FP- 45 Liberator

hey he got 45 here we went to bring to you an interesting little gun pistol from World War two now unfortunately don't have one there very few of them around or even rare I mean they're very rare maybe in a museum you've seen one called the liberator FP 45 do have an article on it interestingly enough as you can see that's quite a jewel isn't it you could use that in its at competition and maybe win the Nationals is in 45 ACP the very interesting firearm if you're not familiar with this I highly recommend this article and this month of American Rifleman from the NRA of all places just came out coincidentally but this gun was was a gun that was designed to help you get to a gun and what's that oh maybe we do have one what are you doing dropping he's in Tennessee man everybody's armed in Tennessee you know why they'd drop it in Tennessee well ok great so we got one I guess it was some know some Lost World War two pilots still flying around up there cool well this is the gun just so happens I do believe in coincidences I'm really good yeah cool look at that we actually have one alright nice so yeah so we I thought we were just going to rely on this picture and this wonderful article by Bruce Canfield he's a great writer and yeah we got it all we get the firearm looks like it even has an ammo in it because they came with 10 rounds you know in the in the but the stock there see alright looks just like it in it I'll be darned so now we have one and and we can you know tend to show you how it was made and how it works and they actually came there dropped out of the sky designed to be dropped out of the sky with instructions about how to use them you notice there's nothing written on there just pictures so that people in Kentucky could understand them couldn't resist I'm from Kentucky so you know people with that speak a different language that'd be Kentucky doing I'm sorry Kentucky folks I'm from Kentucky I love Kentucky but this is this is a really interesting design because you know any there are a variety of countries that were occupied during World War two either in the Pacific Theater or in the European theater and so this is a very useful little cartoon so to speak to show how this thing worked so that was pretty clever but anyway the way this gun was designed and what was designed for and I would recommend this article and just studying this little gun I've known about it for quite a while it has been given a rebirth of sorts this is a replica that was made by an outfit in Elizabethtown Kentucky vintage ordnance company I've talked to the owner of that company at gun shows in Louisville and I guess that the Knob Creek and was very very impressed with these heating offered to send us one but really nice guy and has given this gun new life because there just were not many of them that were salvaged Lassa more dumped in the ocean and just beaten back into pot metal or whatever to to be used for who knows what cooking soup I don't know but the gun was designed as as in 1941 you know Pearl Harbor in December and then the Philippines surrendered a few few months after that we had as can field points out in Europe Western Europe a lot of Western Europe was under the Louisville a phrase that the heel of the Nazi jackboot you know at that time so things were not going well around the world and it was looking bad and so I think it was Poland that that was asking the Allies to could you do something to provide some of firearms for for the occupied civilians or population in these countries is there anything we could do get some firearms to them to the unarmed masses and so the US army went to that I think it was the joint psychological warfare or committee they put their minds to it and came up with the idea of this firearm what would be the smartest thing to do had to be cheap had to be quick something that could be made that would be a gun that's about all you can say that would fire a round and again it was designed to to get a gun morning it wasn't designed to fight with not a battle weapon obviously but it was better than a stick nor a club and so they want to put something together stamped metal that could be made in huge volume pretty quickly and then the plan was to airdrop France the wherever Philippines the the Pacific Theater the the European theater and just drop them air drop them they made a million of these things just in a two or three months I think from the initial planning stages I believe it was around may 42 up into August they had a million of these things put together very secret very hush-hush they called it the F P 45 and the F P stood for flare projector so as far as anybody knew they were designing a flare gun of some sort and they didn't even call this a trigger or a trigger guard they were using terms like yoke and tube not barrel so that people just wouldn't get a clue it looks like a some kind of cheap flare gun doesn't it so pretty interesting pretty interesting now you see this is a really fine qualifier this I don't think sig is going to come out with anything like this anytime soon or anybody but that it's a very interesting firearm and the way it works is you pull this back and you lift this up you slip a 45 ACP round in there you close match its back around and you keep firing pin and then you pull the trigger bang sometimes it will work right now they were dropped with 10 rounds in the thought that there's no functioning it's a single shot you said that but it was a clever way to get spin rounds in there so in the box for 10 rounds of ammo let's just dump the ammo let's see if they yeah good really flying around this thing put plenty ammo in here for me this is the I mean think about a gift that this would be if you were totally unarmed and being abused by the enemy if I can get those out there are ten in there and we will get 100 sooner or later but I'll have to pry it out but you might have to yeah once I get one half of cover oh there we go it's not a semi-automatically okay okay now all right so when you put the hatch back on okay now they were made out of just this plain metal this even this when I was when I picked it up it has you know like fingerprints on it it's not stainless they wanted them to to rust away they want them to be you know showing up years later in any kind of capacity they were just designed for these people who were under occupation by the enemy to have a gun to get to a gun to get to a real gun a better gun and that's all they were designed for not the last in fact they card one around out of each one because they were making them and then randomly they pick one issue 50 rounds and as I understand they just didn't hold up very well the wealth would start coming apart and really not that safe to shoot so these replicas are better they're made a little bit better they're not really designed to shoot to tell you the truth that much they will fire in fact the owner of this company recommends you just don't fire it really but we're going to fire one I think they come without the firing pin hole even opened up and gets kind of drill that out if you actually want to fire the thing they're really meant to be more of a replica but they will fire I have fired this one a couple of times and they come there these replicas have much closer tolerances to then I discovered it's really hard to get the round in you know so so they're very tight tolerances a little bit better material and all that so when we go ahead and just fire it now I have discovered that the round doesn't just fall in there and end up where it needs to be necessarily so I resort to my old days of Mosul loading then find my tool here but I put it in my pocket let's just try this this came with it because if you look at the firearm you notice that there's no ejector or anything like that and this is would appreciate intermix in there okay that's not I don't like doing that very much that's one reason we're not going to fire this much but this was designed once you fired it you need to get the case out so you stick this down the barrel and punch out the empty case alright and there's no safety I mean