Martial Arts Of The World - Webs

and 1930s, comic books and movies featured lantern-jawed heroes knocking
out hordes of enemies using weapons no more powerful than a single
right cross to the jaw. Heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey literally made
a million dollars starring in a series of forgettable Hollywood films featuring
exactly this technique.
Around the same time, police departments began providing officers
with professional instruction. In New York City, Theodore Roosevelt authorized
firearm instruction for police officers as early as 1895, and in
Berlin, Erich Rahn began teaching jûjutsu to detectives in 1910. During the
1930s the Gestapo became interested in Japanese close-quarter methods; in
1938 a German policeman named Helmut Lehmann was sent to Japan
specifically to learn jûdô, and upon his return to the Reich the following
year, he was ranked fourth dan (fourth-degree black belt).
In Britain and Canada, policemen boxed or wrestled. (During the
1930s, a surprising number of Canadian amateur wrestling champions
were police officers.) During the 1920s several London Metropolitan policemen
also took jûdô instruction at the Budôkai, and in Vancouver,
British Columbia, eleven Royal Canadian Mounted Police constables
achieved shôdan (jûdô first-degree black belt ranking) by 1934.
In the United States, officer S. J. Jorgensen started a jûjutsu program
for the Seattle Police Department in 1927. Police in Minnesota, Michigan,
New Jersey, and California also started jûjutsu programs, and by 1940
such programs were nationwide. A British show wrestler named Leopold
MacLaglan was often involved in establishing these programs, and the
quality of instruction was not always the best.
J. Edgar Hoover’s G-men had their own system of applied mayhem.
The Bureau of Investigation’s primary close-combat instructor was Major
Anthony J. Drexel Biddle, U.S. Marine Corps, Retired. Biddle had done
some boxing and fencing, and he enjoyed telling old ladies and little children
Bible stories illustrated by homilies about how turning a bayonetequipped
rifle sideways would keep the bayonet from sticking to the opponent’s
ribs (McEvoy 1942, 538–539). During the late 1920s, Biddle
taught some grip releases and disarming techniques to the Philadelphia police,
and after Franklin Roosevelt made Biddle’s cousin Francis the attorney
general of the United States, the FBI hired him to teach close-combat techniques
to agents. Since FBI training took place at a Marine base in Virginia,
Biddle also got to show his tricks to Marine officers during summer encampments,
and as a result the Marine Corps Association published Biddle’s
Do or Die: Military Manual of Advanced Science in Individual Combat
in 1937. Cold Steel, a 1952 text written by a former student named
John Styer, is an improved version of Do or Die.
The Soviet method of unarmed combat was called sambo, short for
Combatives: Military and Police Martial Art Training 87