Manufactured in 1942, the Liberator pistol went from concept (reportedly suggested by Winston Churchill after reading Steinbeck's "The Moon is Down", which included a plot point of an occupied town receiving an air drop of loose sticks of dynamite with matches taped to the sides) to a complete production run in just 6 months. The full kit (pistol, 10 rounds of ammo, a 1 page "comic strip" instruction sheet, a dowel rod for ejecting spend cartridges and a waxed box; note the lack of a parachute on this list) was to be thrown out of the back of a low flying airplane in large quantities where they could be found by civilians and used against occupation forces, either to steal better weapons for more coordinated resistance activity or just to let the Germans know how they really felt about the occupation. Minus shipping costs, the whole package only cost Uncle Sam about $3. While produced in mass quantity, the lions share of the Liberators were destroyed after the war. The pistol itself is constructed primarily from sheet metal stampings welded and pinned around a smoothbore steel tube, with two oiler holes on the left and one on the right, with a cast zinc cocking knob and a sliding cover on the butt for an ammo storage compartment.