Military and Police Knife Fighting Techniques
The art of teaching knife fighting skills to mass military and police forces was significantly accelerated after World War I, when Captain William E. Fairbairn and Sergeant Eric A. Sykes, then members of the Shanghai Municipal Police, began teaching knife fighting skills and defenses to both police recruits and members of the British Army, Royal Marines and U.S. Marine units then stationed in Shanghai during the interwar years. Fairbairn reportedly engaged in hundreds of street fights in his twenty-year career in Shanghai, where he organized and headed a special anti-riot squad. Much of his body – arms, legs, torso, and even the palms of his hands was covered with scars from knife wounds from those fights. During World War II, Fairbairn and Sykes continued to refine their knife fighting techniques for military and paramilitary forces, teaching British Commandos, Special Operations Executive (SOE) personnel, selected American and foreign soldiers and covert espionage personnel, including members of the American Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and US/UK combined Operation Jedburgh teams. Their experience in training both soldiers and civilians in quick-kill knife fighting techniques eventually led to the development of a specialized fighting dagger suited for both covert elimination of enemy sentinels and close-combat knife fighting, the Fairbairn-Sykes Fighting Knife.
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