in which we meditate on what Wing Chun has to do with the historical European martial art (HEMA) of British World War II combat master W.E. Fairbairn, late of the Shanghai Municipal Police
More than anyone else in the 20th century, Anglo-Chinese expatriate W.E. Fairbairn shaped how violence professionals in Europe and America train for close-quarters fighting.
Fairbairn fathered a school of hand-to-hand fight training (both a school of thought and a literal school) that speciated, evolved, and developed into a standard for American military and law enforcement training into the Reagan years.
Intriguingly, though Fairbairn held serious credentials in judo and jujutsu, his truncated system for fighting looks (at least superficially) very different from either. Fairbairn called his art “gutter fighting,” and to my eye it resemble nothing so much as “fast-food Wing Chun”—an ingenious, convenient quick-serve variant of classic fare. And when Fairbairn’s methods were transported into a different environment by one of his students, they evolved in exactly the direction that Wing Chun did in Bruce Lee’s hands.
World War II: Fecund, Repulsive Petri Dish for Martial Arts
World War II hastened the development of advanced technologies in rocketry, aeronautics, radar, plastics, computing, large-scale manufacturing, logistics, food processing, shipbuilding, and nuclear energy. But it also obliged civilized people to rediscover grisly, half-forgotten skills from an unhappier epoch, like how best to kill people using bare hands, how to wrestle a man for a knife, or how to stab a man to death noiselessly.
Once it became clear that there would be no quick, negotiated end to the war, the combatants were forced to scale up more their armies more than anyone was ready for. In countries that survived the opening months of combat, their small pools of long-service professional soldiers were replaced or diluted with oceans of untrained conscripts.
These masses draftees were not just raw but heterogenous beyond belief. The British Army augmented its ranks with Indians, South Africans, Australians, and Canadians. The Japanese commanded hundreds of thousands of Koreans and Taiwanese, as well as some Russian exiles and Chinese. The Soviet Union conscripted men from its dozens of ethnicities, including hundreds of thousands of non-Slavs—Mongols and Yakuts, Kazakhs and Uzbeks, freshly annexed Balts—who understood no Russian. And even before a million of them defected to the German side to fight Bolshevism, Berlin attracted anti-Communist volunteers from Scandinavia, Spain, the Baltics, the Low Countries, France, and Arab countries.
It was far from simple just to equip them all. The major combatants didn’t even have enough guns for their men. The British and the Soviets contracted out their Enfields and Mosins to factories in America. The Germans vacuumed up odd lots of Czech, Polish, Belgian, and French guns. Chinese forces relied on a mélange of rifles chambered for as many as eleven different cartridges.
But as difficult as that was to outfit the burgeoning ranks, it was infinitely more complex to train them.
In the American case, most servicemen were not intended to do combat of any sort. Nevertheless, the Army still had to “check the boxes” and teach clerk-typists at Ft. Huachuca, Arizona how to throw a punch, just like it taught him first aid, marksmanship with a pistol he would never see again, and how to avoid venereal disease.
However, it was not immediately obvious just what hand-to-hand training to give the new soldiers. For the major powers, centuries had passed since most soldiers did most of their fighting with handheld blades and bludgeons. Even in Napoleonic times, when infantry battles culminated in bayonet assaults, they still rarely led to actual bayonet wounds. Either the attackers’ advance failed before they reached the defenders’ lines, or the defenders prudently withdrew when the attackers reached to within about 30 meters.
Each country’s military mostly made do with what martial resources as lay ready to hand.
In America, boxing was in its golden age and was widely practiced. No less an authority than retired heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey was commissioned into the Coast Guard, and my high school weightlifting coach, then a young boxer, ended up as a Marine in the South Pacific teaching “combat judo.” Wrestling was practiced with passionate dedication in Pennsylvania and the Midwest, and a friend of my family, an enormous state wrestling champion, joined the Navy and was put to work teaching “dirty wrestling” in basic training.
