Francois d’Eliscu: The Little Professor Who Taught America’s Rangers to Fight Without Rules
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In May 1942, on a training field at Fort Meade, Maryland, a slight, balding lieutenant colonel faced down a charging Ranger armed with a fixed bayonet. The young soldier lunged forward at full speed. Seconds later he was flat on his back, trussed with a length of sash cord and unable to move without strangling himself.
The officer standing over him, unhurt apart from a shaved patch of skin on his elbow, was Francois d’Eliscu. To his men he was “The Little Professor”. To wartime journalists, he was the man who could “kill with a flick of his elbow”.
He was also something else entirely: a scholar, a self fashioned aristocrat, a radio performer, and one of the architects of America’s transformation in hand to hand combat during the Second World War.
Reinventing Milton Eliscu
Francois d’Eliscu was born Milton Eliscu on 10th November, 1895 in New York City. His father, Frank Eliscu, was a French businessman. His mother, Sophia, was Romanian and had emigrated to the United States in the late nineteenth century. His younger brother, Edward Eliscu, would later become a successful lyricist in Hollywood, collaborating on popular songs during the 1930s and 1940s.
Edward later described his elder brother as “an introverted, buck toothed loner”. As a teenager Milton worked stacking books at the 135th Street public library in Harlem. At some point during his late adolescence, he returned home bloodied from what he claimed had been a beating in a racial confrontation. That episode appears to have marked a turning point.
He began training obsessively. Despite little prior interest in athletics, he won a cross country race during his senior year at DeWitt Clinton High School. He enrolled at the Savage School for Physical Education near Columbus Circle, an institution that trained physical education teachers and athletic instructors.
During this period he began altering his identity. He inserted a “d” and an apostrophe into his surname, presenting himself as d’Eliscu. It was a subtle but deliberate reinvention, suggesting European nobility. By the time he graduated in 1917, he had fully embraced his new persona. Edward recalled being astonished at his brother’s gymnastic display at graduation, writing that he moved with the grace of a ballet dancer.
War Service and Academic Credentials
When the United States entered the First World War, d’Eliscu joined the Army. He did not see combat overseas but served at Fort Gordon in Georgia, organising sporting competitions and acting as a bayonet instructor. Newspaper accounts from the time show him supervising boxing and wrestling matches for troops.
After the war he pursued education with unusual intensity. He earned a bachelor’s degree in education, a master’s in sociology from the University of Pennsylvania, another master’s in science from Columbia University, and later a doctorate from New York University. He coached wrestling at NYU and taught physical education at several institutions.
His academic grounding in sociology and education shaped his approach. He did not see physical training as simply muscular. It was psychological. It was about reshaping behaviour and reflex.
Radio Personality and Public Performer
During the 1920s and early 1930s, d’Eliscu cultivated a public presence that blended athleticism with showmanship. In Philadelphia he hosted early morning exercise programmes on radio station WIP. He once broadcast from the ocean floor off Atlantic City while wearing a deep sea diving suit. When the microphone malfunctioned, listeners heard only bubbling sounds. “When I came up, I found out that everybody thought I was dead,” he later joked.
He also worked as a sports commentator, including coverage related to the 1926 bout between Gene Tunney and Jack Dempsey. In Honolulu during the late 1920s he became a newspaper sports columnist and helped manage the US Olympic swim team. He was briefly associated with Johnny Weissmuller, advising caution regarding early film contracts before Weissmuller achieved fame in 1932 with Tarzan the Ape Man.
D’Eliscu understood publicity. He knew how to present himself. That skill would serve him well once war returned.
The Jujitsu Narrative
It remains unclear precisely where d’Eliscu acquired his expertise in Japanese martial arts. Western interest in jujitsu and judo had been growing since the late nineteenth century. Japanese instructors such as Taguchi Ryoichi taught in the United States during the 1920s, including at Columbia University, where d’Eliscu studied.
A popular wartime story claimed that during a 1928 trip to Tokyo with the swim team he persuaded Japanese judo masters to demonstrate their techniques, memorised them, and later taught them to American soldiers. Whether embellished or not, it became part of his legend. Wartime magazines suggested that Japanese soldiers possessed mysterious bone breaking skills. D’Eliscu’s Rangers, readers were reassured, would know more.
His system was not pure judo. It blended wrestling, joint locks, choking techniques, eye strikes, knee blows and garrotting methods. He dismissed conventional boxing as too rule bound for battlefield realities.
