Sword on Sword Contact in Real World Combat?

SeaxyBeast said:
Giron Arnis Escrima. Leo Giron was a commando in WWII and landed on Luzon by submarine in order to establish radio contact with the guerillas in N. Luzon and map Japanese troop movements in preparation for MacArthur's return. Very low ammo, low visibility and the need for stealth meant a lot of his combat encounters were hand-to-hand or bolo vs. bayonet. He earned two Bronze Stars for his service.
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:D When I saw written "open sparring" and your description, I instantly got a picture in my head of a bunch of LARPers running around swinging at each other willy nilly. :D

I'm curious now to compare and contrast Messer techniques from the 14th/15th Century "Fight books" with this and other Escrima styles. But it appears there are no certified schools or clubs for his style in Va. :(
 
okay, see i know there was edge on edge contact, because it's depicted in this documentary that i watched when i was younger... i think it was called "Highlander"...

In the documentary, they re-enacted dozens of sword fights (most of which ended in decapitation, which seems strange), but there was LOTS of edge to edge contact
 
BePrepared said:
okay, see i know there was edge on edge contact, because it's depicted in this documentary that i watched when i was younger... i think it was called "Highlander"...

In the documentary, they re-enacted dozens of sword fights (most of which ended in decapitation, which seems strange), but there was LOTS of edge to edge contact
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And some of it was pretty sparkly too wasn't it? It's been a LOOoong time since I saw that. :D
 
ttoney83 said:
:D When I saw written "open sparring" and your description, I instantly got a picture in my head of a bunch of LARPers running around swinging at each other willy nilly. :D

I'm curious now to compare and contrast Messer techniques from the 14th/15th Century "Fight books" with this and other Escrima styles. But it appears there are no certified schools or clubs for his style in Va. :(
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I don't know of anyone in VA. I think JD is in PA and Guro Chuck is in NY, but the east coast is still pretty sparse. Giron Arnis Escrima does have an affiliate program (www.bahalana.org) and some decent DVDs that GM Somera put out through Masters Magazine, but the DVDs are more like a MA seminar with training material than a look at the full philosophy of the style. Think the Larga Mano DVD is closest to the combat philosophy. The art is still Old School enough that they only share so much publicly. It's not a mystical thing so much as a trust thing.

Training in person really opens things up, but that's not an easy prospect for everyone.

As for comparison with Messer, there's a lot that looks familiar in vids like:

[video=youtube;6Dmo_815aTE]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Dmo_815aTE[/video]

The stances in the vid are much higher and the footwork looks unsteady to my eye, but I can see the similarity to Giron's De Fondo style in the way that the response to an attack both neutralizes the threat and puts the defender in a superior position to counter with few effective responses. The main difference I see is that in Giron the non-weapon hand is much more involved in checking when moving forward and more likely to try to maintain range if conditions allow. So much of the system revolves around knowing when and how to close or maintain distance and what happens in the transitions.
 
Wouldn't taking an edge on blow on the flat be a great way to get a broken blade? Taking an edge on blow on the spine would seem to me to be a better option. I just have this image of the flat cracking like an eggshell with a direct on edge blow. Having never fought with swords, well, I don't know. But as a maker, it seems the blade is just more likely to break with a strong laterial force on the flat. What do you guys think?
 
A sword can be repaired and replaced. it will cost money, but it is still affordable. however your life is not.

a sword is designed to be a killing tool rather than an unbreakable object. so it doesn't matter if the edge get damaged in a parry or block, or even a full force head on edge to edge impact. a sword with dozens of dents will still remain an effective killing tool. survive and winning a battle then you will have enough money gained from looting plundering and ransom from your capitives to buy a few new sword.

man, do not let your sword limits your ability and potential. worry nothing but parry or block the best way to open a oppertunity for the kills. kill their man, everyone of them, loot their cropse, plunder their land. and listen their women weeping. is anything more enjoyable than that?

anyway. a well made sword will not break from edge to edge chopping. trust me, i had tried this before. two of us tried so hard that 2 swords bite into each other half an inch deep, and i think the high velocity impact made them welded into each other too. i had to use a 3lb hammer strike many times to finally seprate them. yet they are still unbroken, and ready to kill at any time. the only situation you can break a sword is you strike a heavy unmoveable hard object, such as an anvil. you strike it so many times to make the micro fractures expand and connected into major cracks.
 
