Battalion Martial Arts Hull

21/08/2026

WW2 German shovel fighting

I doubt it was common to have a trench shovel duel but the German Soviet and Finnish manuals all cover it.

19/08/2026

Our organisation's York Club are getting into German combatives soon, including with the venerable combat shovel.

At Cottingham, we're currently going through the 1910s-1930s Shanghai Police programmes, for a non-military flavour of combatives.

We now have everything we need to start looking at the German combatives book Merkblatt 25/3 published April 15 1944.

10/08/2026

Tommy Joe Moore on the use of the bolo cut;

Nyd de videoer og den musik, du holder af, upload originalt indhold, og del det hele med venner, familie og verden på YouTube.

08/08/2026

We are a Historical European Martial Arts (HEMA) club Based in York, UK, that teaches World War Two Combatives.

07/08/2026

Last night, the Hull & Cottingham branch (that's us) workshopped the police truncheon, as part of our current thematic module looking at the Shanghai Municipal Police.

Earlier in the week, the York club got a nice play in the rain as a break from the hot weather:

01/08/2026

This is a handy video from Recon Method looking at Fairbairn's stick drill.
https://www.facebook.com/share/r/191DLK7JHQ/

30/07/2026

Our instructor Mike demonstrates the SOE favourite; the Edge of Hand Blow when assisting at the Cavendish Convivial a few weeks ago.
Come along to our sessions in Cottingham on Thursday evenings to learn strikes, holds, escapes and other unarmed and armed combat methods of WWII.

23/07/2026

Tonight, we're 'going back to basics' with the Shanghai Municipal Police Manual (1915) and Defendu (1926), which was the text book for the SMP, Hong Kong and Singapore Police.

The lesser-known 1915 book has some moves that were dropped by 1926 - evidently Fairbairn did not think they were worth keeping in, and we see this again with Scientific Self Defence (1931) and his WWII books; refinement, discarding what did not work, and leaving a cleaner, leaner 'system' of fighting in each iteration.

Being a police book, however, there is of course none of the knife-fighting and more lethal moves we see in the military combatives work, and more holds and throws for compliance and arresting.

https://archive.org/details/shanghai-municipal-police-manual-of-self-defence

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Self-defense manual for the Shanghai Municipal Police.