Sea of Fire in the Battle of Aizu

I was mulling over a Rurouni Kenshin reference to the Battle of Aizu
and looked at the two pages on the SHQ site by M and Sec.
(http://www.shinsengumihq.com/aizunotesbf.htm)

What I couldn't get a sense of from the summaries was how the fires
were set and why.... not so much with the defense of the castle, but
with the general area and how widespread they were.

Also, in looking over the site, I noted that there are some refs to
the the Meiji three. I did recently check out the diaries of Katsura
Kogoro which cover 1868 until the time of his death and was planning
to compile notes on various historical personages as well as what
thoughts he had about various things.

No mention of Shinsengumi or Ryoshingumi as far as I could tell from
the indexes.

What sort of interest (if any) do the folks here have with respect to
this material? What persons or events do you think would be of
interest to this list or the mirror site? Just wanted to ask before
I started taking notes. (Already extracted references and personal
thoughts w.r.t to Takasugi Shinsaku...)

S

Itagaki Taisuke, was in charge of the first Meiji government army into the
area (the one which stormed Bonari Pass). It was his men who set the fires that
destroyed the samurai homes which surrounded the castle. Pillaging and burning
obviously are a common part of war, but they might have also been trying to
remove anything that would keep their cannon from striking the castle since
they fired on it day and night after that. And these blazes had to be pretty
intense because it began to rain around the same time. According to witness Shiba
Goro, it looked like a "sea of fire".

MissB


[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

Please see
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/SHQ/message/1957
http://1happyturtle.com/makoto/Aizubattle.jpg
there are "clouds" to divide the different battle scenes but if you
click on the image to zoom in you will also see a gate on fire and
houses on fire.

There are also 2 narratives connected to the Byakkotai regarding
fire. 1) the Byakkotai saw the smoke/flames around the castle which
was set by the Aizu defenders themselves OR 2) the fires were set by
the enemy ofcourse the fires regardless of who set them resulted in
their mass suicide...I've read both these 2 different versions in
published texts.

The heavy downpour MissB mentioned in her post also resulted in
extremely muddy conditions.

--- In SHQ@yahoogroups.com, Warg3791@a... wrote:
> Itagaki Taisuke, was in charge of the first Meiji government army
into the
> area (the one which stormed Bonari Pass). It was his men who set
the fires that
> destroyed the samurai homes which surrounded the castle. Pillaging
and burning
> obviously are a common part of war, but they might have also been
trying to
> remove anything that would keep their cannon from striking the
castle since
> they fired on it day and night after that. And these blazes had to
be pretty
> intense because it began to rain around the same time. According
to witness Shiba
> Goro, it looked like a "sea of fire".
>
> MissB
>
>
> [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]