Mongol ship, decapitated the entire crew, and then swam back. Two renowned heroes of these raids hailed from local families who were firmly associated with pirate activities: Kusano Jirō led a raid in broad daylight and set fire to a ship even though his left arm was cut off, while Kōno Michiari also led a daytime raid with two boats. Thinking the Japanese were coming to surrender, the Mongols allowed them to come close, at which point they were boarded and a high-ranking general was captured. Attempts were also made to dislodge the Mongols from Shiga island.
The Mongol response to the raids was to stretch chains between their ships and throw stones with catapults to sink the Japanese vessels. But at the end of this phase of the invasion, the bravery of the samurai, unaided by any storm, led the Mongol fleet to withdraw to Iki Island, there to await the arrival of the southern Chinese contingent, which made up the second phase of the invasion. By the early part of the following month, this huge armada had begun arriving at various parts of the Japanese coast, from the Gotō islands around to the west to Hakata. They eventually made rendezvous to the south of Iki, near the island of Takashima, where the Japanese launched a bold raid that deserves the title of the Battle of Takashima. The fighting lasted a full day and night, but the Japanese were eventually driven off by sheer weight of numbers. A massive attack on Hakata Bay now looked inevitable, but it never happened.
Within days of the Japanese attack at Takashima, a typhoon blew up, and was devastating in its effects. Korean casualties were 7,592 out of 26,989 men, nearly 30 percent, but the Mongol and Chinese figures were much higher, between 60 and 90 percent. Forced by the Japanese raids to stay in their ships, and unable to drop anchor in protected harbor waters, the Mongol