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during the 1870s, as did the Japanese during the 1880s and the Americans
during the 1890s. In all cases, the reforms coincided with the establishment
of centralized training depots. Perhaps more than physical fitness, a key
learning objective was conditioning recruits to respond instantly and appropriately
to shouted commands.
Although nationalism played a part in choosing the exercises used
(thus Germans and Japanese wrestled while Americans and British boxed),
other arguments were also given. One was the nineteenth-century belief
that physical training in boxing and similar sports built character, which in
those days typically translated into reduced male sexual desire. (Sexually
transmitted diseases were a serious problem in nineteenth-century militaries,
causing 37 percent of hospital admissions in the British Army in India
in 1888 [Hayton-Keeva 1987, 76–80].) Another was that such sports
provided commanders with a tool with which they could demonstrate superiority
over other commanders. And as always victories could be orchestrated
for political purposes; as early as 1929 the Nazis staged a boxing
tournament between French Algerians and German “Aryans” for the express
purpose of inciting race hatred.
During the late nineteenth century, swords and bayonets fell into disfavor
with most professional soldiers. The reason was that cavalrymen
came to prefer revolvers and shotguns and infantry came to prefer breechloaded
firearms. Unfortunately, Japanese successes during the Russo-
Japanese War of 1904–1905 convinced some politicians that the spirit of
the bayonet was a key to victory. So when ammunition stocks fell low at
the beginning of World War I, Allied conscripts were trained to attack with
bayonets rather than shoot. Ammunition expenditure was reduced, but casualties
were enormous.
As early as 1908 Colonel Sir Malcolm Fox of the British military gymnastics
department claimed to see correlation between boxing and bayonet
fighting, so throughout the 1910s the British, Canadians, and Americans
recruited professional boxers as combatives instructors. Privately, the boxers
were appalled, as most had enough experience in rough parts of town
to know that anyone who brought a bayonet to a gunfight was going to
end up dead. Still, the methods were easily taught to huge numbers of men,
and the bayonets were effectively used by Allied military police to quell the
British, French, and Italian mutinies of 1917.
For their part, the Germans and Austrians never devoted much effort
to teaching bayonet fighting; as a German officer named Erwin Rommel
put it, “The winner in a bayonet fight is he who has one more bullet in his
magazine” (Rommel 1979, 59–60). Instead, at mass levels the focus was on
squad and team development, while at the individual level the focus was on
teaching picked sharpshooters to use cover, concealment, and bolt-action
Combatives: Military and Police Martial Art Training 85