http://voennizdat.com/plakat/?mark=plakatu&model=fp
Although the North Korean aspect of the post might make people tend to think it should be in the Asian Martial Arts forum, the underlying emphasis of the Russian forum page linked above is North Korean military training in the martial arts. So, it is posted here in the military-related forum.
The Russian forum page has a lot of useful links, postings, images and videos. It has kept the content fairly current. The uniforms of most of the North Korean soldiers in the photo album are within the past 20 years, with only a few images going back to the '70s. As a historian, to me even the older images have some value and interest.
There are some poor quality scans of North Korean forms (pattern training) taught to the East German special forces in the mid-1980s. This was during the modernization program of close-combat training by the East German security services and the East German special forces. Karate was becoming a significant part of a comprehensive personal combat program. They kept the Jiu-Jitsu (Ju-jutsu) of their past, and integrated karate methods of the North Koreans, recognizing each method had value within the larger problem set of close-combat.
One of the former East German special force program developers actually published on this. His book is in German, and includes the Korean patterns used by the East Germans to develop their own East German specific forms. Both the North Korean patterns (kata, forms) and East German forms are included in his book. It was an obvious effort to document the unique events internal to the East German special forces that occurred right before the collapse of East Germany and German reunification.
The book information, should you want to follow-up on it for yourself: Frank Pelny, GJOGSUL,
- [B]ISBN-10:[/B] 3833422289
- [B]ISBN-13:[/B] 978-3833422287
It is an interesting history.