WWII’s Cheapest Weapon: The Story of the FP-45 Liberator Pistol

The FP-45 Liberator pistol is an interesting footnote in the annals of wartime insanity—a hunk of cheap metal meant to turn occupied Europe into a slaughterhouse of resistance. In the darkest days of World War II, some madmen in a smoky backroom decided to arm the desperate European masses with a single-shot, .45 caliber hand cannon that was about as sophisticated as a rusty nail. This, my friends, was the Liberator: a weapon for the downtrodden and the damned, made to bring chaos to the Nazi war machine.

Born in the Belly of Paranoia

The Liberator wasn’t crafted in the fires of heroic necessity but out of sheer guerrilla lunacy. It was 1942, and George Hyde, an unassuming engineer at General Motors, was tasked with designing a firearm that could be mass-produced faster than you could say “Third Reich.” The Joint Psychological Warfare Committee—because nothing screams psychological warfare like handing out zip guns to untrained civilians—dubbed it the “Flare Projector Caliber .45” to keep prying eyes away. Yeah, sure, a “flare projector.” That’s like calling a Molotov cocktail a “warm beverage.”

In the original engineering drawings, the barrel was a “tube,” the trigger was called the “yoke,” and the firing pin was dubbed the “control rod.”

At $2.10 a pop ($37.70 in 2022 dollars), these babies were churned out by the Guide Lamp Division of General Motors like candy bars, rolling off the line at an insane pace. The entire project spanned just six months, from idea to finished product. Three hundred workers built a million of these in an 11-week period. I don’t believe there was any quality control involved in the process. 

It was supposed to be the great equalizer: get behind enemy lines, pop a Nazi in the face, and upgrade to his rifle. The stuff of freedom-fighting fever dreams. Not to sound too cliche, but desperate times call for desperate measures, and this is an idea borne out of sheer desperation. A hail Mary pass meant to slow down the Nazi war machine. 

A Gun So Basic It Was Almost Genius

The Liberator wasn’t just simple; it was absurdly so. Twenty-three parts, stamped and slapped together into a Frankenstein’s monster of a firearm. The barrel wasn’t even rifled, which meant aiming was more of a suggestion than a science. But who needs accuracy when you’re shooting someone from arm’s length? You’d fire, hope for the best, and pray the other guy didn’t shoot back with something that wasn’t designed in a weekend.

Packed in a waxed box with ten rounds of .45 ACP, a wooden dowel for ejecting spent casings, and a comic-book-style instruction sheet, the Liberator was a do-it-yourself nightmare. But that was the point. It wasn’t supposed to last or even work well. It was a throwaway piece, a tool for one thing: creating havoc.

It was intended for super short-range use, 1-4 yards. The maximum effective range was noted as 25 feet, but I think that was wishful thinking. For those of you into stats, the gun was 5.55 inches long with a barrel length of 4 inches. It weighed in at one pound. Due to its ultra-low price, it was nicknamed the “Woolworth pistol” after that popular discount store of the time.

The Great Distribution Fiasco

Here’s where the plan goes off the rails. Of the million or so Liberators produced, only a fraction made it into the hands of those scrappy resistance fighters. Eisenhower, a man not exactly known for his love of absurdity, saw the gun as more trouble than it was worth. “Air-drop pistols to the French underground?” he probably thought. “Why not just mail Hitler our invasion plans while we’re at it?” He authorized fewer than 25,000 of the half million pistols sent for his use to be airdropped for the French Resistance. 

In the Pacific, however, General Douglas MacArthur—ever the showman—ordered 50,000 of them. They went to guerrillas in the Philippines and the Solomon Islands, where the Liberator’s brutish simplicity might’ve had a fighting chance. But the “weapon’s”operational record is murky. Most were either destroyed post-war or disappeared into the black holes of military history. Very few were used. Records of these kinds of things can tend to be spotty wartime. 

The 450,000 remaining Liberators were turned over to the OSS, who dispersed them to resistance fighters worldwide.

The Legacy of a Disposable Death Machine

The Liberator didn’t turn the tide of war, but it sure as hell made a statement. In reality, it was a psychological weapon as much as a physical one. The mere idea of arming occupied populations with these lethal paperweights must’ve sent chills up the spines of Axis commanders. Imagine a world where every farmer, shopkeeper, and factory worker could be packing heat, waiting to ambush the first German officer who got cocky.

Today, the Liberator is a collector’s wet dream—a relic of a time when the line between brilliance and madness blurred in the fog of war. For the World War II relic collector who loves unique and quirky pieces, these are in high demand. Original examples can fetch several thousand dollars. 

If you can’t afford one of the real ones, a company called Vintage Ordnance Company makes some interesting replicas, complete with the wax box, wooden shell extraction rod, and instruction sheet. They start at about $630 and look pretty well made. Perhaps too well made in that all of the pieces seem to fit, and you might just be brave enough to fire one.

It’s a monument to the desperate, wild-eyed ingenuity of the human spirit, proof that sometimes, the most ridiculous ideas are the ones that just might work. Or, at least, make the enemy lose a little sleep.