by Canada’s E. Hartley Leather, and How to Fight Toughby America’s
Jack Dempsey and Frank G. Menke. Inuring readers to violence and dehu-
manizing the enemy were important leitmotifs in all these books. As for the
methods shown, well, let’s just say that they worked better on willing part-
ners than armed SS Panzergrenadiers. For instance, consider the training in
mayhem illustrated in Life Magazineon February 9, 1942, pages 70–75.
Two of the men shown in the pictures are Frank Shibukawa and Robert
Mestemaker. Private Shibukawa had learned his jûdô in Japan and was a
prewar Pacific Northwest jûdô champion. Corporal Mestemaker, mean-
while, had started studying jûjutsuwhile in high school and had kept at it
during the years he worked as a corrections officer at the Michigan state
penitentiary. So both men entered the army already possessing a consider-
able base of knowledge. Furthermore, what they showed was not some-
thing taught everyone, but instead rehearsed tricks specially developed to
impress Groucho Marx and other visiting dignitaries (Svinth, forthcoming)
So too much should not be made of their expertise.
In Japan, sports, calisthenics, and military drill were widely used to
prepare the adolescent male population for military service. This was not
because the Japanese generals really expected soldiers to wrestle or box on
the battlefield, but because they believed that such training instilled Yam-
ato damashii(the Japanese spirit) into shopkeepers’ sons. So, under pres-
sure from Diet, in 1911 Japan’s Ministry of Education decided to require
schoolboys to learn jûjutsuand shinai kyôgi (flexible stick competition), as
jûdô and kendô were known until 1926. The idea, said the ministry, was
to ensure that male students should be trained to be soldiers with patriotic
conformity, martial spirit, obedience, and toughness of mind and body.
During the 1920s, Japanese high school girls also began to be required to
study halberd fencing (naginata-dô). In 1945, the girls were told to drive
their halberds into the groins of descending American paratroops, but of
course the atomic bomb put an end to that plan.
Following Hiroshima and Nagasaki, most Americans believed that the
bomb had rendered hand-to-hand combat obsolete. Therefore the U.S. mil-
itary quickly abandoned all training in close-quarter battle, which is un-
fortunate, since the U.S. Navy’s wartime V-5 program of hand-to-hand
fighting was practical. Freedom fighters and terrorists, on the other hand,
lapped it up. For example, Indonesian Muslims attributed nearly magical
power to silat,Israelis developed krav magafor use by commandos, and
the Koreans developed a version of karate called taekwondo.(“Through
Taekwondo,the soldiers’ moral armament is strengthened, gallantry to
protect the weak enhanced, courage against injustice fostered, and patrio-
tism firmly planted,” boasted the Korean general Chae Myung Shin in
1969 [Letters to the Editor, Black Belt,May 1969, 4–5].)90 Combatives: Military and Police Martial Art Training