The FP-45 Liberator is a pistol manufactured by the United States military during World War II for use by resistance forces in occupied territories. The Liberator was a crude and clumsy weapon, never intended for front line service. It was originally intended as an insurgency weapon to be mass dropped behind enemy lines to resistance fighters in occupied territory. A resistance fighter was to recover the gun, sneak up on an Axis occupier, kill or incapacitate him, and retrieve his weapons. The pistol was valued as much for its psychological warfare effect as its actual field performance. It was believed that if vast quantities of these handguns could be delivered into Axis-occupied territory, it would have a devastating effect on the morale of occupying troops. The plan was to drop it in such great quantities that occupying forces could never capture or recover all of them. It was hoped that the thought of thousands of these unrecovered weapons potentially in the hands of the citizens of occupied countries would have a deleterious effect on enemy morale.