The idea came from a novel, The Moon is Down, by John Steinbeck, in which the British parachuted cheap weapons to the Norwegian resistance.
It was one of those ideas that sounded good when someone briefed the generals, but in reality was, well, unreal. One nonsensical report says they were dropped over France by the millions - not parachuted, just dropped. (No mention of the holes in French roofs.) There is ONE report, which sounds made up, of the use of a Liberator pistol against the Japanese in the Philippines. But when US supplies did get through by submarine, they included conventional weapons, not single shot pistols.
Supposedly they were intended for Europe, but in fact the European resistance movements were supplied by air with much more effective weapons - STEN guns, US carbines, and British No. 4 rifles. The story was pretty much the same in the Far East, though a few were taken up by Chinese and some were reportedly carried after the war by Filipino police officers until they could procure conventional revolvers.
The theater commanders had no use at all for the guns, and kept trying to buck them off to somebody, anybody. Knowing that the idea was still in vogue in Washington and London, no one wanted to just scrap the guns, so they did nothing until the end of the war when tons of unused Liberators were dumped into the ocean.
Jim
