Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another
video on ForgottenWeapons.com. I'm Ian, I am here today at the Rock Island Auction House taking a look at the guns that they are selling in their upcoming December of 2015 Premier auction. And I wanted to pull one of these out this time to take a look at, because a lot of people are familiar with these, or are familiar with the name, but maybe you don't know the whole story behind them. So this is a Liberator.These were in the news in the last couple of years because it was the inspiration for the name for one of the very first 3D printed guns that became available. Well, the original Liberator here is a single shot .45 calibre pistol. These were the brainchild of actually some guys in the US Army, not OSS, but actually in the Army who came up with this notion of (in 1942), well you know, the Germans
have occupied a lot of areas of Europe and there are a lot of occupied countries
that aren't very happy about that fact, but they don't have any way to fight
back, and maybe if we could just scatter tens of thousands of guns
across the European countryside people could use one of these to shoot
a German soldier and take a better gun, or simply shoot a German soldier
as part of a sabotage campaign. Basically these guys wanted to give European
civilians the means to have some way to fight back. So in March of 1942 this idea kind of first
had its genesis, and it did not take long, by the fall of 1942 a million of
these guns had been manufactured. Literally, the Guide Lamp division of GM in
Anderson, Indiana, got the job to assemble these guys. And in between 10 and 11 weeks with 300 employees
working they manufactured a million of these little guns. In fact if you average it out, they came to the
conclusion that they actually manufactured them faster than you could load them,
which is really quite impressive. It's an extremely simple gun. It's all stamped
sheet metal, so cheap and quick to make. The barrels are unrifled because the intent of this
was basically point-blank contact sort of shooting. The engineer who designed them was actually
George Hyde, who was working for GM, and he was the mind behind a number of other
gun projects. He's not a well-known name, but he was active in gun design for the US
military, and in general around that time period. Now we'll take a look at how
this works in just a moment, but I wanted to do a little bit more
discussion of the history behind these. So the US made, literally did make, a million of them, and started talking to the British about sending them to
England, so the British could then drop them into Europe. We ended up sending 500,000 of these to England,
at which point the British asked to cut the supply off. They actually had concerns about
being able to distribute them. So a little bit later on we'd get into some problems
with philosophical issues, control issues actually, kind of, British Special Operations Executive
wanted to be in charge of the whole project, and when they weren't they were a
lot less interested in participating in it. But one of the concerns that was brought up was ... the
bombers they had available that could be used to drop these into Europe were Whitleys, and apparently
the limit was about 600 guns on one sortie, you know, with enough fuel to get
to a place where they'd be useful. That's an awful lot of bomber flights just to dump these
things, and remember this is not a primary military objective. These bombers have actual bombs to drop
for military campaigns at the same time, and they can't all be spending all of their time
dropping single shot Liberators into civilian Europe. So interestingly, the British never ended
up distributing any of them in France. That's one of the widely held myths,
these guns never got into France. They really weren't ever dropped into Europe. Certainly not,
you know, in mass by air as was originally conceived. SOE did distribute some of them
in places like Greece to partisans, but most of the guns were actually destroyed after the
war by chopping them up or dumping them in the sea. Now there were 500,000 sent to England,
the other 500,000 stayed in the US, and they kind of bounced around. There
wasn't a whole lot of interest in them. Ultimately most of them were
transferred to the OSS which was kind of the US equivalent to Special Operations
Executive, and it was the predecessor to the CIA. And the OSS was given these guns for free basically
in exchange for finding somewhere to store them, because they'd been in storage at the Frankford
Arsenal and they were taking up too much space. And the Army was literally getting ready to send them
to the scrapyard just to be melted down and recycled. And OSS took possession of them. And most of the ones that actually got distributed
got distributed in India, China and the Philippines. The Philippines probably are the ones
where they saw the most recorded use. ... Especially after the war Philippine
policemen, constabulary type units, actually carried these things as issue
weapons for a short time. They did work. So why don't I bring the camera back, let's take
a closer look at how this thing actually operates. It's obviously quite simple, but it's an interesting design. Alright, so the basic concept behind the Liberator was to be a
single shot, very simple, cheap to manufacture .45 calibre pistol. .45 Auto was chosen as the calibre
because it was already in production in the US. That would help keep costs down,
it was something easy and accessible. Most of these parts are stamped sheet metal,
obviously the two halves of the frame and grip here are. This trigger guard / barrel support is a piece of heavy
stamped sheet steel. And then there are a couple pieces, well, actually just one, the cocking knob
here is a casting, ... pot metal casting. As I mentioned the barrels are unrifled. This was a very secretive project at the GM
Guide Lamp plant when it was being made. It was codenamed the FP-45 and it was
called a "Flare Projector" or a "Flare Pistol". And all of the parts on the original
blueprints had non-gun names. So things like the trigger wasn't
called a trigger, there was a yoke. This was the tube, not the barrel.