Fort Meade and the Rejection of Sportsmanship
In early 1942, d’Eliscu was assigned to Fort Meade, Maryland, to train elite Army Rangers. His training philosophy was explicit. American soldiers had to abandon sporting hesitation. “Our attitude and personal feelings in regards to sportsmanship and fair play must be changed,” he later wrote. “Strangling and killing are remote from our American teachings, but not to our enemies.”
Daily routines began with a two mile run followed by a punishing obstacle course. One feature was a 15 foot deep pit with smooth sides. Trainees had to find a way out. If they failed, they remained there. One officer reportedly struggled for five hours before escaping.
D’Eliscu devised drills that required men to freeze instantly on command, hang from branches, or grapple without insignia so that rank offered no advantage. He encouraged bare knuckle fighting and anything goes wrestling. Medical staff attended sessions because injuries were common.
Journalists described him stepping across the stomachs of supine trainees to harden them psychologically. He taught more than two dozen strangulation techniques using a sash cord. The simplicity of the tool appealed to him. It was light, concealable and lethal.
Life magazine featured his “dirty fighting” system in June 1942. The US Army Signal Corps produced a 35 minute training film documenting his methods, emphasising that no scenes were staged.
The Mayhem Bowl in Hawaii
In early 1943, Army leaders sent him to Hawaii to prepare Rangers for jungle warfare in the Pacific. There he established a secret mountainous course informally known as the Mayhem Bowl
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The course included mud filled ravines, greased slides, water hazards and steep climbs. Trainees crawled half a mile keeping their bodies within two feet of the ground. Teams carried a 1,000 pound log uphill multiple times before engaging in hand to hand drills.
He incorporated flamethrowers and tear gas into exercises to simulate battlefield stress. “Fire and gas are a little unorthodox,” he remarked, “but then, so is war.”
By March 1943, reports indicated 1,600 injuries among trainees. D’Eliscu remained unapologetic. He argued that controlled injury in training prevented fatal mistakes in combat.
Prominent visitors, including Eleanor Roosevelt, toured the facility. Photographs show her standing beside the compact instructor, who appeared stern and focused.
Combat at Makin Atoll
Unlike many instructors, d’Eliscu sought combat experience. In November 1943 he landed with US forces at Makin Atoll in the Gilbert Islands. During an advance inland, a patrol was pinned by sniper fire. According to accounts compiled from wounded soldiers, d’Eliscu shot a sniper positioned in a tree, disarmed him using techniques he had taught, and killed him. He received the Silver Star for his actions.
He later organised training in France at Fontainebleau and was awarded the Legion of Honor and the Croix de Guerre.
In 1945 he published Hand to Hand Combat, detailing hip throws, joint locks, eye strikes and knife defence techniques. He warned trainees not to injure partners in practice, saving their full force for the enemy.
Korea, Turkey and Final Service
After the Second World War, d’Eliscu continued his military career. He served during the Korean War and later travelled to Ankara, Turkey, to train infantry and paratroops under US military assistance programmes.
Upon returning to the United States in 1953, he worked at Fort Bragg, helping refine airborne and guerrilla training methods. He commanded paratroop exercises in harsh winter conditions, including simulated mountain warfare during blizzards.
He retired from the Army in 1954 and settled in Siesta Key, Florida. In his later years he taught power boating safety courses, a quieter pursuit that contrasted sharply with his wartime persona. He died in 1972 at the age of 76.
A Psychological Shift in Military Thinking
Modern Army Rangers train in blended systems that incorporate wrestling, boxing, Muay Thai and Filipino Kali. D’Eliscu’s specific methods have been replaced. Yet his influence remains visible in the psychological orientation he promoted.
He argued that combat required abandoning sporting restraint. Violence, when necessary, had to be efficient and decisive. His contribution was less about any single hold or choke and more about shifting doctrine from gentlemanly boxing to pragmatic battlefield survival.
His brother Edward wrote of him without sentimentality, noting that he had accomplished what he set out to do. He had transformed himself from Milton Eliscu of Harlem into Francois d’Eliscu, the Army’s leading authority on military fitness.
Small in stature, academically accomplished and theatrically intense, he embodied a wartime moment when scholarship, performance and brutality converged. On a field at Fort Meade in 1942, that convergence was visible in the blur of motion, a falling soldier, and a simple length of cord pulled tight.
