The gun is made almost entirely of cheap stamped sheet steel assembled by riveting and spot-welding, with a zinc cocking knob. The Liberator is a very simplistic breech-loading, single-action smoothbore pistol that fires with a fully locked breech. Pictorial instruction sheet that was provided with the Liberator. However, many thousands survived and remained in circulation, and are now sought after as collector's items. After these guns were deployed and the project was discovered by the Axis, the "Flare Projector" designation was dropped and the gun was re-named the "Liberator".Īfter the war, a large number of Liberator pistols were melted down into scrap. The largest delivery went to China, who received about 100,000 units. About 25,000 FP-45s were delivered to the French Resistance and a few thousand more were airdropped into Greece. Nazi reprisals against civilian resistance action increased in severity after the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich ( Operation Anthropoid) in May 1942, forcing the Allies to be more cautious in their involvement with European partisan movements. Ultimately, however, only a fraction of the million pistols that were made were ever actually deployed. A standard load would be 600 guns, mostly limited by volume rather than weight. The intended means of deployment was by bomber drops, with each gun packaged in a cardboard box with 10 rounds of ammunition, a dowel rod to assist in reloading and a pictorial instruction sheet. During manufacture the pistol was modified several times, with some changes to the markings, breech and oiling holes. Within three months of production beginning, a million units had been made, averaging about one every 7½ seconds, at a cost of $2.10 apiece ($31.76 adjusted to 2018 dollars). The original engineering drawings labelled the barrel as "tube", the trigger as "yoke", the firing pin as "control rod", and the trigger guard as "spanner." The Guide Lamp Division of General Motors was selected to manufacture the pistol although the company had no experience in producing firearms, it was well-accustomed to the process of stamping steel and had the appropriate facilities to rapidly turn out massive numbers of the gun. 45", or "FP-45", to disguise the nature of the program and misdirect Axis intelligence. The weapon was deliberately mis-designated as the "Flare Projector, Caliber. The original prototype was a "harmonica gun" with two chambers that retained cartridges with a small piece of spring steel, but this was further simplified to the final single-shot weapon.
The idea was to develop a simple weapon that could arm vast numbers of resistance fighters in occupied Europe and China, at a low cost. The Liberator pistol had its origins in the US Army Joint Psychological Committee and was designed for the United States Army in 1942 by the Inland Guide Lamp Manufacturing Division of the General Motors Corporation in Dayton, Ohio.
0 kommentar(er)
