The Liberator was nowhere, anywhere, remotely close to the effectiveness imagined in the article. The Liberator saw minimal distribution, mainly to France, a few in Greece as other occupied nations. Ever heard of Alfons Moser? He is remarkable because he was a German officer assasinated in France, more or less in the way the article describes, and his death was remarkable at the time for its unusualness. The
The Germans burned and machine gunned dozens of people in retribution in some instances of attack by resistance. The French collaborated at a high rate anyway, and the resistance seldom engaged combat. Their main value was in their potential to strike anywhere, and in providing intelligence.
The popular image of dashing French resistance fighters blowing railroads and sniping sentries, and walking up to sentries and shooting them in the face with Liberator pistols, is mainly fiction. Fiction encouraged by the French to overshadow their rampant collaboration and the fact that most resistance were commie shitstains with little support from the populace much of the time.c
You both make good points, and perhaps the FP-45 Liberator wasn't all that this article makes it out to be, but I would still rather have the best means available to me to resist an oppressor to go along with the will to use it. In my opinion, the theory is valid, even if it's chances of success are slim to none, since the alternative is even worse.
It seems that the Liberator was not even given as much of a chance as it could have been, due to
decisions made by General Staffs of the United States Army, and Eisenhower's men.
“If you will not fight for right when you can easily win without blood shed; if you will not fight when your victory is sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves.” ― Winston S. Churchill