CIA Deer Gun aka Liberator 2.0

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WestKentucky

WestKentucky

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That's all well and good, but the Liberator pistol had nothing to do with Vietnam or the Cold War and certainly didn't cost $3. It was a WWII production item and supposedly over 1 million were produced. Many were shipped to China and few are known to exist today.

There is a current, new production version offered which runs around $600. I have actually seen them in stores but wouldn't buy one on a bet.
 
I think the $3 is referring to the 9mm Deer gun the article was about which was inspired by the WWII Liberator.
 
There's one I never heard of..... The WWII Liberator is pretty well known and documented but the Deer Gun's a very obscure item, indeed. It claims only 1000 were made and as many as 150 may have been shipped to Vietnam. That's not many and now I understand why they aren't well known. But it's an interesting story about a very obscure bit of history. While their rarity might prove interesting to those who collect things like that It's amazing that one actually got over 22 grand at auction. All in all that was a good, interesting read. Thanks for posting.
 
As I understand it from past reading, some small batches of the Liberator were sold as surplus metal scrap after WW2 and found their way into discount stores, minus the ammunition and boxes. According to the story, they were sold as "toy" guns for children as the sellers had no idea what they truly were. Those were the days of trash barrels full of surplus rifles and WW1 revolvers, so I could envision that happening. Hey I read it on the internet so it must be true, right?
Don.
 
What a boondoggle. By the 1960's, the Third World was awash with guns, with the ComBloc handing out AK-47's and SKS's to every insurgent group it could find. This "Deer Gun" was just silly. (The original Liberator was not much better, in terms of use.)

ETA: The concept of the Liberator and the "Deer Gun" was that they would be dropped to insurgents fighting organized, occupying military forces. (Think of the French maquis fighting against the occupying Nazis.) By the 1960's, the formal military forces were on our side and the insurgents were the enemy (at least in SE Asia). So the whole concept no longer made any sense.
 
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What I find most interesting about this gun is it’s absolute simplicity. I have already added it to the list of things to make. The drawings are good enough, and even though there aren’t “dims” on the drawings, there are 9mm case heads to use as a reference and get stinkin close. It will be a fun project just to say I have done it. I would really like to know if any of the 150 were ever used for any purpose other than as door wedges.
 
The Deer Gun and/or Liberator might be pretty easy to fake. Someone with the right skills and a good workshop could maybe fleece some folks at gun shows.
 
Those were the days of trash barrels full of surplus rifles and WW1 revolvers, so I could envision that happening.
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I was about 6 YO and with my dad at Leonards Farm And Ranch store in Ft Worth when he bought a Colt 1917 45 revolver from WWI for the price of $6. He just laid it on the counter and they rang it up and out the door we went. No background checks or anything else.

Now if the CIA wanted a cheap gun to drop behind the lines I guess they could just drop Hi-Point 9mm pistols. My bud had one of those and the dang thing shot very well and never jammed. Well worth the hundred bucks he paid for it.
 
If you want "deniable" guns (guns without the supplying country's fingerprints), just use guns captured from the enemy. We certainly have enough AK-47's on hand to supply any insurgency. Captured guns are also cheap enough.
 
Havok7416 writes:

That's all well and good, but the Liberator pistol had nothing to do with Vietnam or the Cold War and certainly didn't cost $3. It was a WWII production item and supposedly over 1 million were produced. Many were shipped to China and few are known to exist today.
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I'm guilty of doing the same thing you did, glancing at the first part of the article and assuming it was about the .45 we know of. ;)

When I saw the posts following yours, I opened the article again. It does indeed describe a gun about which I had never heard.
 
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The original Liberator was a smoothbore to simplify construction.
Some reasonably good supposition that OSS built the things just to vex the enemy, and not for any actual use in the field.

Deer gun was rifled, apparently for 'reasons.' Unclear is there was any psychological effect. Always looked like a hot glue gun to me.

Interestingly, the reissue Liberator had to be made with a rifled barrel.
 
Iroquois said:
Interesting read. I didn’t know either gun existed. Thanks for posting.
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There is actually at least 1 more gun built for the same purpose, and it was probably the best suited for the job. It was a shotgun, and it was designed/developed by a reputable arms maker as opposed to these pistols which were arguably the most crude and unrefined guns of the modern era. I will go get a link...
 
Havok7416 said:
That's all well and good, but the Liberator pistol had nothing to do with Vietnam or the Cold War and certainly didn't cost $3. It was a WWII production item and supposedly over 1 million were produced. Many were shipped to China and few are known to exist today.

There is a current, new production version offered which runs around $600. I have actually seen them in stores but wouldn't buy one on a bet.
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Did you even bother to read the article?
 
