How one man taught US soldiers to fight dirty in WWII

Lecturing to a gaggle of younger U.S. Military Rangers on a subject at Fort Meade, Maryland, in Could 1942, U.S. Military lieutenant colonel Francois d’Eliscu ordered a trainee to degree his rifle and bayonet and cost at him, full bore.

“Come on, boy, such as you imply enterprise!” d’Eliscu shouted.

His voice was startlingly loud and sharp, particularly contemplating that it got here from such an elfin, exotic-­wanting determine. Simply 5′5 and 136 kilos, d’Eliscu was in his mid-40s and had a shiny balding head and finely chiseled options. The “Little Professor,” as some referred to as him, had an intense glare and animated gestures — virtually like a French mental debating over espresso in a Left Financial institution cafe. He had a number of graduate levels and had taught at prestigious American universities.

However d’Eliscu’s assured stance, along with his sinewy arms and shoulders poking out of his shirt, gave a touch that the person of letters was additionally well-schooled in violent confrontations. His personal weapon was a six-foot size of sash twine.

The trainee lunged at his small goal, the naked blade of his bayonet flashing. However d’Eliscu was a blur. Seconds later, the soldier lay flat on this again, trussed and unable to maneuver for worry of strangling himself. D’Eliscu was unhurt, aside from a patch of pores and skin that the bayonet had shaved off his elbow as he’d disarmed his assailant.

After releasing the trainee, d’Eliscu continued his lecture. He proceeded to deride American-style boxing, with its guidelines barring foul blows and breaking clear from a clinch and its strategy of hanging with the fists.

“Sportsmanship!” he snarled. If the lads ever confronted off in opposition to German or Japanese troopers in close-quarters hand-to-hand fight, he instructed them, there have been no guidelines, and different components of the physique — open palms, elbows, ft — had been more practical for hanging the susceptible spots on an enemy’s physique.

“This — this — this,” d’Eliscu defined, demonstrating a collection of strikes. “And he’s ruined.”

After which there was the sash twine, a seemingly innocuous on a regular basis object that in d’Eliscu’s fingers might disable and even kill.

“His velocity and ability appear magical,” wrote R. P. Harriss, a columnist for the Baltimore Night Solar who was readily available to watch the demonstration. “This to make the sufferer speechless, this to blind…this to interrupt the neck.”

It was a sort of combating that Harriss and most different People had most likely by no means seen earlier than.

“Most of us nonetheless consider the American soldier as a two-fisted man who wouldn’t consider hitting under the belt,” Harriss wrote, “a lot much less letting fly a kick to the crotch.”

D’Eliscu’s coaching was meant to offer American troopers with the abilities to counter the mysterious martial arts experience that many believed Japanese troops possessed. By one account, d’Eliscu had really purloined the combating secrets and techniques of the Japanese when he attended a jujitsu demonstration whereas visiting Japan and had sneakily dedicated the intricate strategies to reminiscence.

D’Eliscu was simply one of many many martial artists the US had pressed into service throughout World Battle II to hone the hand-to-hand fight talents of American troopers.

In keeping with Thomas A. Inexperienced and Joseph R. Svinth’s Martial Arts of the World: An Encyclopedia of Historical past and Innovation, numerous service branches turned to consultants starting from boxing champion Jack Dempsey, who educated Coast Guard cadets, to Marine Corps knife-fighting skilled J. Drexel Biddle, who popularized the Ka-Bar knife, and even skilled wrestlers corresponding to Charles “Soiled Dick” Raines and “Man Mountain Dean” (the ring title of Frank Simmons Leavitt), who taught their holds to military troopers.

The U.S. Workplace of Strategic Providers, the predecessor of the CIA, had its personal hand-to-hand combating system, designed by British skilled William E. Fairbairn, which emphasised strategies corresponding to palm strikes and knee-to-groin assaults.

However even amongst that group, d’Eliscu stood out, along with his colourful, barely eccentric, mental persona and his unorthodox combating system, a mixture of soiled wrestling holds and Japanese jujitsu that eschewed strategies in style in boxing or wrestling competitions that had sporting guidelines.

He additionally developed an excessive health routine for his fighters that was brutal sufficient to make at present’s CrossFit exercises look slothful by comparability. Within the course of, he turned a sought-after topic for function writers and navy propagandists, who portrayed him as a form of World Battle II Bruce Lee — a martial arts genius who might prepare American troopers to provide the Japanese a style of their very own medication.

