While special forces were a thing long before the Second World War,
their success in that conflict secured their place as an integral component of modern militaries.
We've covered various aspects of special forces in previous videos, though one topic that certainly
deserves more attention is spec ops training, specifically their close-quarters combat training.
And it's impossible to do that topic justice without acknowledging two Englishmen who pretty
much taught the British, American, and Canadian spec ops units of World War II how to end lives
in close quarters. In this video, we tell the story of William E. Fairbairn and Eric A. Sykes.
While special forces were a thing long before the Second World War, their success in that conflict
secured their place as an integral component of modern militaries. We've covered various aspects
of special forces in previous videos, though one topic that certainly deserves more attention
is spec ops training, specifically their close-quarters combat training. And
it's impossible to do that topic justice without acknowledging two Englishmen who pretty much
taught the British, American, and Canadian spec ops units of World War II how to end lives in
close quarters. In this video, we tell the story of William E. Fairbairn and Eric A. Sykes.
Working the beat, Fairbairn went toe-to-toe with the city's more violent criminals,
getting into a number of fistfights, knife-fights, and gunfights everyday before lunch.
In Fairbairn's own words, these people were "the ruffians, thugs, bandits, and bullies
of one of the toughest waterfront areas in the world." In his first few months on the job, he
got stabbed multiple times by Chinese gangsters, who left him in an alley for the rats to eat.
But that hardly phased the man. After getting to his feet and recovering from the attack, he
dedicated even more of his spare time to studying martial arts — such as boxing , wrestling, judo,
jujutsu, and kung fu — and even designed a martial art of his own. By 1910, the SMP had
tasked Fairbairn with training up other recruits, to whom Fairbairn taught his mantra: "Get tough,
get down in the gutter, win at all costs [...] There's no fair play, no rules except one:
kill or be killed." In 1925, Fairbairn stepped things up a bit, founding an anti-riot squad
that he equipped with bulletproof vests and riot batons of his own design. As we said before,
Fairbairn and Sykes met in 1919, though it wasn't until 1926 that Sykes signed himself
up as a volunteer reserve for the SMP. That same year, North China Daily News & Herald
published Fairbairn's book Defendu, a 170-page manual all about the author's brutal self-designed
martial art Defendu, which was also referred to as "Gutter Fighting," among other names.
When Fairbairn realised that Sykes was a force to be reckoned with — namely an
excellent shot — he helped Sykes set up a special sniper team, which Sykes spearheaded until 1939,
when he retired from the SMP. Leaving Shanghai a short while after he retired, Sykes returned to
the United Kingdom and joined the British Secret Intelligence Service or — as many know it — MI6.
With China overrun by Japanese troops deployed in the Second Sino-Japanese War,
and with World War II unfolding, Fairbairn retired from the SMP as well,
offering his lethal skillset to MI6, just like his old pal from Shanghai. Throughout his
30-plus years of working for the SMP, Fairbairn participated in over 600 street fights,
sustaining hundreds of scars from his head down to his toes, many the result of knife wounds. In
Fairbairn's own words, "In close-quarters fighting there is no more deadly weapon than the knife."
For the rest of 1940 and about half of the following year,
Fairbairn and Sykes adapted what they had learnt while fighting crime on the streets of Shanghai
in order to train MI6 operatives and then British Commandos. A big part of said training consisted
of hand-to-hand combat, knife fighting, and close-combat point shooting, but they taught
them how to smash skulls with improvised weapons, such as literal dining chairs, too.
It was during this time that Fairbairn and Sykes designed the famous — or is it
infamous? — Fairbairn–Sykes fighting knife. The manufacturing company Wilkinson Sword produced
the first Fairbairn–Sykes in 1941, and the knife is still used by the British military to this day.
In another book pertaining to the art of ending lives, titled Get Tough, Fairbairn discusses the
features of a good fighting knife, such as the one of his own design: "In choosing a knife there are
two important factors to bear in mind: balance and keenness. The hilt should fit easily in your hand,
and the blade should not be so heavy that it tends to drag the hilt from your fingers in a
loose grip. It is essential that the blade have a sharp stabbing point and good cutting edges,
because an artery torn through (as against a clean cut) tends to contract and stop the bleeding."
Fairbairn got a few other books published in 1942, too, one of them being Shooting to Live
With the One-Hand Gun, which he co-authored with Sykes. This was the first written manual
dedicated to combat pistol shooting, and one paragraph from the book reads: "The average
shooting affray is a matter of split seconds. If you take much longer than a third of a
second to fire your first shot, you will not be the one to tell the newspapers about it.
It is literally a matter of the quick and the dead. Take your choice."
By the time enough MI6 operatives and British Commandos had mastered so-called
Gutter Fighting — meaning they were now able to train others without Fairbairn and Sykes being
there in person — the Shanghai veterans had had a bit of a falling out. This was possibly because
Fairbairn treated Sykes like an underling instead of an equal, or possibly because Sykes may have
had something to do with the higher-ups denying Fairbairn's request to go to war alongside the
men he was training. Either way, Sykes stayed in the UK, where he trained SOE operatives and
also the combined British SOE and American OSS spec ops teams known as the Jedburghs.
As for our mate Fairbairn, he went to Canada, where he trained Canadian and American spec ops
units, such as the Rangers and SAS, as well as OSS agents. In May 1945, several months before
World War II came to an explosive end, Sykes succumbed to a heart attack. Fairbairn, however,
went on to train cops on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus and then riot squad units
in Singapore. After living a life of violence, he died peacefully in 1960, at 75 years of age.
As always, though, we'd love to know what you think. Had you heard of the men behind the knife
before this video? Do you know anything about either man that we didn't cover?
Lastly, how many Shanghai knife-fights do you think
you could have survived? Please share your thoughts in the comments.