I heard in WW2 the Allies air-droped 1 bullet only guns for the french resistance? Anyone else heard of this?

Question

They only contained 1 bullet so they couldn't actually be utilised for practical use by the wehrmacht.

Answer 1

actually, why would the French need weapons to begin with , when dropping them to the ground and raising both their hands seemed to do just fine. The Wermacht found many weapons never fired, just dropped, and used them against the US Army !

Answer 2

Not quite.  They were single-shot .45 caliber pistols.  Extremely crude, one manually loaded a round from the "magazine" in the butt.  The "extractor" was a small stick that the shooter literally pushed down the barrel to poke the casing out. Cheap to make, and if the Germans/Japanese intercepted a drop-which happened more frequently than popular histories would have one believe, they wouldn't be tempted to use these weapons themselves.

The philosophy was it was small, therefore concealable-rugged (nothing to break, unlike a M1911 .45), easy for illiterate peasants -who may have zero skills with machines- to use; and could be used to approach unsuspecting Germans/Japanese to kill them and take their weapon(s).

As mentioned, they are today very rare, I've seen one in a French museum.

Answer 3

you seem confused. i believe it says, a mint condition french rifle, never fired and only dropped once.

Answer 4

Yes and no.  Yes, they dropped something like 1 million of the little "Liberator" pistol which looks like a small automatic pistol but is actually a single shot.  It is a smoothbore, .45 caliber pistol made of stamped sheet metal for approx. $1 each.  Inside, where the magazine would normally be, was a stripper clip of 5 rounds of ammunition.  You detached a round from the clip and loaded it from the breech and manually cocked the striker.  They would have had no practical use for the Wermacht had they been supplied with a case of ammunition!  They also came with a simple picturegram instruction sheet.  They were described as "a good gun to get a gun".  Presumably the resistance would use one to kill a German soldier at close range and take his good rifle or sub-machine gun.

Despite that over 1 million of these were made and dropped, very few survive in collections and are quite valuable, especially if you have the instruction sheet that came with them.

Answer 5

yes. i think it was intended to be used for assassinations and had a range of about 10 m. it was only single shot but could be reloaded as it was shipped with 10 bullets.

here is the wiki page

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M1942_Liber...