Few knew that d’Eliscu’s unique persona was one thing he’d rigorously constructed, right down to including a “d” and an apostrophe to his surname, within the style of French the Aristocracy. However his combating prowess wasn’t all hype. In the middle of the struggle, d’Eliscu would display his abilities in actual fight, with lives on the road.

“He can kill with a flick of his elbow — maim with a pinch of his fingers,” defined a 1942 profile of d’Eliscu in Yank journal, which described him as one of many hardest males alive.

It helped that d’Eliscu evidently preferred to display his strategies by taking over a lot bigger opponents. One in every of his favourite companions was military main Tod Goodwin, a former New York Giants soccer participant, who stood 6-foot-6 and outweighed d’Eliscu by 50 kilos. Yank famous that it was so harmful to tangle with d’Eliscu that “an ambulance with three Medical Corps docs was in attendance in any respect periods.”

Harriss, who noticed d’Eliscu in motion, famous that no one at Fort Meade who’d seen the Little Professor render opponents helpless ever expressed any doubts concerning the effectiveness of his strategies. For Harriss, the large query was whether or not sufficient troopers could be able to studying them.

“It’s plain that he’s far above regular in velocity, ability, aptitude, and coordination,” he wrote. However Harris noticed that a number of rigorously picked males, “intensely educated on this style,” could be worthwhile as hit-and-run raiders. A few of d’Eliscu’s sash twine strategies had been designed for exactly that function — sneaking up behind an enemy sentry and rendering him “helpless and terrified.”

The press accounts of d’Eliscu’s strategies should definitely have reassured People who feared the brutal techniques of the Japanese. In keeping with a 1943 article on d’Eliscu in Widespread Science, the enemy troopers knew “all of the bone-breaking methods of judo” and even supposedly carried small knives that, within the occasion of seize, they may use to slit the throats of unwary American guards. However due to d’Eliscu’s instruction, the profile in Yank journal had identified, “the Rangers … really know extra about judo than the common Japanese.”

D’Eliscu’s previous was in some methods as mysterious as his martial arts strategies. He apparently instructed Harriss that he spent a few of his early years in France in addition to in Japan, and an Related Press profile as soon as described him as having inherited his combating prowess from a father who was an skilled swordsman.

In actuality, he was born on November 10, 1895 in New York Metropolis, the son of a French businessman, Frank Eliscu, and his Romanian spouse, Sophia, who had emigrated to the US seven years earlier. His youthful brother, Edward, would go on to turn into a well-known Hollywood songwriter.

In his 2001 autobiography With or With out a Tune, Edward Eliscu recalled his teenage brother as “an introverted, buck-toothed loner” who glided by the title Milton Eliscu.

At one level the long run martial arts skilled and navy officer bought a job stacking books on the one hundred and thirty fifth Avenue public library in Harlem, in response to Edward. However after Milton returned residence one night with torn garments and a bloody brow, which he claimed he had acquired after being overwhelmed by a mob in a racial confrontation, he started to alter.

Although he’d by no means had a lot curiosity in train or sports activities, as a senior at DeWitt Clinton Excessive Faculty, he entered a cross nation race and, surprisingly, completed first. After commencement he entered the Savage Faculty for Bodily Training, a academics faculty off Columbus Circle, and step by step withdrew from his household, retaining them at midnight concerning the new identification he was forging as a bodily health buff and coach for native highschool soccer groups.

Round that point, gadgets within the sports activities pages of the Brooklyn Each day Eagle present that he had Frenchified his final title with the “d” and apostrophe. When d’Eliscu graduated from Savage in 1917, Edward and his mom attended the occasion and had been startled to see him give an exhibition of his gymnastic abilities.

“Milton’s ability and beauty left me breathless,” Edward later wrote. “A gymnastic Nijinsky, he outclassed his friends.”

Quickly after that, Edward Eliscu recalled, d’Eliscu gathered a number of belongings and instructed his household that he was off to affix the U.S. Military. His mom, lamenting that Milton would by no means return, defined that he had transformed to Christianity.

Edward bought one other fleeting glimpse of his brother a month or so later, when he observed him in a navy parade, sporting a mock bandage on his head as he bore a stretcher in a medical unit and “marching as if the struggle depended upon him alone.”

However d’Eliscu didn’t see fight in World Battle I. As a substitute he served at Fort Gordon in Georgia, the place, in response to native newspaper accounts, he supervised sporting actions and arranged boxing and wrestling competitions for the troopers. In keeping with an Related Press profile revealed many years later, he additionally labored as a bayonet teacher.

After the struggle d’Eliscu earned a bachelor’s diploma in schooling, a grasp’s in sociology from the College of Pennsylvania, a second grasp’s in science from Columbia College and later a doctorate from New York College. He additionally coached numerous collegiate sports activities, together with varsity wrestling at New York College.