Along with boxing and wrestling, much of Europe nurtured a passion for fencing too, and saber fencing in particular came to leave a mark on some of the wartime hand-to-hand training for the use of the fighting knife and bayonet.
At this time, fencing still retained some of its martial realism, and Olympic champion Aldo Nadi was far from the only living European who had fought an affair of honor with “sharps.” Nevertheless, what remained was at most an art narrowly designed for the purpose of dueling—in a prescribed manner, with matched weapons, at an appointed time and place—not a battlefield art that trained a disarmed man how to survive a spear attack or wrestle in mud for control of a dagger.
In the Soviet Union, the Red Army and NKVD were far ahead of any other country in systematizing and proliferating hand-to-hand combat training. For twenty years already, Soviet authorities had trained their men in a grappling system distilled from judo and the abundant wrestling traditions in the Soviet Far East and Central Asia. By all later accounts about hand-to-hand fighting on the Eastern Front, they were doing something right, because young Ivan definitely knew how to scrap.
China was supremely well endowed with hand-to-hand training systems informed by recent experience of melee combat. Since China’s last emperor was dethroned in 1911, the country could perhaps be described as a failed state, or at least as severely under-governed, over-warlorded, and over-invaded.
Moreover, within living memory, China had already hosted two of the modern world’s ten most lethal wars, the Taiping Rebellion and the Dungan Revolt, in which most of the fighting was still done with swords and spears. Throughout all of this, there was a prolonged effort to systematize training for melee combat by the sponsors of the many, many, many combatant groups: government soldiers, foreign soldiers, rebels, bandits, commercial security firms, fortified villages, and town militias. The result was that China became a terrific “tech incubator” for hand-to-hand combat: motivated organizers with a broad demand for their product, financial backers with deep pockets, and a very deep pool of competitive and talented “developers” with rich experience in their field (viz. killing people with bare hands or a hard piece of metal).
Neighboring Japan was at the crescendo of the modern world’s greatest martial renaissance. Nobody archives culture and curates it more faithfully than Japan. Some of the country’s martial koryū (“ancient lineages”) had been sustained for three centuries and curated so effectively that they retained battlefield efficiency. And as it happens, by World War II, Japan was at the high water mark of a rebirth of martial arts that saw martial conservationists like Jigoro Kano consolidate and reform Japan’s disparate combat arts into forms that modern Japanese people (not least of all their government) could be induced to practice and perpetuate. Thus were born the “new-old” arts of judo, aikido, karate, and kendo.
As pre-war Japan practiced them, these were pretty serious combat arts. In the age of MMA, aikido and karate practitioners get a lot of razzing about their arts’ unrealism, with their compliant partners and air punching. In the modern world, much of this is well deserved, especially in the West, where a martial arts business can’t thrive if soft-handed customers accustomed to Frappucinos and heated car seats get teeth knocked out. But in pre-war Japan, where even childhood was highly militarized and bullying was a feature and not a bug, beatings were practically just part of a well-rounded education, like piano lessons with a little blood. So Japanese dojos of the day were not gentle places.
(Incidentally, despite what you’ve heard, the name judo doesn’t actually mean “the gentle way” or “soft way.” The word ju (柔) here means “soft” in the same sense that a Toyota Hilux with a .50-cal and six ISIS fighters is a “soft-skinned” vehicle, namely it fights without benefit of armor. That doesn’t make it a minivan full of unicorns driven by Gandhi.)
Note what excellent Wing Chun this is: the wrestler lifts his opponent’s elbow, upsetting his balance, and his other hand fills the center line with his attack.
For that matter, sumo is another typically Japanese martial treasure, and severely underrated for martial practicality. If you think it’s just fat dudes bucking bellies, watch some sumo on YouTube and marvel at how much full-contact striking there is: palm-heel blows, forearm shivers, “throat thrusts,” and actual knockout blows—and they’re perfectly legal. What you won’t see are cry-baby athletes whining to the ref about all the, ahem, “incidental” head-butting and eye-jabbing. These guys play by “big-boy rules” in every sense.
