‘Techniques’: This word immediately suggests to us that the person talking knows little about survival ways against a knife. There are no techniques, you have not the time to be thinking about techniques. You only have the time to react and this ‘time’ is the difference between life and death. No, there are no ‘techniques’, but there are ways of doing things that will give us the best possible chance, which is, at its best, about 15 to 20 percent survival. How many times have you been told that the best defense against a knifer is to run? Many times, I’ll bet. I have, and I have heard others telling students that this is the best thing to do. When I give seminars to law enforcement people, I have them work an experiment. I become an attacker with a knife ( rubber) and I ask them, while I am standing away from them at varying distances, to try and turn and run as fast as they can to try and escape. No-one thus far has been able to get away from the knife under 15 feet, with many not even being able to get away under 20 feet. I am not able to get away under 15 feet away from an attacker. The reason is simple and logical. We, as the defender, must firstly turn to run, and if the knifer is on his toes, he will see this movement and immediately rush at us. Usually, the attacker is upon us before we have even taken the first few steps, and now we are in the most precarious position of having our backs to the attacker and not even being able to defend. I have three scars on my body, from three different knife cases, and the first two represent the wrong way to handle a knife attack while the third scar represents me almost getting it right! The scar that runs from just below my kidneys to my lower right buttock represents me running away and having the attacker throw the knife Luckily, he was not too good at this as it is quite difficult to hit a moving-away or towards-you target and the knife struck me with its cutting edge and not the point, slicing my lower back open. Luckily again, was the fact that my attacker was not really intent upon doing real damage as he fled at the sight of the knife actually striking me. The second scar came when I tried to do what many people in the Martial Arts tell us to do: to grab the arm that is holding the knife! There is not one street fighter, not one thug, not one inmate of a maximum security person who will tell you to grab the arm that has the knife. At all costs we try to keep as far away from that hand as possible, until the attacker has been stunned or has been downed or knocked out, then we should take the knife away; not when he is still fully active and full of aggression and at his strongest. In this case, I received a cut on my right arm about six inches long and to the bone, from his simply withdrawing the knife with much power, more power than I could hold, and taking the knife over my arm as he withdrew it. Luckily again, he fled at the sight of my blood. Both of these incidents took place when I was a rock and roll bandsman. (See Photo A in which I thrust with the knife, and he grabs my arm. In photo B, I withdraw the knife violently, to cut his arm ... ). The last scar on my body is across my first three fingers of my left palm and went to the bone. This is when I “sort of got it right”. Giving up a smaller part of my body for the sake of the whole, I was able to defeat this attacker and escape. This time, I went nowhere near the knife hand, but rather barged right in there and had my fingers sliced while my other hand was poking into his eyes... and this worked very well.
Erle Montaigue Articles 1979 to 99: Page 35