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[whitewolf]

To add some to the discussion-what happened all of a sudden to WW2 tactics-i would imagine from 1946-1953-when korea war started the Army pushed training of this sort aside-now we jump fprward to 2010 and Army combatitives is here-i watched them train last week-a group of Air force came up from Flo to train in level 1 combatatives-they practised for a week on basics- but no knife/gun disarms or defense against a knife standing or on the ground (as shown in Hocks knife counte knife book)-no clawing biting
vicious chokes were shown-i dont undersgtand it -
lets get back to real world dangerous methods to finish off the enemy- WW

[CQCKenpo]

The film was great and the mention of Captain Smith and WWI combatives brought back an old memory.  Black Belt magazine had an article covering Captain Smith back in 1971.

http://books.google.com/books?id=R9gDAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA9&dq=black+belt&source=gbs_toc&cad=2#v=onepage&q&f=false

However, this article and other information that I've read would indicate that Smith did not arrive in the U.S. until the very end of WWI.  Somehow, he managed to get a commission as a Captain in the U.S. Army (without any prior service in any army) and get his book published.  After that, he appears to disappear into history - nothing more is known.  What effect his training had on overall CQC training in the pre-WWII period I don't know.  However, based on the timing of Smith's arrival in the U.S., I would suspect that the U.S. Army and Marines' CQC training during 1917-1918 was based on the boxing and wrestling of that period.

For further information and a copy of Smith's book, you could go to:

http://ejmas.com/jnc/jncart_bowen_0603.htm

http://ejmas.com/jnc/jncart_cptsmith_0700.htm

[CQCKenpo]

I've done a little more research and it would appear that the U.S. Army may have incorporated jiujitsu into its combatives program sooner than I thought.

According to the information I've seen, a John J. O'Brien had lived in Japan and was among the first Americans to extensively study jiujitsu in Japan. A disciple of Tanaka and Inouye Sensei (Kishoku Inoue), he returned to the United States in 1900 from Nagasaki.

(One source states that he was a police officer in Nagasaki, but why the Japanese would employ an Occidental as a police officer in 1900 is a mystery to me.)

At any rate, he returned to the United States and is known to have provided lessons in jiujitsu to President Theodore Roosevelt in March and April of 1902. Roosevelt was a known boxing and wrestling enthusiast and according to all accounts fitted out a room in the White House specifically for jiujitsu practice. 

Probably based on the contacts that he made while in Washington, in 1910 O'Brien was made a captain in the U.S. Army as part of the Army's modernization effort.  He was assigned to developing the early H2H hand-to-hand combat program. This was the
beginning of the use of Ju-Jitsu as the Hand-to-Hand combat method of the U.S. Military.

Later, in the 1917-1918 period, Allen Corstorphin Smith was brought into the military combatives program by O'Brien and made a Captain because of his prior martial art experience as a Judo Blackbelt, which he received at the Kodokan in Japan. 

Although O'Brien was the author of a book on JiuJitsu which was published in 1904, this book was intended for civilians.  Smith was the author of the the first U.S. Army Hand-to-Hand combat "manual".