David Stifle said:
Wouldn't taking an edge on blow on the flat be a great way to get a broken blade? Taking an edge on blow on the spine would seem to me to be a better option. I just have this image of the flat cracking like an eggshell with a direct on edge blow. Having never fought with swords, well, I don't know. But as a maker, it seems the blade is just more likely to break with a strong laterial force on the flat. What do you guys think?
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Not if the sword is properly tempered. It is much more flexible in that direction than it is in the edge direction and is more likely to break edge to edge. At the very least a chip is likely to be taken out of the edge. But again, if the edge to edge is on the strong of the blade, where my swords are VERY dull, the edge is stronger there and so is less likely to be damaged by an edge to edge impact.

I still say though that if I can get any part of my blade between me and my opponants blade, it is most likely just as easy to get the flat there as the edge. But like Seaxybeast says, things happen in the heat of combat, and so it is likely that many edges do end up meeting and edge damage is the garaunteed result.
:)
 
SeaxyBeast said:
I don't know of anyone in VA. I think JD is in PA and Guro Chuck is in NY, but the east coast is still pretty sparse. Giron Arnis Escrima does have an affiliate program (www.bahalana.org) and some decent DVDs that GM Somera put out through Masters Magazine, but the DVDs are more like a MA seminar with training material than a look at the full philosophy of the style. Think the Larga Mano DVD is closest to the combat philosophy. The art is still Old School enough that they only share so much publicly. It's not a mystical thing so much as a trust thing.

Training in person really opens things up, but that's not an easy prospect for everyone.

As for comparison with Messer, there's a lot that looks familiar in vids like:

[video=youtube;6Dmo_815aTE]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Dmo_815aTE[/video]

The stances in the vid are much higher and the footwork looks unsteady to my eye, but I can see the similarity to Giron's De Fondo style in the way that the response to an attack both neutralizes the threat and puts the defender in a superior position to counter with few effective responses. The main difference I see is that in Giron the non-weapon hand is much more involved in checking when moving forward and more likely to try to maintain range if conditions allow. So much of the system revolves around knowing when and how to close or maintain distance and what happens in the transitions.
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I figure the stances used in these demonstrations are too high and unsteady for actual combat. IMO many who are investigating the European Martial Arts are adopting stances which are too high, based on the pictures which accompany the text in the various "Fight Books" from the era. The texts do say to adopt a wide stable stance, and I suspect that when these were being practiced by actual masters and persons who would be engaging in combat, the stances would be much wider and more stable. They also say to remain very mobile, constantly changing guards and moving about, like a boxer might. When my friends and I spar, we are definitely not as stiff and formal as these demonstrations.
 
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My two cents in this discussion. I practise historical fencing. Over the years I have practised many styles from smallsword to longsword. The Fiore style longsword might be most applicable to this discussion.

In Fiore De Liberis manual (1409 Italian) all parries are done with the edge. The trick is not to take a hard blow directly on the blade, but to parry "mezza spada", middle to middle, edge on the flat. This serves to purposes. One, it is mechanically efficient to parry this way, your edge against the attackers flat is stronger. Try pushing with your blade first against the other swords edge and then against the flat and you will see. Second, by parrying this way you avoid damaging the blade. So no hard parries on the edge. Also this way your own sword hand is safe, since the cross, the handguard is between your hand and opponents blade if his blade slides against yours.
 
David Stifle said:
Wouldn't taking an edge on blow on the flat be a great way to get a broken blade? Taking an edge on blow on the spine would seem to me to be a better option. I just have this image of the flat cracking like an eggshell with a direct on edge blow. Having never fought with swords, well, I don't know. But as a maker, it seems the blade is just more likely to break with a strong laterial force on the flat. What do you guys think?
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Look further back at the links provided. The video's show techniques pretty well. Swords can flex a lot. Mythbusters did super slow motion trying to break swords with a machine swinging. It was pretty difficult!
 
I think they tried it with one from Angel Sword, and couldn't break it

snapped some cheaper ones in half, but just managed a permanent set in the AS blade
 
I've done a lot of sport fencing and some iaido/iai-batto.
Japanese blocks/parries ideally takes the edge of the attacking sword on the outer bevel of the defending sword reducing the chances of edge damage and the inherent weakness of parrying with the flat.
Before going into war/battle, samurai would rub the bottom half of their swords in the sand to round the edges and help prevent chipping. Sabre fencing also ideally aims to take the parry on the bevel, but in the heat of battle anything can happen. A heavy cavalry sabre would also be used in a maranello? style blade (constantly moving in circles & figures of eight) and the parries tended to be glancing/sliding/ ceding parries rather than edge to edge. It is usually only quinte parry to a downwards blow to head that has full on edge to edge contact. The other thing with western sword fighting is that parries are taken forte to foible and the forte is the bottom 1/3rd of the blade closest to the hilt. Cuts are made with the top third (or top 6 inches) of the blade and this was the part normally kept sharpened on a sword.
 