Whereas he taught bodily schooling and coached, d’Eliscu had a facet profession as a radio character. He hosted a pair of early morning every day train applications on radio station WIP in Philadelphia, and he as soon as donned a deep-sea diving swimsuit to broadcast a present from the underside of the ocean off Atlantic Metropolis — a stunt that almost resulted in catastrophe when one among his weighted footwear got here off through the broadcast and he needed to cling on for pricey life within the sturdy present.

“After I got here up, I discovered that everyone thought I used to be lifeless,” he recalled with amusement. “Plainly the principle tube from the microphone broke, and I used to be there speaking away, and all that got here out for the printed was glug-glug-glug-glug.”

He additionally dabbled in sportscasting, working the primary Gene Tunney–Jack Dempsey combat in Philadelphia in 1926. In his spare time, he taught fly-fishing strategies at Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn.

Within the late Twenties d’Eliscu moved to Honolulu, the place he turned a newspaper sports activities columnist and arranged novice boxing competitions. He additionally helped to handle the U.S. Olympic swim workforce that featured Johnny Weissmuller in his premovie days. For a time, d’Eliscu additionally reportedly acted because the star swimmer’s private supervisor, turning down early film affords that didn’t appear sufficiently profitable.

“Even granting that he would mixture greater than $25,000 the primary yr, which I do know he would, there is no such thing as a surety that he would go over within the motion pictures or on the stage,” d’Eliscu instructed a newspaper interviewer.

He most well-liked as an alternative to see Weissmuller turn into knowledgeable swimming instructor and earn a residing giving demonstrations and lectures, although Weissmuller did find yourself going into the flicks and changing into an in a single day star with the 1932 movie Tarzan the Ape-Man.

D’Eliscu returned to Philadelphia within the early Thirties to function an athletic director, a monitor coach and an teacher in public well being on the Philadelphia School of Osteopathic Medication.

It’s not clear the place d’Eliscu acquired his obvious experience at jujitsu. A 1919 article within the Philadelphia Inquirer mentions his taking part in a jujitsu exhibition with Leo Pardello, an Italian heavyweight, to lift cash for erecting a constructing for the American Legion.

Many articles about d’Eliscu and different navy martial artists portrayed Japanese hand-to-hand combating strategies as a intently guarded cultural secret and inherently underhanded. In actuality, in response to Inexperienced and Svinth’s historical past of martial arts, Westerners started going to Japan to review jujitsu within the late 1800s. After that, Japanese immigrants within the early 1900s unfold judo — the trendy martial artwork that advanced from jujitsu — all through Europe and the US. Within the Twenties, one judo grasp, Taguchi Ryoichi, taught the artwork at Columbia College, one of many establishments that d’Eliscu attended.

The 1942 profile of d’Eliscu in Yank journal affords a extra colourful account. Whereas on a visit to Tokyo with the U.S. swimming workforce in 1928, the story goes, d’Eliscu was invited to attend exhibitions at two judo faculties, the place he was invited to provide an indication of Western wrestling strategies. The Japanese photographed his strikes in order that they may examine them later. After d’Eliscu completed, he bowed to the top of the college.

“I’ve heard a lot about your individual type of wrestling,” he instructed the Japanese teacher. “Would you honor me by demonstrating a few of your extra difficult holds in return?”

At first the teacher was reluctant, however d’Eliscu’s flattery finally gained him over, and he demonstrated “his full bag of methods,” because the article put it. When it was over, d’Eliscu thanked him, bowed, and left. Fourteen years later, he supposedly taught a few of the similar Japanese strategies to American troopers.

After World Battle II broke out, d’Eliscu — by then in his late 40s — rejoined the navy. In early 1942 he was despatched to Fort Meade, Maryland, to coach elite Military Rangers.

To that finish, d’Eliscu devised an virtually inhuman coaching routine. Every day started with a two-mile run, adopted by a 600-yard impediment course, that includes a 15-foot-deep entice with clean sides, from which the trainees needed to discover a strategy to get out. “If they will’t get out, let ‘em keep there,” d’Eliscu defined to a reporter. One officer stayed within the entice for 5 hours earlier than he lastly managed to flee.

However that was simply the warm-up.

D’Eliscu put the lads via unconventional drills through which they needed to freeze in place on his command or cling from tree limbs. Then got here pull-ups and different power workout routines. He additionally devised unusual torments designed to spice up troopers’ fortitude. {A photograph} from Fort Meade exhibits d’Eliscu working over the supine our bodies of his trainees, stepping on their abdomens as he makes his means throughout the sphere.

