The Elmer Keith's and Jeff Cooper's of the world like to keep a lot of stupid schit alive.
Perhaps, I was quoting William Ewart Fairbairn, 25 years in the Shanghai Municipal Police. If you're at all involved in combat arts ya oughtta know about W.E.Fairbairn.
IIRC Fairbairn was alway a bada$$ and joined the Royal Marines underage before WWI. When he was 19 he left the Royal Marines while posted in the Far East and joined the Shanghai Municipal Police. Likely Shanghai had many attractions for a 19 year old youth.
Shortly thereafter, despite his fighting abilitites, he was beaten and left for dead on the docks while on duty. At that point he started studying martial arts, well ahead of his time so far as Europeans were concerned. In particular he studied for decades under a Japanese ju-jitsu master.
The SMP hired people from all over the Empire and also contained Sikhs and of course Chinese. As he rose in the ranks Fairbairn incorporated their fighting styles also.
For handguns, despite his Brit roots, he favored the 1911 but pinned the grip safeties. His smaller-statured Chinese policemen got the Colt 1903 (??) .380's.
British handgun training in that era weren't all that bad, to pass the Army revolver course you had to put one round into a 10" by 15" rectangle at ten feet (??) within one second, starting from a stiff-armed, one-handed low ready. Fairbairn was way ahead of his time in incorporating practical courses of fire. Nobody but him in that era would put out a book on handgun combat with a title like "Shooting to Live".
Fairbairn himself survived more than sixty armed confrontations with bad guys in the course of his career. if you read his book he actually brags on how his Cops were winning fights at a ratio of four to one, which indicated how rough the duty was.
He also published a book on knife fighting and where to cut your opponent, it used to be on-line too but was withdrawn IIRC at the request of his family.
He later partnered up in the SMP with a former Indian professional big game hunter named Eric Anthony Sykes, Sykes was a rifle guy who initiated police sniping and something akin to a modern SWAT team.
WWII breaks out and Shanghai falls to the Japanese, Fairbairn and Sykes return to England where they devised modern Commando training and techniques. The Sykes-Fairbairn dagger is still the emblem of Brit Spec-Ops forces.
Sykes and Fairbairn had a falling out after Sykes busted Fairbairn's plans to go along on a Commando raid with the mean he had trained (Fairbairn was in his 50's at the time). Sykes died of a heart attack during the war, Fairbairn was sent to the US to coordinated Spec-Ops training, Rex Applegate became one of his disciples.
After that Fairbairn was sent to train agents Camp X in Canada, a black-ops (is that the term?) outfit. Ian Fleming of future James Bond fame was sent to train at that camp.
After the war Fairbairn, still on Her Majesty's secret service, was sent to India and Ceylon on various classified missions. IIRC he retired shortly before his death in the 60's.
Pretty much everything ya need to know about Fairbairn is that when, as one of the demonstrably deadliest men in the world, he was asked what he would do if attacked by a knife-wielding assailant, his advice was "run".
The famous gun gurus on this side of the Atlantic, including IIRC Rex Applegate, were strangely silent on crediting Fairbairn which is prob'ly why he ain't more widely known over here even today.
Not so in England, and the Israelis in particular IIRC still advocate Fairbairn's safeties-off, empty chamber carry/two handed rack and draw technique for autos.
When it came to handgun combat Fairbairn described a typical gunfight as taking place in the dark, within ten feet, and decided in the first two seconds.
Which is why at the handgun range I'm about the only guy standing ten feet from the target, putting two rounds center mass in repeated draw-and-shoot drills. To do that ya gotta have a handgun grip that indexes in the hand the exact same way every time, hence the longer grip on my Airweight and the longer magazine on the LC9.
Works fer me, YMMV.
Birdwatcher