I just want that blade that Duncan Macleod uses... he chops other swords in half, and doesn't even have to sharpen it... must be INFI
 
During Japan's warring periods, intricate and artful katana's were rare.
By today's standards (art pieces) it takes about 1-2 weeks to forge a katana, a few days for the basic koshirae/mounting. What takes the absolutely longest is the polish, which often has wait times of a year and working periods of 6 months (longer or shorter). At the end of the day 95% of the time, is waiting.

Most katana's in the warring period were very basic swords. Nothing intricate, nothing beautiful. Just forged folded, clay tempered steel with a serviceable polish. Something that could be put together in a month's time at most, with no production requirements this was more than easily achieved.


The damage due to edge to edge contact is not really that bad. I ran some tests using two katanas each of a different quality.
Blows were done with approximately 40% force. Keep in mind samurais rarely used full force using a katana for two reason:
1. If the opponent was wearing a silk kimono with no armor. 40% force would be more than enough to kill a man, or sever a limb. Why waste effort and risk damaging your katana why using full force, and lowering control over edge alignment.
2. If the opponent was wearing armor, using a katana at full force would result a heavily damage or broken katana and a very dead samurai.

Here's the result.
A Kris cutlery 29A (5160), and a Muneotoshi Take (1060).
This is the cheaper, lower quality Take:
2011-07-27_19-33-20_237.jpg

This was the higher quality Kris Cutlery:
2011-07-27_19-32-18_904.jpg
 
Thanks for the test, Luis. Nice to see some actual pics in here, rather than just speculation like the rest of us were offering up :D
 
I did some edge-on-edge testing a few years back using a Windless cavalry sabre and a short sword I made out of 5160. I held the sabre in a vise, and braced the tip against a table. I then took full strength swings down onto the sabre. There was much less damage than I had expected, even on the Windless sabre. I put maybe 1/4" deep dings into the sabre, and >1/16" dings into my sword. I touched up my sword -- you can feel the nicks, but you wouldn't notice them to look at it. I can cut a free-hanging rope with the sword, it is sharp.

ding_mark.jpg

I've circled once of the dings. This is after resharpening.

Swords are much less delicate than everyone is assuming here. And the testing I did is completely unrealistic. No one would do a full strength hit directly onto a fixed sword. The whole point of parrying is to deflect the blow, not stop it. Even with something like a St. George parry (blocking an straight hit to your head) your parry will have give.

Mechanically, your hand and sword is much stronger when parrying with the edge. Your hand and wrist can apply much more force in line with the edge than with the flat. In addition, European swords have sword guards aligned with the edge. This makes sense if you are parrying with the edge towards the other blade -- the guard can catch anything you miss. If you parry with the flat, your opponent can slide up your blade and into your arm.
 
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gator68 said:
Mechanically, your hand and sword is much stronger when parrying with the edge. Your hand and wrist can apply much more force in line with the edge than with the flat. In addition, European swords have sword guards aligned with the edge. This makes sense if you are parrying with the edge towards the other blade -- the guard can catch anything you miss. If you parry with the flat, your opponent can slide up your blade and into your arm.
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+1 on this. Very true. I guess that's why my training actually does use blocking with the edge, and not the flat. Also a possible explanation for why there's a big UNSHARPENED part of the blade on many swords. I thought it was just a hugely long ricasso, but it would make sense for that area to be unsharpened for defensive reasons... You're not really likely to need to cut with the area closest to the hilt, but you ARE likely to block there. I'll need to keep that in mind if I make a longer sword...
 
gator68 said:
Mechanically, your hand and sword is much stronger when parrying with the edge. Your hand and wrist can apply much more force in line with the edge than with the flat. In addition, European swords have sword guards aligned with the edge. This makes sense if you are parrying with the edge towards the other blade -- the guard can catch anything you miss. If you parry with the flat, your opponent can slide up your blade and into your arm.
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Good info and demonstration. Nice to have some physical evidence in the discussion.

As for edge vs flat for parries I think it's a matter of training and philosophy rather than of one way being right and another wrong. I know that many sabre and backsword schools teach edge parries and emphasize strength of alignment and their weapons and practices support this decision. My own arnis training teaches us to parry with the flat but our positioning and live-hand practices have evolved to protect the hand and arm from cuts as a matter of necessity. Using the flat facilitates some interesting follow-up cuts on half-time that are slower and feel less natural when you begin from a stronger alignment. Of course this also means that you need to make adjustments in your approach because the structure is weaker. It's a tradeoff either way.

I love discussions like these. Cross training is good and understanding why other systems do what they do can help you to develop a better understanding of your own approach.
 
Maybe it's the terminology again... I'm most comfortable with parrying from the flat, but BLOCKING from the edge. Dynamic parries are good, but not always possible.
 
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