25 BANNED Hand-to-Hand Combat Tricks Every WWII Soldier Learned That Are Now Classified D
In the winter of 1943, a British commando named William Sykes sat across a table from a group of American OSS recruits in a converted Scottish manor house and told them something that no training manual had ever printed. He told them that the difference between the man who walks out of a close quarters fight and the man who doesn’t has nothing to do with strength, size, or even speed.
It has everything to do with knowing three things that the enemy does not. Sykes had killed with his hands before. He had done it quietly in dark alleyways in Shanghai, working as a police officer in one of the most violent cities on Earth. He knew what worked and what got you killed and what he taught those OSS recruits that winter would be stamped classified before the war ended.
Locked away in files that the general public was never meant to see. Number 25 on this list involved no weapon at all. It was a technique for collapsing a man’s lung with a single open palm strike delivered to a precise point on the rib cage. The British special operations executive called it the dead rib entry and they taught it to agents who were going behind enemy lines in occupied France and the Netherlands.
The target was the floating rib on a man’s left side just below the armpit. At the exact angle where the rib attaches to nothing and has no structural support. A sharp downward heel palm strike to that point at the correct angle does not just bruise. It drives the rib inward, piercing the plural lining, and the man cannot cry out because he suddenly cannot breathe.
SOE handlers documented the technique in a training manual designated most secret in 1941. That manual was partially declassified decades later, but the specific anatomical diagrams were redacted and remain so today. The reason most of these techniques disappeared after the war is not complicated.
The men who used them came home, got jobs, had children, and never talked about it. Their trainers, men like Sykes and his partner Eric Fairbar, died without authorizing civilian publication of what they had developed. And the governments that employed them decided that techniques designed to kill quickly and silently had no place in a world trying to convince itself that civilization had been restored.
Number 24 was taught to rangers and marine raiders in the Pacific. It was called the neck wrap, and it required nothing except the soldier’s own forearm and the angle of the enemy’s shoulder. If a soldier came up behind a Japanese sentry in silence, the instinct was to go for a chokeold.
But a chokeold takes time and the man can still struggle and make noise. What Fairbar had documented from years of street fighting in Shanghai was that wrapping the forearm across the throat while simultaneously driving a knee into the back of the knee produced a specific collapse pattern. The sentry’s knees buckled, his center of gravity dropped, and the angle of the forearm naturally closed the karateed without requiring any squeeze. 17 seconds.
That was the clinical figure in the training documentation. 17 seconds from contact to unconsciousness with no sound produced if done correctly. Marine Raider training records from Guadal Canal reference this technique by name. Those records are held at the National Archives and available to researchers, but the specific technique pages have been withheld under a provision that allows certain wartime operational methods to remain restricted indefinitely.
Number 23 came out of the NKVD, the Soviet secret police, and was shared with American operatives during the brief period of cooperation between the OSS and Soviet intelligence in 1943 and early 1944. It was called, in translated briefing documents, the standing key. The idea was grotesque in its simplicity.
Every human knee is designed to flex in one direction. Apply lateral pressure in the opposite direction at the right moment, and the joint does not merely strain. It separates. The Soviet trainers who demonstrated it on volunteers in those briefings used a specific positioning technique that required no leverage, no size advantage, no momentum, just timing and the precise placement of a boot heel against the outside of a kneecap during a moment of weight transfer.
American trainee who witnessed the demonstration described it in debriefing reports as deeply disturbing. Not because it was dramatic, but because it was quiet. The man simply stopped being able to stand. Here is the first thing you need to understand about what these men were being trained to do. This was not fighting in any sense that a modern audience would recognize.
There were no rounds, no rules, no reset. The entire philosophy that Sykes and Fairbar had built and that became the foundation of Allied close combat doctrine across multiple services was based on a single premise. The goal is not to defeat the enemy. The goal is to remove the enemy from the situation as fast as possible so you can complete your mission.
Every technique on this list was built around that premise. Speed and finality over everything else. That philosophy is why so much of this material was classified. Not because it was militarily sensitive in any traditional sense, but because governments understood that teaching civilians to think that way.