Then it was time for combating, which included anything-­goes grappling and bare-knuckle boxing, with Medical Corps personnel readily available to have a tendency accidents. To get his males accustomed to all-out, no-rules combating, one among d’Eliscu’s methods was to have trainees placed on fatigues with out rank insignias. Then he’d get them organized to get right into a low crouch and at his command start combating one another from that place.

After they pushed, pulled, and threw a number of punches, the trainees normally ended up falling collectively in a chaotic heap; they needed to roll to get clear of each other’s our bodies and keep away from damage.

Whereas d’Eliscu included Western-style boxing within the troops’ coaching routine, he wasn’t eager on it as a combating method within the subject. As a substitute, he needed his fighters to make use of extra of their our bodies and use a wider vary of disabling strategies.

“Boxing — bah!” he as soon as instructed his college students. “Swing your proper elbow like this, to crush his windpipe. Slap him together with your different hand. Then observe via with the knee or stomach.”

His strategies had been sufficiently unorthodox for Life journal to ship a photographer to shoot a June 1942 unfold on what it labeled his “soiled combating” system.

However for all his depth about educating deadly strategies, d’Eliscu additionally typically displayed a unusual humorousness. As Harriss witnessed, he as soon as stopped abruptly in the course of an indication and segued into an unsettling monologue.

“Civilization! Christian ethics! Human progress!” d’Eliscu exclaimed. “All our research in sociology, schooling, the humanities — after which we’re proper again to the beast. What a world!”

On one other event, d’Eliscu paused the coaching for some self-contemplation.

“The killer. That’s what they name me right here, and I’d relatively go trout fishing any day,” he instructed Harriss. “Kiddies, doggies, I like them. However c’est la guerre!”

U.S. Military leaders had been sufficiently impressed with d’Eliscu’s combating and health program that in early 1943 they despatched him again to Hawaii to arrange one other college to organize Rangers for jungle warfare within the brutal island marketing campaign within the Pacific.

D’Eliscu arrange a secret coaching website within the mountains that turned generally known as the Mayhem Bowl, replete with ravines and dense brush. In keeping with a United Press account that hid the college’s actual location, a three-mile course there had trainees working up and down hillsides, navigating water hazards, scaling a wall, and working up a metallic slide that was greased to make the going harder.

For a piece of the course, trainees needed to crawl a half mile with no a part of their our bodies greater than 24 inches off the bottom, an effort that usually took an hour.

A reporter for the Honolulu Advertiser described the coaching course as “form of a mountain goat’s nightmare, lined with the three ft of mud and water.”

To make the battlefield frighteningly real looking, d’Eliscu used precise flamethrowers and tear fuel as hazards.

“Fireplace and fuel are slightly unorthodox,” he defined. “However then, so is struggle.”

“My job was to make worms and turtles out of the lads,” he later instructed a newspaper interviewer.

The coaching in Hawaii was much more grueling than that at Fort Meade. Amongst different ordeals, d’Eliscu put trainees via a very brutal train that required groups of males to carry and carry a 1,000-pound log up a steep hill a number of occasions — after which proceed to hand-to-hand combating drills.

He additionally subjected them to life-threatening risks, planting fields with explosives and utilizing dwell ammunition, flamethrowers, and naked bayonets in coaching, to instill in them what he referred to as “sane appreciation of a knife and a bullet.”

The routine was so hazardous that by March 1943 trainees in this system had already suffered 1,600 accidents. However d’Eliscu didn’t appear involved.

“Higher to have a number of males harm now,” he mentioned, “than to have them killed needlessly later.”

D’Eliscu even went via the exercises alongside his trainees. “I went via each take a look at with the lads,” he mentioned, “by no means asking them to do a factor I wouldn’t or couldn’t do.”

Many distinguished individuals visited the Hawaii coaching college. One archival picture exhibits a smiling First Woman Eleanor Roosevelt in an American Purple Cross uniform, towering over a stern-looking d’Eliscu in a sleeveless white undershirt. He additionally apparently taught a number of judo strategies to Senator Albert B. Chandler of Kentucky, who seems in one other picture throwing d’Eliscu over his shoulder.

Whereas he led the coaching, d’Eliscu someway additionally discovered time to write down the educational e book The way to Put together for Army Health, revealed in 1943 by W. W. Norton & Co.

And naturally, the Rangers discovered d’Eliscu’s sash twine strategies.

