The school can teach you how to do it, but you’re the one that has to actually make it work. Just realize the effectiveness of what you’re learning rests with you. If you’re planning on taking up a study of fighting, that’s great. So, what’s the solution? Unfortunately that will probably rest with the student as the schools are too worried about being sued out of existence. In the martial arts world, we call it Bullshido. The end result? Watered down traditional martial arts or straight-up crap. Lawsuits are expensive and have driven many a school out of business. Unfortunately, there are people out there who cannot stomach getting hurt and run to a lawyer when it happens. I’ve been popped in the nose, kicked in the knee, kneed in the groin, and given myself a wicked huge gash with a katana. Learning a physical act like fighting is going to result in some damage. Somewhere along the line a lot of martial artists and martial arts schools forgot what they were doing and decided to focus more on memorizing movements and less on the intent behind those movements. Which, coincidentally, is exactly what the traditional martial arts were created to do. Fairbairn’s intent was to cause maximum damage in a minimum amount of time.
A lot of modern martial arts students have the sole intent of getting to the next belt. What makes Fairbairn’s interpretation of the techniques he chose different from what we’re doing today in the martial arts is intent. She’s doing White Crane Kung Fu, if you were wondering. At a time when most people were looking to boxing and Judo or Jiu-Jitsu, Fairbairn advocated fingers in eyes, punches to the throat, knees to the groin, and so on. He taught what he called “Gutter Fighting”, a system of relatively easy-to-learn moves that were designed to debilitate or kill an opponent with a minimum of fuss and muss. When he was done, William Fairbairn made Chuck Norris look like a child who had found a copy of Enter the Dragon and tried to imitate Bruce Lee.įairbairn was a natural choice to train the new spies and miscreants that were going to be dropped into Nazi Germany. If he learned something but couldn’t make it work in a fight, it was tossed by the wayside. He took the best of what he found and discarded the rest. He survived and went on to learn as much about fighting as he possibly could. At one point he was stabbed nearly 40 times and left to die in a gutter. He learned his trade as a cop in Singapore in the 1930s, fighting Chinese gangsters with a Colt 1911 and his fists. If you’ve ever heard of the Sykes-Fairbairn commando knife, he’s that Fairbairn. So, who was going to teach this new collection of bad asses? That would be a British gentleman by the name of William Fairbairn. As Kelly McCann is fond of saying, the fair fight is the one you lose.
You need to take all the concepts of fair fighting and throw them away. Krav Magawas still a twinkle in Imi Lichtenfeld’s eyes, even if he was field testing what would become his system using Nazis as test subjects.īut if you’re going to drop people in Nazi Germany for nefarious purposes, simple punching isn’t going to help them. MACP ( Modern Army Combatives Program) and MCMAP ( Marine Corp Martial Arts Program) were still a long way off in the 1940s. During World War II, the hand-to-hand combat largely consisted of simple punching, stabbing with bayonets, and some easy to learn and use throws. You have to realize the modern United States military has only recently undertaken a serious martial arts program.
While the idea of people being taught to drop into Nazi Germany and really mess things up is fascinating in and of itself, it was the hand-to-hand combat training that I find most fascinating.
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