To view a physical encounter as something to be ended rather than one crossed a line that polite society was not prepared to have crossed. Number 22 was a knife technique, but not the kind that most people imagine when they think of a combat knife. The standard combat knife of the era, the Fairbar Sykes fighting knife, was designed with one purpose encoded in its shape.
The blade was thin, double-edged, and tapered to an extremely fine point. It was not designed for slashing. Slashing wounds are survivable. The FS knife was designed for thrusting and specifically for thrusting into the gaps between the ribs at the angle that reaches the heart. Trainees were taught the exact anatomical entry points not as a general area but as a specific intercostal space, the precise angle of blade inclination and the depth required to reach the paricardium.
Medical examiners who have examined bodies from wartime covert operations documented this with clinical precision. The technique leaves a wound so small that forensic identification of the cause of death was difficult by the standards of the era. Number 21 was taught to paratroopers in both the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions, and it addressed a problem that nobody had anticipated before the war.
When a paratrooper landed and found himself tangled in his own suspension lines, he was temporarily immobilized in a way that made him completely vulnerable. German soldiers who found Allied paratroopers in this situation had orders to take prisoners when possible. What Allied paratroopers were taught was a ground fighting escape sequence that allowed a man tangled in lines to create enough space, enough angle to deploy a secondary weapon.
But the technique that accompanied it was something else. It was a specific eye strike delivered with the extended middle knuckle rather than the fingertip that targeted the brow ridge rather than the eye socket itself. The brow ridge, when struck precisely, bleeds immediately and profusely, causing involuntary eye closure from the blood alone.
The paratrooper doesn’t need to blind the enemy. He just needs 2 seconds of compromised vision to get a hand free. Number 20 involves sound, not making it. Specifically, the technique that SOE agents in occupied Europe were taught for approaching a target in a room where that target was facing away.
Every person has a peripheral awareness zone, a kind of sensory halo that extends roughly 6 ft and triggers a response even when the person is not consciously paying attention. Trainers documented that the specific quality of sound that triggers this response is not volume but frequency change. Footsteps trigger it.
The rustle of fabric triggers it. What does not trigger it, according to the documented training methodology, is sustained frequency ambient sound. Agents were taught to move during continuous noise events, including the sounds that their own targets were making, voices, radio, machinery, and to move with their weight on the outer edge of the foot rather than the heel, eliminating the frequency signature that the human brain is wired to detect.
Number 19 was developed specifically for OSS agents operating in Japan and Japanese occupied territories, and it drew on research that had been conducted by American academics studying Japanese martial arts before the war. The technique addressed a specific vulnerability in the fighting posture favored by Japanese soldiers trained in judo and jiujutsu.
That posture involves a forward lean and a low center of gravity that makes the practitioner very difficult to throw. What the OSS trainers had identified, drawing on the academic research, was that this posture creates a specific vulnerability in the lower back, a zone where the lumbar spine transitions to the sacrum that is almost impossible to protect when the practitioner is in the forwardleaning ready position.
A targeted knee strike to that zone during a moment when the opponent’s weight was forward did not require great force. It required precise timing and the result was immediate and total incapacitation. Number 18 came from the files of the Devil’s Brigade, the first Special Service Force, which was a joint American Canadian Commando unit that operated primarily in Italy.
They had a reputation among German forces that became almost mythological. German soldiers in the sectors where the Devil’s Brigade operated reportedly wrote on their bunker walls the words, “The Black Devils are here.” Part of what built that reputation was a specific approach to nighttime infiltration that combined technique number 20 with something else entirely.
A choking method that did not use the arms at all. It used only the thighs. A soldier who came up behind a target and achieved a specific seated position on the target’s back could apply pressure to both corateed arteries simultaneously using the inner thigh muscles which are significantly stronger than the arms.
The method was documented in first special service force afteraction reports using clinical language that made it clear this was a standardized technique not improvisation. Here is the second thing you need to understand and this is the part that gets genuinely uncomfortable. The men who developed these techniques were not sadists.
Fairbar had spent 22 years policing the most violent port city in Asia. He had been in over 600 documented street fights by his own account. Sykes was quieter, more clinical, a former sniper who thought about violence the way an engineer thinks about loadbearing calculations.
