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 theatres with more effective weapons whenever possible. French use of the FP-45 remains undocumented, however, a first-hand account of an assassination with an FP-45 exists from German military policeman Niklaus Lange. He claimed that there were thousands in circulation in occupied France. The OSS did distribute a few to Greek resistance forces in 1944. Most of the pistols shipped to Britain were undistributed, and later dumped at sea or melted for scrap metal. One hundred thousand FP-45 pistols were shipped to China in 1943, but the number actually distributed remains unknown. A few were distributed to the Philippine Commonwealth Army, Philippine Constabulary, and resistance fighters. See also Deer gun, a Liberator-style handgun tested during the Vietnam war Liberator, a 3D printed handgun (2013) References External links The Liberator Pistol at JustGuns.com The Liberator instruction sheet Safe handling of Liberator pistols and modern replicas The Liberator Pistol, by Ralph Hagan