the safety you're looking at basically once you turn this around you know its rate of fire so that's your safety and that's it if you had this thing where it should be like right there I'll point it downrange and you dropped it it could fire so there's a lot of disclaimers in the literature on these replicas so you want to be careful not not to do that so but we have around in it don't we we got one in there and we put my ears on let's see if it will fire and like I said this gun is designed to get you to a better gun right a real gun we just have to have a zombie here it looks like he's got a mauser maybe he's a nazi zombie so let's see if we can get that from him hey your gun looks better than mine almost yours man alright now there's a real gun I'll take this one every deck over that thing I worked out pretty well yeah lots better lost better nice yeah got me a real gun that was the goal that was the objective of the little FP 45 to get a better gun we got us a headshot on that zombie that's what it takes doesn't it so this actually would be a better firearm weapon to go to war with much better than this now I normally wouldn't stick that on my belt like that but you know one round get fired so that's totally safe that's for sure so what you would do is lift the hatch get that round out so you wouldn't want to be in some kind of extensive firefight would you be like a muzzle loader and there it is you could load up another one now as I said the the originals were that looser tolerances and the the military ball ammo probably just slid right in there you didn't have to push it in - be my guest depending on the one you got but the chamber tolerances are tighter I was reading on these interesting little design and these are pretty exact in terms of the replica they went to the original drawings the owner this company did a vintage ordnance company and and then even after that he looked at some of the actual guns and made a few tweaks here and there because I think on the factory floor they actually once they started making these they may have done some things a little bit differently that they didn't go back and change in the drawings as I understand and all that sort of thing but they're they're pretty much his better materials a little bit better trigger a little safer although again they're not really recommended to be fired okay they'll withstand some firing but it's kind of a do it at your own risk sort of thing all right so now the so again the psychological warfare committee they thought that if they sang they made a million of them that that's spring or summer 42 if those things came dropping out of the sky into France or wherever they just thought that would break help break them around of the occupation forces if civilians and people start showing up with a 45 and copying you know the enemy popping them and grabbing rifles and that was the plan and they shipped about five hundred thousand of them over to European theater but according my reading Eisenhower wasn't crazy about them and there weren't that many dropped in fact there's no evidence of any of them actually being dropped into France that's the word and he kept about 25,000 Canfield points out and sent the rest of them back or to the Pacific Theater now in a Pacific Theatre of Stillwell and the McArthur weren't crazy about him either so it might be in one of those deals where you know how people can get in a room and make a decision for what needs to be done out there in the real world but once the real world gets their hands on that plan it maybe doesn't make a lot of sense and I don't know or maybe more of them were dropped than we know and it's just it really is hush-hush because the people were sworn to secrecy and everything that were involved in this projects who knows a lot and were dumped in the oceans supposedly but you know there's just not records on it there were no markings on them you know they didn't stick made in the USA or anything they want anybody know necessarily where they came from and unlike these the replicas have to have a serial number and you know the caliber and all that on the barrel but it's done discreetly it's up underneath the barrel and all that but so as I understand in China in the Philippines more of them were used or dropped and used okay but by and large they weren't either the mean that were manufactured we're not we're not drop all over the world for anything so great plan but maybe it wasn't carried out to the to the nth degree as uh I guess the planners thought it might be but it was a scary time we can't relate to that I can't relate do you imagine what was going on in Europe at the time and then in the Pacific to Pearl Harvard all that it was like whoa world's going to be ending here as we know it it could have of course and it did for something alright you know so yeah I you can see you can understand why this this committee would get together we need to do something put guns in people's hands you know and some of that that might happen to other in other ways too not just for these I know in England they were we were shipping them various types of fire Colt single-action everything they were they won't anything we had you know so so who knows why I went on that it's not in the records but this is a very interesting piece because it did fire and it did fire a quite a nice round the 45 ACP that most of us have a lot of respect for even if it was one shot it gets you to you know something like that Gooding it and again it beats a stick beats a club you know and that sort of thing but so anyway more of them were used in the Eastern or not the eastern but in the Pacific than in the European theater and they were not made all that well they were designed or rust away and I got there probably aren't that many even good museum pieces around because like I say they're they're not stainless and you know just rust immediately and they're kind of junk we get right down to it you know they're just basically a junk gun designed to get you to a real gun and quite an interesting piece of history if you've not seen them I have been at a couple of gun shows and I have seen the display over the last two or three years of these things and the fellow who makes them the replicas and I've chatted with him and he offered to send me one like I said I thought maybe I'd do that sometime there's a gun shop up in Clarksville Tennessee Tennessee gun country that I drop in every now and then and they've had this one there for three four months and they offered this to me three or four months ago say hey you won't do a video with that thing take it you know so yeah probably yeah I want to do that sometime well we're just now getting to it it's kind of interesting that just this month in the American Rifleman there's no arc a lot so worked out great I wanted to get the video done on it before the summer was over and give you all look at this gun as you know I like history I like historical firearms and while this isn't something you're going to see at the range people shooting or plinking with it's it really has a very interesting place in history so I thought maybe you enjoy seeing it and I really didn't think I'd have it thankfully drop down the sky cool wonder what's going to drop out next maybe a cig never no no the Glock but the FP 45 Flair projector interesting huh make we're making a flare projector oh by the way I didn't tell you that uh it was it wasn't made by the US military it was made by by General Motors you know the inland manufacturing company Division of General Motors kind of I think did a lot of the design and then they farmed it on out to the lamp division because they were busy making m1 carbines which are pretty important at the time and so it was actually made by a division of General Motors and they just stamped them out in that summer just in a matter of about ten weeks a million of them and then shipped them so it was a very quick project from beginning to end so interesting piece of history I would not recommend you buy one of these to go shoot competition with but definitely an interesting piece of metal life is good