What both of them had arrived at independently and then together was a philosophy of minimum necessary force applied to maximum effect. They were not teaching soldiers to enjoy violence. They were teaching soldiers to survive it. And the techniques that resulted from that philosophy were so efficient, so far removed from anything a civilian opponent would encounter that every government that funded their work eventually decided that the documentation should not be public.
Number 17 targeted the inner ear. This was a technique documented in both OSS training materials and in British combined operations manuals from 1942. The human inner ear is extraordinarily sensitive to pressure change. A cupped palm strike delivered simultaneously to both ears with the correct cup shape maintained so that the air in the cup is compressed rather than displaced creates a pressure differential inside the ear canal that is severely disorienting and in some cases ruptures the eardrum. The key detail that made this a classified technique was not the strike itself. Open palm ear slaps have been documented in fighting traditions for centuries. The classified element was the specific cup geometry. The angle of the palm, the gap left at the base of the thumb, and the angle of entry relative to the targets head that maximized the pressure differential. That specific combination was the result of documented experimentation that the relevant agencies did not want attributed to them. Number 16 was taught exclusively to Office of Strategic
Services personnel designated for what were called black bag operations, meaning operations that the United States government would never officially acknowledge. It was a method of incapacitation using pressure applied to the mastoid process, the bony prominence behind the ear. The mastoid sits directly over the facial nerve and in proximity to the jugular vein.
Sustained firm pressure applied at a specific angle triggers a veagal response. a sudden drop in blood pressure mediated by the vagus nerve that causes loss of consciousness within approximately 20 seconds without any visible injury. A man rendered unconscious this way looks to any observer who doesn’t know what they’re looking at as though he simply fainted.
OSS records from the Italian campaign reference this technique in the context of the capture of a German signals officer in 1944. The specific operational report remains classified. Number 15 was not a striking technique at all. It was a verbal one. Specifically, it was a method documented in psychological operations, training materials for physically disabling an opponent before any physical contact occurred.
The technique was simple. In the moment before physical engagement, the trainee was instructed to issue a specific type of command in a specific tone, a short, sharp, authoritative phrase that exploited the human startle response. The phrase itself mattered less than its delivery. Research drawn on by OSS trainers indicated that a sudden high authority verbal command directed at an individual caused measurable hesitation.
A quarter second to halfsecond freeze during which the brain is attempting to categorize the input as a threat or an instruction. In a real engagement, half a second is enough. The technique was effective enough that it was removed from general infantry training on the grounds that soldiers encountering it from enemies they had not been briefed on would not recognize it as a technique.
Number 14 came from the Japanese American soldiers of the 442nd regimenal combat team, the most decorated unit in American military history. Many had backgrounds in judo and kendo. And what they contributed to Allied close combat doctrine was a set of joint manipulation techniques combining jiujitsu efficiency with the Fairbar Sykes philosophy.
The specific technique documented in afteraction training reports was a wrist lock release from a standing bear hug that transitioned directly into a takedown using the attacker’s own forward momentum. What prompted the classification was the terminal element. The takedown was not designed to throw the opponent to the ground.
It was designed to drive his head into the nearest hard surface using his own body weight. Number 13 addressed what the training manuals called the crowd problem. an agent in a populated area who needed to move quickly without triggering alarm. The technique combined the pressure point distraction of number 16 with a crowd penetration method borrowed from a British criminologist who had studied how pickpockets moved through crowds without being perceived.
The combination was documented in a training module the OSS labeled urban passage and it remained in active use in modified form through the cold war era. The reason it was classified is straightforward. The same technique that got an agent out of a compromised location could get an enemy operative into a secured one.
Here is the third thing, and this one matters for understanding why almost none of these techniques have ever appeared in any mainstream account of the war. The men who survived using them were bound by security oaths that did not expire with the war. OSS personnel, S SOE agents, members of the Devil’s Brigade, and officers from the specific advanced programs were not legally free to discuss operational methods for most of their lives.
Many of them died without ever speaking about it. The few accounts that emerged came through official historians granted limited access, and those historians were themselves bound by conditions preventing full disclosure. The result is a gap in the public record that popular history has never fully acknowledged.