The Imperial Japanese Army and Navy encouraged karate, judo, sumo, kendo, and jukendo (bayonet fencing) among their servicemen, and plenty of other country’s servicemen took note. One was the young Englishman W.E. Fairbairn. From 1903 to 1907, Fairbairn was stationed as a Royal Marine in Japanese-occupied Korea. Fairbairn seems to have spent all his off-duty hours studying martial arts with Japaneses soldiers (men very much like Morihei Ueshiba, who also served in Korea during those same years). Though Britain and Japan were allies at that time, these lessons would not have been gentle affairs.
An Anglo-Asian Martial Art
Because Britain was eventually overshadowed by her American “cousins,” people forget that for most of WWII, Great Britain was the teacher and the US the student. Whether it was geopolitics, spycraft, or plain old land warfare, the Brits had much, much broader experience than the pre-war United States.
Most relevant for our story is that the British had a head start in unconventional warfare, the setting where Allied soldiers were most likely to find themselves in a jam unarmed. Well before the Americans entered the war, Britain was already landing sea raiders and parachutist infiltrators in the occupied countries. When the United States began organizing their own special units, they used the model already worked out by the Brits.
As always, London drew on its unparalleled network of diasporic Brits leading strange lives and acquiring weird skills all over the Empire.
Fatefully, the training method they needed for hand-to-hand had already been worked out in Shanghai. For intricate reasons, Shanghai in the 1920s and 30s was the one place on earth where the most rich people, powerful people, rough people, and predators gathered from the most places. Shanghai was full of bankers, traders, sailors, and smugglers of all nations: Chinese from all over the country, Europeans, Americans, Japanese, and British subjects from all over the Empire. Visas were not needed, so Shanghai attracted Jewish refugees and “White Russians,” stateless fugitives from the Russian Revolution. Part of Shanghai was run by the Chinese government and its affiliated drug cartel (long story), other parts by the French and Japanese. But the largest part was the “International Settlement” overseen by mostly British officials.
Just as you’d expect in a place where (a) money flows in huge rivers, but (b) no one government is in charge, and (c) there is no control over who comes and goes, Shanghai attracted crime like no place else. You know things are spicy when a city’s name becomes a verb meaning “abducting someone onto a boat.”
Equally predictably, Shanghai became a high-pressure accelerator lab for developing policing techniques, including gunfighting and unarmed combat. The doyen of this was none other than W.E. Fairbairn. In 1907, he moved from his military posting in Korea to the Shanghai Municipal Police. Despite a rough start, Fairbairn proved to be a genius in his new profession, inventing or overseeing innovations like the police riot squad, the SWAT team, the armored police vehicle, and body armor, and he invented a method of training for fast-moving pistol fights that evolved into the standard for US law enforcement until the Eighties and remains influential today. Fairbairn would unquestionably have earned a Nobel Peace Prize if only the Swedish Academy defined “peacemaker” as expansively as Sam Colt, to include huge .45 pistols.
Of most interest here is that Fairbairn invented for the Shanghai Municipal Police a training system for real-deal fighting. Although Fairbairn acquired serious credentials in jujutsu and judo, he created a truncated system that looks (at least superficially) very different. In 1940 he and some of his Shanghai police proteges returned to Britain and took over the hand-to-hand combat training for agents going behind the lines, the British commandos, and later the American OSS and Rangers.
What was weird about the Fairbairn system and set it apart from the mixtures of dirty boxing and wrestling, jujutsu joint locks, and bayonet fencing that dominated the training then happening in boot camps around the Allied world was just how pared down it was all that it did not include. There was no sparring, little grappling, and virtually no punching! Much of this had to do with the very special context in which Fairbairn meant the method to be used, namely what he called “all-in fighting.”
In our next exciting episode of “Anglo-Chinese Gutter Fighting,” we look into the substance of Fairbairn’s method. Until then, consider looking through one of Fairbairn’s wartime manuals, widely available online through means both fair and foul!