If you do this, you'll learn a lot about how to fuck people up with stupid tricks, like creating smoke clouds in the desert when enemy troops are already dying of thirst. Just make them breathe smoke on top of that.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5653579&forum_id=2...id.#48480519)

However, by the time the Ottomans got there, the walls were 500 years old and could be mined easily. This led to months of undergorund warfare, where Viennese and Ottomans were both digging tunnels under the walls. The Viennese occasionally used pickaxes and shovels to kill the invaders, or blew up mines and buried them alive in their own tunnels. Real nasty shit. The Viennese were only saved by other Europeans who showed up with Christian armies at the last minute. Toward the end Viennese troops became too weakened by famine to put any kind of fight.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5653579&forum_id=2...id.#48480715)

Also, building a single ship of the line was like its own Apollo project, jesus. England chopped down all its trees to make them.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5653579&forum_id=2...id.#48483638)

As best I can tell this was just another battle where politics likely decided the outcome, not anything special. Unfortunately it's impossible to tell unless you read Japanese fluently, and even then I don't know how reliable the sources are. But we KNOW some key facts:

There were two sides squared off against each other, but each "side" was a mish-mash of voluntary detachments, each serving at the independent command of their daimyo. We don't know how big some of these detachments were, but I get sense that some were as small as six men. Nevertheless, we are told that both sides mustered tens of thousands of men in total.

Since these armies were all under independent command, they were not going to charge the line unless their own actual commander gave the order. It didn't matter if the order came from someone who outranked their commander. They had to receive the order from their commander before they would do shit.

At the head of one faction was a dood named Ishida Mitsunari, but he could not give orders to anyone other than his own personal army. He had convinced a bunch of other warlords to sign up and fight with him so that he could become shogun, but they didn't have a contract.

The battle was well underway when Ishida noticed one of his allies was just sitting there with his troops. He wasn't sending them into battle.

Eventually Ishida got pissed off enough that he rode over to these bros and asked them why they weren't fighting. They told him some variant of "fuck off." Meanwhile an even larger contingent of troops led by a dood named Kobayakawa Hideaki was watching all of this unfold. After seeing how impotent Ishida was, they weren't about to fight either. Ishida noticed this as well, so he went over and started hollerin at Kobayakawa's men, trying to get them to fight.

Eventually the enemy noticed this, but they did something really weird. They shot a volley of arrows at Kobayakawa's men while Kobayakawa was in the midst of telling Ishida to fuck off. This forced Kobayakawa to turn toward them and say "stop, I'm on your side, watch me kill Ishida." Then Kobayakawa's men turned on Ishida and won the battle for the other side. They stabbed Ishida in the back, probably literally.

Japanese historians love to claim that Kobayakawa's motivations become clear if you dig into the minutia of the negotiations he was having with Ishida. But if that's true there should be no need for people to invent fanciful legends about it. We should also just know that Kobayakawa was upset because Ishida caused him to lose face or whatever.

So I'm not buying the official engrish expranation. Furthermore, I don't think it was just about Kobayakawa, because he wasn't the first warlord to hold back his men. At least one other clan had been hesitant to join the battle. I think the more likely explanation is that Ishida was never an inspiring leader, and people genuinely believed Tokugawa would be a better ruler. It didn't matter what loyalty anyone had pledged to Ishida. Ishida just wasn't an inspiring leader.

That's not exciting and it doesn't really offer an insight into Japan. It's really kind of gay that pre-Meiji Japan has nothing better to offer us.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5653579&forum_id=2...id.#48483223)