Number 12 was documented only in a single training film that was produced at Camp X, the OSS training facility north of Toronto in late 1942. The film has never been publicly released. A description of its contents appears in the memoir of a former OSS officer who viewed it during training.
And that description references a technique involving the application of focused pressure to the trachea, not with the fingers, but with a specific ridge of the hand. The edge formed between the little finger and the wrist applied in a rolling motion rather than a static press. The distinction matters because a static press on the trachea is painful, but rarely immediately incapacitating.
The rolling motion described in the officer’s memoir targets a different structure, the thyroid cartilage, and the effect documented in the film was near immediate loss of the ability to vocalize or breathe normally. Number 11 was an adaptation of a technique from Defendu, the fighting system that Fairbar had developed during his years in Shanghai.
Defendu itself was partially published in a 1942 manual called Get Tough that is still available. But the version of this specific technique that appeared in classified training materials differed from the published version in one critical respect. The published technique targeted the shin. The classified version targeted the paranal nerve, a branch of the sciatic nerve that runs along the outer edge of the knee and down the outside of the lower leg.
A precise strike to the paranal nerve with the inner edge of the boot at the point just below and behind the kneecap where the nerve is closest to the surface causes immediate and total loss of function in the lower leg. The sensation is described by people who have experienced it in medical contexts as similar to being unplugged.
The leg simply stops responding. Recovery takes several minutes at minimum. Number 10 was taught to British paratroopers specifically for the aftermath of a jump into contested territory. It addressed the moment when a paratrooper hit the ground and found a standing enemy within striking range before he could get to his feet.
From a prone position, a paratrooper facing upward had almost no offensive options that a standing enemy would find threatening. What training records document is a specific rolling technique that converted a prone position into a lateral position in less than a second using the rifle butt as a pivot point and terminated in a heel strike to the Achilles tendon of the standing enemy.
The Achilles is the largest tendon in the human body. It is also entirely unprotected by muscle or bone. A solid heel strike to a standing Achilles tendon does not tear it. It does something functionally similar to number 23. It eliminates the structural support of the standing position and puts the enemy on the ground where the rest of the technique could be applied.
Number nine was the one that OSS trainers called the quiet option. It appears in a training document that was partially declassified in 2004, and even the declassified version has significant sections blacked out. What remains visible describes a technique for inducing unconsciousness through manipulation of the occipital nerve, the nerve that runs from the base of the skull downward.
The specific application required the practitioner to achieve a position directly behind the target and apply a combination of forward neck flexion and lateral rotation that compress the nerve against the cervical vertebrae. The training document notes in the visible text that the technique requires no exceptional strength but considerable precision and that improper execution could produce effects beyond the intended temporary incapacitation.
That phrase effects beyond the intended temporary incapacitation appears three times in the visible portions of the document. The sections that would explain exactly what those effects were remain blacked out. Number eight, drew on research that came into Allied hands through intelligence networks operating in neutral Switzerland.
German military scientists had identified a specific cluster of nerve endings in the solar plexus region that could be targeted in a way that bypass the body’s protective muscle tension. The difficulty with solar plexus strikes in standard training is that a man who anticipates the strike tenses his abdominal muscles.
The German research documented of a pre-cont trigger, a specific physical stimulus that caused involuntary relaxation of the abdominal wall in the half second before impact. OSS trainers incorporated it. The specific trigger has never appeared in any declassified document. The men who built the Allied close combat doctrine of the Second World War were not mythological figures. They were empiricists.
Fairbar had spent 22 years policing the most violent port city in Asia. Sykes was a former sniper who thought about violence the way an engineer thinks about loadbearing calculations. Applegate had trained under both and spent the rest of his life translating what they knew into something that could be preserved partially.
What these three men produced together was the most rigorously evidenced close combat doctrine in Western military history. And the bulk of it has never been publicly released. The training facilities are gone. The instructors are dead. The documents are in archives where most of them will stay. The gap in what the public knows about what these men were trained to do is not an accident of history.
It is a decision that was made deliberately. Share in the comments which of these techniques surprised you most. And if anyone in your family served in the OSS, the S SOE, or any of the special forces units from this era and told you anything at all, I want to hear it. Because the men who carried this knowledge home mostly chose silence, but not all of them.
And what survived that silence is worth remembering.
