Just to ask, is there any evidence or stories of instances that the Liberator was used as intended in WWII?
The FP-45 was a crude,
single-shot pistol designed to be cheaply and quickly
mass produced. The Liberator had just 23 largely stamped and turned
steel parts that were cheap and easy to manufacture. It fired a
.45 caliber pistol
cartridge from an
unrifled barrel. Due to the unrifled barrel, maximum effective range was only about 25 feet (less than 8 m). At longer range, the bullet would begin to tumble and stray off course. Because of the low quality, it was nicknamed the "
Woolworth gun."
The
Liberator was shipped in a cardboard box with 10 rounds of .45 ACP ammunition, a wooden
dowel to remove the empty cartridge case, and an instruction sheet in comic strip form
[1] showing how to load and fire the weapon. Extra rounds of ammunition could be stored in the pistol grip.
After production, the Army turned the
Liberators over to the
OSS. A crude and clumsy weapon, the
Liberator was never intended for front line service. It was originally intended as an
insurgency weapon to be mass dropped behind enemy lines to resistance fighters in occupied territory. A resistance fighter was to recover the weapon, sneak up on an
Axis occupier, kill or incapacitate him, and retrieve his weapons.
The weapon was valued as much for its
psychological warfare effect as its actual field performance. It was believed that if vast quantities of these weapons could be delivered into Axis occupied territory, it would have a devastating effect on the
morale of occupying troops. The plan was to drop the weapon in such great quantities that occupying forces could never capture or recover all the weapons. It was hoped that the thought of thousands of these unrecovered weapons potentially in the hands of the citizens of occupied countries would have a deleterious effect on enemy morale.
In reality, the OSS never saw the practicality in mass dropping the
Liberator over occupied
Europe, and only a handful were ever distributed. Only the
Chinese and resistance forces in the
Philippines received the Liberator in any significant quantity. The
Liberator was never issued to American or Allied troops and there is no documented instance of the weapon being used for their intended purpose.
The original delivered cost for the FP-45 was $2.40/unit
[1] ($32 in 2010). A
Liberator in good condition today can fetch approximately $1200, with the original box bringing an additional $500, with an original extremely rare paper instruction sheet the value could exceed $2000 to a collector of rare World War II militaria. Fakes of these sheets exist, but authentic copies have a watermark that can be seen clearly, which is difficult to duplicate.
Ken
Larry