Things like that to try and prevent understanding and knowledge
of this project from getting out. Now the way it works is you cock the knob back,
and to load it you actually rotate this out of the way. And then we have a breech block right here, it is just
this piece of stamped heavier sheet metal that lifts up. You drop a cartridge in here and then you
close the breech block behind it. That's it. So this breech plate, really, is being
held in place by this bit of metal. One thing you will see on guns that have been fired a
lot, is sometimes this metal will start to warp outward. It'll bend back like this. At that point you really want
to stop shooting the thing, it will fail at some point. One of the other areas where these guns will eventually
fail is the two panels will delaminate from each other. I've heard some people talk about firing these and ...
under recoil the grip comes back and opens up a little bit and pinches the web of your
hand. Very uncomfortable. So once you've got a cartridge in there, you
can see that there is a hole for the firing pin. And the firing pin is this little guy right here. This top piece is actually just a guide rod. The
initial guns did not have it, they didn't have this top element on the the cocking knob at all. And
one of the problems they had with the first design of the gun was that sometimes this cocking
knob would rotate off to one side just a little bit. I can't do it because they fixed the problem. But if this rotated a little bit, when you pulled the trigger the firing pin wouldn't be perfectly lined
up with the hole, and it would fail to fire. So they added this guide rod which
runs in this hole in the breech plate. That prevents that problem from occurring. Then when I pull the trigger this cocking
knob drops forward, fires the gun, and boom. Once it is fired, you open it up again. This
can rotate to either side, it doesn't matter. You open the breech up and then
you would actually use a stick or a piece of wire or whatever was handy to
poke the case out the back of the gun. These were issued in a little wax waterproof
(mostly waterproof), cardboard box. They came with 10 rounds of ammunition. They came with a little wooden dowel to use as an ejector,
and they came with this neat set of cartoon instructions. All pictorial, no written words, to describe exactly
how to use the gun. So that they could be dropped anywhere, to people who spoke any language,
and you'd have a universal set of instructions. Now another thing that a lot of people aren't familiar
with, or don't realise, is that every one of these pistols was in fact test fired at GM before
it was packed up and shipped out. They actually went through quite
a lot of ammunition doing that. So every gun has had at least one
round, they don't blow up in one round. Some of the guns at random were test fired
up to 50 times as a quality control measure. In the documentation that I have seen that is,
you know, more recent than the actual war, 50 rounds is kind of considered the lifespan
of a Liberator. At that point things start to fail. Spot welds will start to break, the grip panels can come
apart, you can get some bending in the breech area. They're not meant to be long-term guns, they're
meant to be used once or twice, and that's it. And for that purpose they worked very well. Total cost of these ended up being about,
I believe, about three dollars and fifty cents each. Which is far less than pretty much any
other firearm the US was making at the time. In fact, originally the concept when they
proposed this idea was that you could arm a million people in Europe for
the cost of a single battleship. That's an interesting way to think about this. Now I did find ... there are a couple books out there on
the Liberator, and one of them includes some ballistic data from a guy who took an original gun and did a number
of test firings with it using standard ball ammunition. And what he found ... well first off, the barrel
(unrifled) on the blueprints has a dimensional tolerance of 0.450 inch plus 0.002. So
the barrel could vary from 0.450 to 0.452. Of course, .45 ACP ammunition uses a .452 bullet,
so that ensures that you will get a gas seal in the barrel. They found that the muzzle velocity from one of
these guys was about 730 or 740 feet per second. On a standard .45 ACP 1911 you're
gonna be getting 850 feet per second. So ... the use of a much shorter barrel
didn't hurt the gun's ballistics all that much. A ... 230 grain .45 calibre ball round going at
730 feet per second is still quite sufficiently deadly. They did find they were getting about a 12 inch
group at 50 feet, which actually is surprisingly decent. That's better than you might expect
from a smoothbore pistol like this. However, all the bullets were key holing. So obviously without
being rifled this didn't stabilise bullets and they tumbled. Trigger ... on his was about 8 pounds,
and this one feels about the same. So, you know, these are actually sort of a reasonably shootable
pistol, they're just not designed to have a long life span. So just a couple... To put the quantity of these guns kind of in some
context, when they were being shipped into Europe they were planning on how to transport these
pistols in the UK and they were gonna do it by rail. And they estimated they could fit 10,000 of these
guns in their package boxes, 10,000 guns in a boxcar. So a million of these guns was going to take 100 boxcars. That's a very, very long train filled
with nothing but Liberator pistols. So one other interesting anecdote about these guys.
... Basically all of the assembly was done by Guide Lamp. Frigidaire, what is we think of now as a refrigerator and
appliance company, actually chambered the barrels. That was something that Guide Lamp just didn't
have the tooling to do, so they shipped "tubes", you know, steel barrel blanks to Frigidaire. Frigidaire
had five Pratt & Whitney reamers that they were running. And they would run a chambering reamer into these,
and then pack them up and ship them back to Guide Lamp. [Frigidaire] was reaming 600 barrels per hour,
which is a phenomenal number of of barrels. Just think about that volume going through the plant. That pretty much covers it for the Liberator. There were a number of experimental versions tinkered
with, although none of them went into production. They had experiments with actual mechanical
extractors on the guns. They made at least one that ... was a 2 shot version that had a breech block
that could slide back and forth with two cartridges in it. None of those versions actually went
into any sort of production though. Well, thanks for watching guys,
I hope you enjoyed the video. There was a company that put
out reproduction Liberator pistols, although I don't know if they're
still actually making them right now. But if you would like to have an authentic genuine Liberator
you can take a moment and place a bid on this one. If you check the link in the text description below
you'll find Rock Island's catalogue page on these. They've got some pictures and description, and you can set up
an on-line account and place a bid right now if you're interested in it. So, thanks for watching.
TIL the Liberator cost Tree Fiddy (@10 min 33 sec)