Artifacts
Artifacts
Miscellaneous WWII

FP-45 Liberator Pistol

Single Shot Firearm
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Used in 1942 by the US to arm troops behind the lines. The purpose was to build a cheap pistol and then drop them in mass behind enemy lines. There, the troops could pick them up and use them to upgrade... kill the enemy and take his weapon. They made over a million of these in the course of about six weeks at a cost of about $1.25. They were purposely cheaply made so that they could be thrown in a river or lake and they would quickly deteriorate.

Updated October 2024
Posted December 2023

WWII FP-45 Liberator
FP-45 Liberator Pistol
1942-1945
The Liberator is a cheap single shot firearm made of stamped and turned steel parts. It was designed to be dropped over occupied territories so resistance fighters could sneak up behind an Axis service member and steal his firearm.

FP-45 Liberator

WIKIPEDIAThe FP-45 Liberator
A pistol manufactured by the United States military during World War II for use by resistance forces in occupied territories. The Liberator was never issued to American or other Allied troops, and there are few documented instances of the weapon being used for its intended purpose; though the intended recipients, irregulars and resistance fighters, rarely kept detailed records due to the inherent risks if the records were captured by the enemy. Few FP-45 pistols were distributed as intended, and most were destroyed by Allied forces after the war.

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 showing how to load and fire the weapon. The Liberator was a crude and clumsy weapon, 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 gun, sneak up on an Axis occupier, kill or incapacitate him, and retrieve his weapons.

It was manufactured under the "FP" prefix and referred to in official documentation as a "Flare pistol". The pistol was valued as much for its psychological warfare effect as its actual field performance. It was believed that if vast quantities of these handguns could be delivered into Axis-occupied territory, it would have a devastating effect on the morale of occupying troops. The plan was to drop them in such great quantities that occupying forces could never capture or recover all of them. 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.

General Dwight D. Eisenhower's staff never saw the practicality in mass dropping the Liberator over occupied Europe, and authorized distribution of fewer than 25,000 of the half million FP-45 pistols shipped to Great Britain for the French resistance. Generals Joseph Stilwell and Douglas MacArthur were similarly unenthusiastic about the other half of the pistols scheduled for shipment to the Pacific. The Army then turned 450,000 Liberators over to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), which preferred to supply Resistance fighters in both theaters with more effective weapons whenever possible.

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