I believe Smith and Smith SAOTW had these in them by the late 1960s or early 1970s.

The linked article seemed to imply they were for issuing South Vietnamese but this was never the case.

Some folks had spent too many Sunday Mornings on the living room floor with the Sunday Funnies reading Terry and The Pirates and thought everyone in Laos was slaves of some warlord or the Dragon Lady Herself and that everyone in North Vietnam was an oppressed slave of communist leaders worse than Albania or North Korea ever had and their mindless minion Armies.

These Deer Guns were to Opresso Libre the Laotians and North Vietnamese folks by giving them a simple gun they could use with only comic book training. Now folks might balk at a smooth bore pistol with crappy sights, but if your best shooter was a Monkey or Bird crossbow the Deer Gun was a huge step up.

I suspect that one reason they were not deployed was because we had armed the Mountain Peoples of South Vietnam with Carbines grease guns and even M1 Thompsons.....and a large portion of them, about the time this Deer Gun manufacturing was going on Revolted and put on Red hankies. Suddenly the idea of purposefully arming folks we don't really know with ANYTHING that goes bang made a lot less sense.

BTW National Geographic's coverage of the Revolt was pretty much most American's first hint that their was a problem in Vietnam and that we were involved with troops on the ground (wearing funny Green French hats) that were getting shot at.

Meanwhile back to the original FP45. I have known two men that claim to have had one as teens in 1944-45, one Dutch and one Hungarian. The Dutch guy claimed his was used to shoot Germans on two occasions to obtain rifles the Hungarian claimed his gave his little gang of boys the courage to sneak onto a German airbase and damage Aircraft while the guard was off getting lunch. The Hungarian's may still be in the bottom of a stream where he threw it during their escape from the airbase after they were spotted and chased and he decided being caught with it might be a Bad Thing.

In 1981 just before Christmas I was at what might be described as a gun and knife show in Frankfurt BRD (FRG) at the Fifth Core HQ conference center. At a table was a guy selling FR45s in Sardine cans that were green in color and featured the old style key opener. The one can opened when I got their and the can he opened in front of a group of us contained a pistol with a grip full of ammo and a wooden dowel and a Comic strip. I have been told repeatedly by experts that the guns were in cardboard boxes and never packaged as these. There were at least twenty such cans on the table . Someone Somewhere Sometime canned Those Guns.

At the time I felt that buying one of those cans was a pretty good way to make my next assignment be to Ft. Levenworth, and not as an officer, so I passed. Chief WishIdas from that show were a couple of very nice original Luftwaffee Swords and a nice original Luger Snail Drum. I did buy an AK47 (not AKM) bayonet and sheath that, being as how no one had one, got a lot of OOOs and AHHHs at that time before the flood.

-kBob
 
Well I was wrong the1963-69-73 versions of Smith & Smith Small Arms of the World do not seem to have references to the Deer Gun.

It would seem something has eaten or hidden my Ezell version of the book you all should have.

Even went so far as to dig out The Book of Pistols and Revolvers (just one Smith) and flip through it. I blame you guys now for all the neat stuff I ran across and got reminded of that I lusted over back in the day. Dardicks, Kimballs, Gyro Jet,and (don't laugh) even the Sheridan Knocabout (and no I did not misspell it or do a typo)

Amoung the things I learned, the Liberator FP45 cost about $1.71 to manufacture, packaged in " water proof packaging" with extractor/ejector stick ammo and comic they cost the tax payer $2.10 in the money of the time.

According to Smith & Smith they may have done more killing than all the US issued pistols in WWII which is hardly what is reported now. They reported they were used in multiple theaters but that they were most used against Japanese.....

German Polezi told me that in the early 1970's they still saw them (by then though 25 mm flare guns with home made you name the caliber inserts were more common, the 25 mm single shots were sold as fire works launchers at the time)

I saw and was reminded of the other project to arm guerrillas The Stamped .45 Semi Auto I once saw in the old Infantry Museum (before the College Boy Museum Majors Improved everything) This was a stamped gun (no where near as nice as the Walther stamped guns of the same period but likely as serviceable) that used 1911 magazines and had a butt type mag release and used the rear sight for a safety. They appearently lost out cost and effectiveness wise to the STEN as a Guerrilla weapon....they weighed 2.3 POUNDS. Unlike the later Stallard and HiPoints they were appearently locked breech short recoil.

I may have seen the Deer Gun at Benning or Bragg, but am sure I read about them somewhere in the 1970's. They reminded me of electric drills and how the Ruger Standard model started out as a hand drill.

-kBob
 
460Shooter said:
Trigger guard? We don't need no stinkin trigger guards........
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This, and who came up with the brilliant idea of having remove the safety and put your hand in front of the barrel to install the front sight.
 
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