Home > FP-45 Liberator

A pistol manufactured for the United States military during World War II.

The pistol was designed for the United States Army in 1942 by the Inland Guide Lamp Manufacturing Division of the General Motors Corporation in Dayton, Ohio. Interestingly, the army designated the weapon the Flare Projector Caliber .45 hence the designation FP-45. The Guide Lamp Division plant in Anderson, Indiana assembled a million of these weapons. The Liberator project took about 6 months from concept to end of production with about 11 weeks of actual manufacturing time.

The weapon was a crude, single shot pistol designed to be cheaply and quickly mass produced. The Liberator had just 23 parts. The weapon largely used stamped and turned steel parts that were cheap and easy to manufacture. The weapon fired a .45 caliber pistol cartridge from an unrifled barrel. Due to the unrifled barrel, maximum effective range was only about 25 feet. After that, the oblong .45 caliber bullet (designed for a rifled barrel)would begin to tumble out of control.

The Liberator was shipped in a cardboard box with 10 rounds of .45 caliber ammunition, a wooden dowel to remove the empty shell casing, and a instruction sheet showing how to load and fire the weapon. Excess rounds of ammunition could be stored in the pistol grip.

After production, the Army turned the Liberators over to the OSS. A crude and clumsy weapon, the Liberator was never intended for front line service. It was originally intended as a weapon to be mass dropped behind enemy lines to resistence fighters in occupied territory. The resistence fighters were to recover the weapons, sneak up on an Axis occupier, kill him and retrieve his weapon. In reality, the OSS never saw the practicality in mass dropping the Liberator over occupied Europe, and only a handful were ever distributed. Only the ChineseThis article is on the geographic and cultural entity. For other meanings, see China (disambiguation). China ( Traditional Chinese: , Simplified Chinese: , Hanyu Pinyin: Zhongguo, Wade-Giles: Chung-kuo) is a country in continental East Asia with some oute received the liberator in any significant quantity.

The Liberator was never issued to American troops, but a handful did find there way into the hands of G.I.s who used the weapon for personal defense.

The original delivered cost for the FP-45 was $2.10/unit. A Liberator in good condition today can fetch several hundred dollars from a collector.