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They were made by the Guide Lamp division of GM. ONE MILLION were made in three weeks.

One of the big mysteries in the collector field is where did one million Liberator pistols go?

Somebody, somewhere, seems to have had second thoughts about dropping them in France.

Well, when the war ended they pushed a lot of NIB jeeps and trucks off the cargo ships rather than ship them back stateside. So, I suppose that might have happened. Or they could have thrown them in a blast furnace, crates and all.

That, or they're filling a couple government warehouses somewhere waiting for some eventuality.

If they didn't ship them, they scrapped them and they became 1911s, or tanks or canteens.

Those Philippine slam-fire pipe guns were actually sold as souvenirs in national gun magazines when I was a kid in the 1950s. Probably made up for the sale, with a pine 2X4 stock. They DID go bang, and at VERY close range must have been effective no matter the projectile.

I recently read a biography of one of the American reserve officers who stayed behind in the Philippines and organized and led the resistance against the Japanese. The Philippino guerrillas asked for shotgun shells FIRST when asking for supplies from Australia; shotguns were their favorite weapon in the jungles. I suspect many were American shotguns left by plantation owners and other US citizens when they fled the islands or were interned. Many were probably the single shots all tropical poor people worldwide seem to get. They killed a lot of Japanese....

I recall reading the MauMau in Africa made shotguns (12ga) by wrapping Bamboo tubes with wet rawhide. These were fitted to a wood stock cut for a breech & fired with a rubberband cut from innertubes as I recall to power the firing pin made from a nail. I seem to recall reading about this at the time Winchester was introducing its fibeglass wrapped bbl.

As in the final scene of "Raiders of the Lost Ark"!

Mike, are you referring to "American Guerrilla in the Philippines"? I remember reading that book years ago.

Guess what, you can buy newly manufactured "Liberators". World War II reenactors buy them. Don't recall the price, but I thought it was outrageous when one came through the shop I help out at. Also look at the price of repro BARs, can be a very expensive hobby, but more power to them.

Wonder why a WWII reenactor would buy a Liberator. Are they playing Pierre the Maquis or something? Even the OSS types, behind the lines, didn't use those things.

Mr. Brown, I don't recall the title of the book, but it wasn't that one. Some of the things I DO remember, besides the need for/use of shotguns, are the skepticism of Allied commanders that these reservists (mainly mining engineers and suchlike trash) left behind could lead and that the Philippinos could be led. The pre-war Army was still very much a class-ridden organization, with a strong racial flavor. It took WWII to get us over that stuff. (And to be fair, the Phillipines IS a very different sort of "nation" than we were or are used to!).

Mike, since this country never had an empire (other than what it acquired as a result of the Spanish-American War), we had no tradition of working with "native" troops. And the whole guerrilla warfare concept was not looked upon with much favor by the military establishment. The OSS, working behind the lines with resistance groups in both Europe and Asia, was regarded as very much of an oddball organization. It really wasn't until President Kennedy lent his strong support that the Special Operations community (Green Berets, SEALs, etc) gained much respect within the overall military structure. The British and the French, with their histories of colonial empires, learned the lesson of the value of native troops long before we did. Given the wars we're fighting now, we haven't much choice but to train and rely on the natives. But that was certainly an area in which we had little experience back in WWII.