Channel: hickok45

Views: 1,741,125

Rating: 4.8868937 out of 5

Keywords: 45, Colt, 45ACP, FP-45, Liberator, WWII, .45, ACP, Psychological, Warfare, single-shot, Occupied, France, European, Theater, Pacific, Philippines

Id: _ERSQo6cmTQ

Length: 18min 39sec (1119 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 10 2012

Reddit Comments

[u/JohnTDouche]

I would think in a zombie apocalypse this would be your suicide gun.

[u/elitegamerbros]

Hickok45 is freaking awesome! If you are into guns or want to learn about them, checkout his channel!

[u/williamhts]

This would have been awesome to have in the game! If the game would be more like this http://www.reddit.com/r/dayz/comments/10zlkd/consolidated_weaponitem_requests_for_standalone/?sort=top It could be a good addition as it it not overpowered :)

[u/AlwayzPro]

I love Hickok45

[u/hdrive1335]

Zombies with a Kar98 - that's a scary thought.

[u/srwim]

Was designed to be dropped into occupied enemy territory for resistance fighters, the Deer Gun is slightly more modern example.

[u/zuggles]

i think that would be less than useless in a zombie apoc. id rather have an axe... or a sling shot.

[u/plsenjy]

Sometimes it's fun to just watch rednecks doing their thing. This guy looks like he's having a blast.