Narrow Road To The Deep North 33

Uesugi Kenshin was born nine years after Shingen. In 1544, at the age of 14, he was also required to betray a family member to gain power, in this case from his older brother, Harukage, who was forced to commit suicide.
Kenshin was famed for his honorable conduct, his military expertise, and his advocacy the ‘way of the warrior as death.’ Fate is in Heaven, the armor is on the breast, success is with the legs. Such was his ferociousness in the five battles of Kawanakajima against Takeda Shingen, some of his followers, and others, believed him to be the avatar of Bishamonten, the Buddhist god of war.
The first three battles, fought every two years in 1553, 1555, and 1557, were but dress rehearsals on the Kawanakajima plain south of Nagano, for the fourth, largest and bloodiest of the lot, which caused greater casualties for both sides, as a percentage of total forces, than any other battle in the Sengoku.
Kenshin was the aggressor, determined to destroy Shingen once and for all. In mid-September 1561 he left his fortress at Kasugayama with a massive force of 18,000 warriors, headed south across the plain. 
He took up a position on Saijoyama, a mountain to the west of, and looking down upon, Shingen's Kaizu castle. Kenshin was unaware that the redoubt contained no more than 150 samurai and their followers, and that he had taken Kaizu’s commanding general, Kosaka Danjo Masanobu, completely by surprise. Here the Dragon patiently waited for the Tiger’s response.
Shingen, ninety miles away at his great citadel of Tsutsujigasaki, quickly learned of Kenshin's move from signal fires and messengers, and immediately marched for Kaizu with 20,000 men, approaching Kawanakajima on the west bank of the Chikuma River, keeping the river between him and Saijoyama. He reached Kaizu 24 days after Kenshin's arrival. 
Because both warlords knew that victory would require the essential element of surprise, neither made a move.  Shingen was allowed into his fortress at Kaizu.
One of Takeda's 24 trusted generals, the seventy-year old, one-eyed Yamamoto Kansuke, devised a strategy called ‘Woodpecker,’ that he believed would bring success. The plan called for Shingen to divide his army in two, to trap the Kenshin’s army between them. Masanobu was to lead a force of 12,000 up the backside of Saijoyama under cover of night and attack from the rear, and drive Kenshin's army down to the plain. There, Shingen would be waiting with another 8,000 men in a mighty kakuyoku ‘crane's wing,’ a formation designed to surround and entrap an advancing army and destroy it with flanking arrow and gunfire.
At first all went according to plan. Masanobu and Shingen arranged their men in total darkness. Shingen waited for dawn in his tent on the plain, and Kenshin's army to come fleeing down the mountain, right into his hands. However, Kenshin had anticipated the plan. Under cover of the morning fog, his force of 10,000 men had quietly crept down Saijoyama’s western flank, using bits of cloth to deaden the noise of the horse's hooves, and taken up position directly in front of Shingen's position.
When he opened his tent at daybreak of September 10 1561, and the fog broke, instead of the battered, disorganized, and fleeing army he was expecting, Shingen was hit with a fierce head-on assault of pounding hoofs and flags and Heaven and Earth.