History lesson from a miniscule item in a movie

[Drache]

It's funny how seeing an item in a movie led to my spending the entire day yesterday reading about the history of three people. I was watching a movie and seen a knife this one soldier had and liked the looks of it which started a hunt for the knife. All I had to go on was what the handle looked like. So I finally found the knife and then by accident fell into the history of one of the two designers of the knife and other things the guy did.

The knife was designed by a Lieutenant-Colonel William E. Fairbairn and a Colonel Rex Applegate. Upon further examination Fairbairn teamed up with a Major Eric A. Sykes to design a knife as well.

Fairbairn and Sykes were both members of the SMP (Shanghai Municiple Police) before WWII. They were teamed together as Snipers. During this time Fairbairn also created a Martial Art style for Police Officers called Defendu (Sykes also developed his own during WWII called Combatives). When the second world war broke out Fairbairn enlisted and later became a member of the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS - MI6) (Sykes joined in 1939). Both taught close quarters combat (pistol shooting), hand to hand fighting, as well as knife fighting. They taught in Britain, Canada, and The USA. During this time they developed the knife that would be known by every WWII Commando. Also during this time they both wrote a book called Shooting to Live.

Fairbairn-Sykes Fighting Knife


Colonel Applegate worked in the Office of Strategic Services where he trained allied special forces in close-quarter combat during World War II. In 1943 he wrote Kill or Get Killed, still considered the classic textbook of Western-style hand-to-hand combat. The updated 1976 edition of Kill or Get Killed was also published by the US Marine Corps as Fleet Marine Force Reference Publication 12-80. Applegate developed the techniques outlined in the book during his work with William E. Fairbairn, who had previously developed his techniques while working for the Shanghai Municipal Police from 1907 to 1940. Applegate was the proponent for a system of combat pistol shooting that is outlined in "Kill or Get Killed", based on point shooting and stressing training for close range, fast response shooting.

http://www.bobtuley.com/pointshooting.htm

E. A. Sykes and W. E. Fairbairn, once of the Shanghai Municipal Police before the Japanese occupation, are generally acknowledged as the fathers of modern point shooting development and Colonel Rex Applegate of the military's Office of Strategic Intelligence (OSS - Precusor of the CIA) is credited with documenting and bringing it into popular use for clandestine military operations.  Many books are available that paraphrase their work, at great length in fact, in promoting the art of point shooting during WWII training of OSS agents.

He was inducted into the Blade Magazine Cutlery Hall of Fame at the 1994 Blade Show in Atlanta, Georgia in recognition for the impact that his designs have made upon the cutlery industry as well as his writings on knife fighting.

Learned all this by searching for:

Boker Applegate Fairbairn Combat Dagger


And that's a little useless history less brought on by my love of knives.... 

[Lowprofile]

Compared to some of the stuff on here  .......

That was good stuff bro!   

[Drache]

Compared to some of the stuff on here  .......

That was good stuff bro!   

I collect knives and this is the first knife that actually had a real "history" behind it. It's funny because I had read about Defendu last year and when I first saw the name on the knife I didn't put two and two together until I started researching the history.

[bountyhunter]

Wow funny you actually read about fairbain and sykes because I train in their kni-com (knife combat). Check out GHCA.org one of the only schools left to still train in cqc close quarter combat and kni-com relative to world war two training standards.
~ Johann