On November 13, ten thousand tiger troops crossed the Seto Inland Sea by boat, landed on Honshu Island and surrounded Osaka Castle.
Osaka Castle is one of the larger castles in Japan. In 1583, Toyotomi Hideyoshi built Osaka Castle on the original base of Ishiyama Honganji Temple. It took about a year and a half to complete the Honmaru (main castle) until Hideyoshi's death.
Until now, construction of fortifications such as Ninomaru and Sannomaru, as well as defense facilities such as multiple moats and canals, had continued.
Osaka Castle was destroyed by war in 1615. After Tokugawa Ieyasu occupied Osaka, he expanded it. The expanded Osaka Castle castle tower is 17 feet and 4 feet high and has eight floors.
Osaka Castle is a defensive fortress composed of Honmaru, Ninomaru and Sannomaru. The outer periphery is a defensive layer composed of a large number of stone walls and water banks, and the inner part is a maze-like passage composed of winding roads and shooting holes. The outermost part of the castle
Sannomaru is fourteen "machi" long from east to west and nine "machi" long from north to south. When converted to later generations' weights and measures, it is approximately 1,600 meters long and 950 meters wide.
Below Osaka Castle is a prosperous market. It can be said to be the most important city in western Japan, with a population of about 100,000. According to Zheng Kaida, this castle town in Osaka is Japan's commodity distribution base and one of the central cities in Japan.
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But after Li Zhi's army surrounded the city, the panicked citizens immediately abandoned the city and ran away with Xinruan. The entire city is now deserted.
Li Zhi stood on a small mound east of the castle town and used a telescope to observe the Osaka Castle five miles away.
This is a very large castle, even larger than some small counties in the Ming Dynasty. It is protected by layers of moats, trenches and walls, and the castle tower stands high in the middle. Standing on the wall behind the castle Sannomaru
Japanese Ashigaru holding iron cannons. According to information from the Shimazu family, the defenders inside the castle were equipped with 7,000 iron cannons.
The entire castle cannot be said to be poorly defended - in the Osaka Winter Battle of 1614, Tokugawa Ieyasu led 200,000 people to surround Osaka Castle. In the end, they could not defeat it and had to resort to peace talks.
However, the so-called tight defense only refers to Japan's military technology.
In the middle of the seventeenth century, Japan's military technology had lagged behind the times. Due to poor technology in the smelting and casting industry, the development of Japanese artillery was very slow. By 1643, when Li Zhi led his army to attack, Tokugawa Ieyasu did not even have
Equip the walls of Osaka with enough cannons.
Li Zhi observed from the telescope that there were only sixteen cannons in Osaka City. These cannons seemed to be cannons bought by the Dutch. Li Zhi took a closer look and felt that these cannons were the Dutch's "half-length cannons" with three heavy shells.
Twelve pounds.
Sixteen cannons were enough to deter feudal towns and peasants trying to rebel across Japan. In Japan, which generally lacked artillery, this was already a heavy defense.
To the Japanese, Osaka Castle is an unassailable fortified city.
But in front of Li Zhi's Huben division, which was often equipped with hundreds of cannons, these sixteen cannons were a bit shabby.
Li Zhi's cannon was a hundred years ahead of this era, and a full two hundred years ahead of Osaka Castle's sixteenth-century defensive thinking. The effect of two hundred years of technological leadership cannot be described by the word "advantage."
Li Zhi's 10,000-horse division unloaded 160 18-pound long cannons from the ship. The artillerymen and infantrymen pushed the cannons and stopped six miles away from Osaka Castle Sannomaru.
The defenders on the city wall seemed very nervous and opened fire from a distance of six miles.
The Tokugawa family seemed to have learned the artillery technology from the Dutch. The cannons on the city wall could move with the enemy's main attack direction. Li Zhi crossed the sea from the west, and all sixteen cannons in the castle moved to the west side.
On the Sannomaru shooting platform, shoot at Li Zhi's artillery carriage.
Cannons are generally used as naval guns on ships. The Tokugawa family purchased cannons from the Dutch, and the cannons they bought were obviously naval guns. However, the cannons in the 17th century had a very short range. They were good as naval guns, but they were somewhat reluctant to be used as city defense guns.
Already.
Compared with Li Zhi's long cannon, the barrel of the cannon is shorter, and the barrel is only 15-28 times the caliber. The barrel of the long cannon is 25-44 times the caliber. As a result, the long cannon can hit farther.
Li Zhi's 18-pound long cannon has a direct firing range of more than three miles and a projectile range of ten miles. However, the range of ordinary cannons is not even one mile, and the maximum projectile distance is five miles.
The cannon on the city wall fired at the Huben Division's artillery truck six miles away, but it could not touch the side of the Huben Division's cannon. The shells fell one mile in front of the Huben Division's cannon, hitting the soil with "thong" and "thong"
inside.
At a distance of six miles, Li Zhi's 18-pound cannon began to charge and load ammunition. The soldiers Li Zhi brought off the ship this time were actually 12,000 people, 10,000 of whom were soldiers of the Huben Division, and 2,000 soldiers who were originally from the ship.
The artillerymen on the ship disembarked this time to operate the 18-pounder guns.
These fleet artillerymen were also highly skilled. They cleared the chamber, applied powder, and loaded the ammunition in one go. The loading was completed quickly. The artillerymen used musket gauges, musket rulers, and calipers to calculate the amount and angle of the ammunition. One hundred and sixty grains bloomed.
The ammunition was loaded into the barrel and aimed at the Japanese cannon six miles away.
"boom!"
"Boom! Boom! Boom!"
Amidst the deafening sound of artillery fire, the ground shook, and one hundred and sixty cannons spurted out tongues of fire. One hundred and sixty cannonballs were like a terrible storm, drawing more than a hundred perfect curves in the sky, heading towards Osaka Castle.
The forts on the city wall were smashed.
The accuracy of the 18-pounder cannon was also poor when projecting from a distance of six miles. However, there were too many artillery pieces that could not hold up to Li Zhi, and there would always be a few shells that hit.
Most of the one hundred and sixty shells hit the stone wall, smashing a thick layer of defense facilities made of boulders and lime, and then fell into the water bank. Or they hit the city wall above the stone wall.
Crash the city wall that defended the iron cannon.
Three cannonballs hit the cannon in the middle of the city wall, hitting the cannon's body hard, knocking this cannon out of the battle at once. The barrel of the cannon that was hit by the cannonball deformed, and the cannonball may get stuck in the barrel.
inside, resulting in blasting and boring, which can no longer be used.
Two more cannonballs landed next to the cannon and exploded with a bang. The iron pellets in the cannonballs flew out in all directions, ruthlessly taking the lives of the cannon artillerymen - it was the first time for those artillerymen who were operating the cannons to see this.
When it came to the shells, I didn't know how to dodge when I saw the shells falling around me, and they were all hit one by one.
The artillerymen were killed and the cannons could no longer be operated. In just one bombardment, Li Zhi's artillery destroyed five cannons six miles away.
A minute later, another 160 shells were fired at the fort in Osaka Castle.
This time, the angle of the cannon was slightly adjusted based on the impact point of the cannonball, resulting in a higher hit rate.
The rumble of explosive shells exploded from the fort on Osaka Castle, and cannons were removed one after another. Seven or eight Japanese artillerymen were overturned by the air waves caused by the explosion, and fell forward out of the city wall.
