Considering all the promotion that Gen. Choi did for Tae Kwon Do, he had surprisingly little martial arts experience. Other than a black belt in Shotokan (and even this is debatable depending on your sources), he had not much experience. This is one reason why I don't have as much respect for him.
Contrast this with several Kwan Founders (Lee, Yoon, Hwang etc.) who had many years of experience. Many of them undoubtably resented being arm-twisted by a guy like Choi who didn't have the same level of experience they did.
I don't want it to seem as though we're ganging up on you, YM, it's not that. You've read my posts, you know that I think that Gen. Choi played ruthless hardball in the down-and-dirty MA politics of the era; you've read (or should have read) Gm. Kim's interview in the January
Black Belt... so you know that no one's trying to portray the General as a saint or savior. BUT... he
was instrumental into fashioning TKD into a devastatingly effective battlefield combat system that won the sincere respect of South Korea's communist enemies in two very nasty, drawn out wars, the first of which saw the ROK's survival on the line, and looking pretty unlikely at several points. Gen. Choi's initiative was essential in making TKD a terrifically effective tool in those wars. I've read enough testimony from independent sources to convince me that Tae Hi Nam played a far more important role in the development of military TKD than most practitioners are aware of these days, and was invaluable to Gen. Choi as an expert on the technical content of TKD, but it was Choi's clout in the Korean army which made the technical contributions that THN and other virtuouso practitioners worked out available to thousands of ROK soldiers.
As for Gen. Choi's own rank, this is what Dakin Burdick, probably the most authoritative historian of modern KMAs, has to say
here:
Hong Hi Choi, the future "father of Taekwondo," was meanwhile busy learning Shotokan Karate. To further his education, he was sent to Kyotoo in 1937, where he met Mr. Kim, a Korean instructor of Shotokan Karate. After two years of "concentrated training," Choi gained his 1st Dan. He then went on to the University of Tokyo where he continued his training and gained his 2nd Dan, after which he taught Shotokan Karate at the Tokyo YMCA. When the Second World War began, Choi was "forced to enlist in the Japanese army."
You have to remember that Gen. Choi stirred very strong feelings both ways, he made a lot of bitter enemies and plenty of people with possibly quite legitimate grievances against him were nonetheless probably happy to say
anything about him to discredit him once he fell from power because of his attempts at initiating a TKD-based rapprochement with the North Korean government. It's any but simple, what happened at that time. This is one of those cases where the truth suffers greatly at the hands of both those who want to canonize Gen. Choi and those who want to demonize him. My advice is, don't be too quick to rush to judgment here...