A narrative in Widespread Mechanics described one among his favourite strikes. After front-kicking an enemy soldier within the abdomen to knock him to the bottom, the American soldier was to rapidly loop the rope round his adversary’s knees and draw the unfastened ends round his neck.

“If the sufferer doesn’t strangle himself along with his personal struggles, the method is hastened by sitting on his face and pushing ahead on his knees,” the journal defined.

D’Eliscu believed that the sash twine was such an efficient weapon that he predicted it might finally turn into a normal a part of each soldier’s gear. By one account, he developed greater than two dozen totally different strategies for strangulation.

“Our perspective and private emotions with regard to sportsmanship and truthful play should be modified,” d’Eliscu wrote after the struggle. “Strangling and killing are distant from our American Teachings, however to not our enemies.”

However educating combating strategies wasn’t sufficient for d’Eliscu. To him, it was vital to see whether or not they really labored in life-and-death conditions. Regardless of his significance as a coach for the U.S. struggle effort, he bought his superiors to ship him briefly into fight.

In November 1943 d’Eliscu went ashore with touchdown forces at Makin Atoll within the Gilbert Islands. As the lads in his patrol made their means inland, they had been pinned down by sniper fireplace and needed to take cowl.

D’Eliscu was strolling behind a tall lieutenant who was abruptly hit within the arm by a sniper in a tree, in response to a reconstruction of the incident by Ray Coll Jr., a correspondent for the Honolulu Advertiser, who interviewed woun­ded troopers evacuated to Oahu.

D’Eliscu fired on the sniper and hit him, inflicting him to fall to the bottom. In keeping with Coll’s account, d’Eliscu rushed to the Japanese soldier, used the disarming strategies he’d taught at Fort Meade and in Hawaii to take the person’s rifle and knife away, and rapidly killed him. That heroic act led to d’Eliscu being awarded the Silver Star three months later.

By July 1944, d’Eliscu was again in New York, the place a few of Edward Eliscu’s pals who labored for the Workplace of Battle Info had been startled to identify a bald, wiry military officer with a well-recognized final title, giving a speech at an armory through which he castigated black marketeers and criticized unions for making hassle through the struggle.

“So Milton Eliscu, born in Brooklyn, raised on the Decrease East Aspect and Harlem, had turn into Lt. Col. M. Francois d’Eliscu, chief of the tough Rangers,” Edward Eliscu wrote in his memoir, with greater than a hint of bitterness.

D’Eliscu was despatched to France to prepare coaching on the officers’ candidate college at Fontainebleau. He was made a member of the Legion of Honor and awarded the Croix de Guerre. He additionally wrote a handbook, Hand to Hand Fight (1945), that outlined his strategies for hip throws, joint locks, eye-gouging finger strikes, shin kicks, grappling on the bottom and defensive techniques in opposition to knife assaults. (A reprint finally turned accessible on the civilian market.)

“Follow for velocity and perfection,” d’Eliscu admonishes in it. “Be cautious. Don’t benefit from your accomplice in follow. Save your individual private strategies for the enemy!”

After the struggle d’Eliscu turned athletic director on the College of Hawaii. However the US quickly wanted him once more. He served within the Korean Battle and was then despatched to Ankara, Turkey, to coach the nation’s infantry and paratroops as a part of a international help program.

Whereas there, he and his spouse bought an opportunity to tour Europe, and close to the top of his tour they spent a while residing within the Turkish seaside city of Izmir earlier than they returned to the US in 1953.

D’Eliscu then headed to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, the place he helped prepare U.S. troops, together with commanding a power of paratroops who used guerrilla techniques in opposition to a Nationwide Guard battalion in a simulated battle on a mountainside in the course of a blizzard.

D’Eliscu’s combating strategies had been finally supplanted by much more refined ones. At this time, for instance, Military Rangers be taught a combating system that blends strategies from wrestling, boxing, Muay Thai and judo with weapons abilities from Kali, a Filipino martial artwork.

However the change in mindset that d’Eliscu delivered to hand-to-hand fight, which can have been his largest contribution to the navy, endures.

After his retirement from the military in 1954, d’Eliscu and his spouse resettled in Siesta Key, Florida, close to Sarasota. He spent his final years educating energy boating security programs. He died in 1972, at age 76. His brother Edward discovered of his demise when somebody mailed him a newspaper obituary.

Edward wrote in his memoir that he didn’t grieve for d’Eliscu, whom he felt had turned his again on his household, however acknowledged that his brother had achieved his life’s aims. He had turn into “the main authority on navy health, a triple Rambo — with a life like a jigsaw puzzle solely he might have put collectively.”

This story was initially revealed on HistoryNet.com.