Woolworth gun
| Industry | Manufacturing |
|---|---|
| Founded | 1942 |
| Headquarters | Anderson, Indiana , United States |
| Products | FP-45 Liberator pistol |
Number of employees | 300 |
Template:Use American English Template:Infobox weapon
The FP-45 Liberator was a handgun produced by the United States military during World War II specifically for resistance groups operating under occupation. This firearm was not issued to American or other Allied soldiers, and documented cases of its use for the designed purpose are scarce. This scarcity is partly due to the fact that the intended users—mainly irregular fighters and underground resistance members—rarely maintained comprehensive records to avoid compromising their operations if captured. Only a small portion of FP-45 pistols reached their intended recipients, with the majority being destroyed by Allied forces following the conflict.
Project history
The initial idea originated from a Polish military attaché in March 1942. Two months later, the US Army Joint Psychological Warfare Committee took charge of the project, assigning design responsibilities to George Hyde at General Motors’ Inland Manufacturing Division in Dayton, Ohio. To prevent interference with the Inland Division’s ongoing production of the M1 carbine, manufacturing was shifted to General Motors’ Guide Lamp Division. The weapon was officially designated as Flare Projector Caliber .45 (FP-45) to conceal its true nature as a pistol being produced in large quantities. In line with this disguise, original blueprints referred to components with misleading terms: the barrel was called a "tube," the trigger a "yoke," the firing pin a "control rod," and the trigger guard a "spanner." Assembly took place at the Guide Lamp plant located in Anderson, Indiana, where approximately one million units were manufactured. The entire Liberator initiative spanned about six months from concept approval to production completion, with around eleven weeks dedicated to actual manufacturing carried out by a workforce of 300 employees.
Design
The FP-45 was a rudimentary, single-shot handgun engineered for inexpensive and rapid mass production. It comprised only 23 primarily stamped and machined steel components, making it cost-effective and straightforward to produce. The pistol discharged the .45 ACP cartridge through a smoothbore barrel without rifling. This design limited its intended use to close quarters, approximately 1–4 yards (0.91–3.66 m). Its effective range was roughly 25 ft (7.6 m), beyond which the projectile would become unstable and deviate from its path. Priced at just USD$2.10 per unit originally (Template:InflationTemplate:Inflation/fn), it earned the moniker "Woolworth pistol".[1] The grip of the pistol housed a magazine capable of holding five rounds.
Wartime use
The Liberator was packaged in a cardboard container that included 10 rounds of .45 ACP ammunition, a wooden dowel designed for ejecting spent cartridges, and an instruction leaflet presented in comic strip format[2] illustrating how to load and operate the firearm. This weapon was basic and awkward, never intended for direct combat deployment. Its primary role was as an insurgency weapon, mass-distributed by air drops behind enemy lines to support resistance groups within occupied territories. The concept involved resistance members obtaining the pistol, stealthily approaching an Axis soldier, neutralizing him, and seizing his weapons.
Official records designated it with the "FP" prefix and classified it as a "Flare pistol".[3] Beyond its physical capabilities, the pistol was also valued for its impact on psychological warfare. It was theorized that delivering vast numbers of these firearms into Axis-held regions would significantly undermine the morale of occupying soldiers. The strategy aimed to distribute so many units that enemy forces could not recover or secure them all. The prospect of thousands of these unrecovered pistols potentially wielded by local populations was expected to erode enemy confidence.[4]
General Dwight D. Eisenhower's command staff doubted the effectiveness of mass air-dropping the Liberator over occupied Europe, resulting in fewer than 25,000 of the half-million FP-45 units sent to Great Britain being allocated to French resistance forces. Likewise, Generals Joseph Stilwell and Douglas MacArthur showed little enthusiasm for distributing their portion intended for the Pacific theater. Consequently, the Army transferred 450,000 pistols to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), which preferred arming Resistance fighters with more reliable weapons when feasible.
Although documented evidence of French use is scarce, German military policeman Niklaus Lange provided a firsthand account describing an assassination carried out with an FP-45 and claimed thousands were circulating in occupied France.[5] In 1944, the OSS supplied some pistols to Greek resistance groups. The majority of pistols sent to Britain remained undistributed and were eventually discarded at sea or melted down for scrap.[6]
In 1943, one hundred thousand FP-45 pistols were dispatched to China; however, records do not clarify how many were actually distributed. A limited number also reached the Philippine Commonwealth Army, Philippine Constabulary, and local resistance fighters.[7][8]
See also
- Deer gun, a handgun similar to the Liberator, evaluated during the Vietnam War
- Liberator, a 3D-printed firearm introduced in 2013
References
- ↑ Thompson, Leroy (3 May 2011). The Colt 1911 Pistol. Bloomsbury Publishing. p. 87. ISBN 978-1-84908-836-7.
- ↑ Bishop, Chris (2006). The Encyclopedia of Small Arms and Artillery. Grange Books. p. 19. ISBN 978-1-84013-910-5.
- ↑ Crown, Alexander (19 October 2016). "Weapon Trivia Wednesday: FP-45 Liberator".
- ↑ Wolfgang Michel: Die Liberator Pistole FP-45: Partisanenwaffe und Instrument der psychologischen Kriegsführung. ISBN 978-3-8370-9271-4
- ↑ Holger, Eckhertz, D Day through German eyes. Book 2, Ochlan, P. J.,, Brilliance Audio (Firm), ISBN 9781536609813, OCLC 961270312
- ↑ Hogg, Ian; Walter, John (29 August 2004). Pistols of the World. Krause Publications. p. 141. ISBN 9780873494601.
- ↑ Cite error: Invalid
<ref>tag; no text was provided for refs namednra - ↑ Richards, Lee (2010). The Black Art: British Clandestine Psychological Warfare against the Third Reich. Psywar. pp. 47–48. ISBN 978-0-9542936-2-8.
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