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Defendu Wikipedia

Defendu is a modern martial art developed by William E. Fairbairn. Defendu is a hand-to-hand combat system based on judo that was developed to train the Shanghai Municipal Police, and was later taught in expanded for to Office of Strategic Services|OSS and Special Operations Executive|SOE members during WWII.

Fairbairn was a Black belt (martial arts)|black belt of the Kodokan Institute, where he learned judo while working as an instructor and head of the Shanghai Municipal Police police riot squad between the years 1907 and 1940.

Based on this training, and actual fights he was involved in during his police work, Fairbairn began to develop his own system of hand-to-hand combat, Defendu. It was designed to be simple to learn and brutally effective. Fairbairn published a book, "Scientific Self Defence", in 1926 illustrating this method - and it is here that the term "Defendu" first appeared.

This confused early readers of the book, who assumed that the techniques within had some direct basis in the Eastern martial arts that Fairbairn had learned. Thus, in an attempt to highlight to originality of Fairbairn's material, the term did not appear in the 1931 edition of the book.

By the time Fairbairn was called back to help train Allied troops in WWII, Defendu had a well established record. Fairbairn and others expanded on this system to create the Close Quarters Combat system that was then taught to the troops. This system was built on Defendu, but modified for military applications, rather than police and riot control.

The original Defendu was oriented towards self defense and restraint, while the Close Quarters Combat system concentrated on rapid disabling of an opponent, with potentially lethal force. The militarized version of Defendu is described in Rex Applegate's book "Kill or Get Killed".

Fairbairn published several more books on the subject of self defence, all of which refer to Defendu only in relation to the earlier book. The term "gutter fighting" or "the Fairbairn system" appeared to be prefered instead.

es:Defendu
Category:Martial arts
Category:Law enforcement in the People's Republic of China

Last Modified:   2005-11-04