Guerilla Weapons

I've always been interested in the makeshift weapons that pop up in occupied nations around the world. Some of them are crude and some are surprisingly sophisticated. The simplest is perhaps the pipe shotgun. If you take a length of 3/4 inch pipe (or the metric equivalent) it will hold a standard 12 gauge shotgun shell with the rim keeping it from sliding into the pipe. You now have a barrel and chamber. Then if you take a shorter 1 inch pipe (or the metric equivalent), cap it with a screw threaded through the center of that cap, you can slide it over the smaller diameter pipe and have a functioning shotgun. You simply grasp the small diameter pipe with one hand and and by firmly shoving the larger piper forward, the screw in the cap discharges the shell.
Of course, there is a reasonable chance that the pipe will burst in your hands, but the person at the other end will still get the worst of it.

That is an example of the crudest of firearms, but one that has been used in desperate situations for 100 years. That design has been widely disseminated in post-war communist insurgency guides, but dates back to WWII and earlier where it was used in China (and probably), at least somewhere in Europe.

The Poles created some surprisingly sophisticated weapons under German occupation. Google Błyskawica submachine gun to see a very successful example of a weapon mass produced under the noses of the Germans. The Poles also made copies of the British Sten as well as a number of other simple but effective firearms, grenades and mines.

I'd be interested in hearing about other weapons created in occupied nations during WWII.

Anybody?

 

Remember children can access the weapons and designs we may bring up here.........as one who knew someone who destroyed his hand with improvised devices and then had to spend a very long time with portions of his re-manufactured fingers sewed inside the linings of his stomach until tissues were ready to be reconstructed......it was a very long trip to complete a functional but not so attractive hand once again for the individual. Since I was in the demilling business.....this person always served the rest of us with safety lessons on what "not to do" as we were engaged in taking apart ordinance. The condition of his hand was the visible object lesson. Any improvised device may have dangers we cannot always predict, despite experienced judgement. There were a lot of missing digits amongst this workforce. They were professionals at this business. Often when mistakes are made in the manufacturing, things will not be taken apart without "incidents".

 

The weapon described has the sentence "Of course, there is a reasonable chance that the pipe will burst in your hands..." appended to it. If we are going to filter each thread under political correctness rules, then the entire forum would fail the test. We are talking about WWII here. Millions of people died; ethnic groups were shoved into gas chambers, cities were bombed with fire and nuclear weapons.

Some brave people resisted tyranny and I'd like to discuss the tools they used to do so. Sorry if that offends you.

 

I am not offended but fully understand children are likely to try the things that sound exciting despite your best warnings....as that is the nature of their curiosity just like your interests in discussing those tools. Since when does common sense fall under "political correctness rules"? Kodiak be aware.... I have been less than appreciated when the subjects of digging up and recovering old ordinance was brought up as well, as I issued similar warnings then as well. I will err on the side of caution.....our discussions of war do not necessitate the engagement in it to experience and study it.

 

Victor,

You clearly underestimate the children of today and all the todays past.

Several "well known" books regarding such matters are widely available on the internet and can easily be found using Google. Not to mention the, likely, several thousand videos on YouTube, LiveLeak, etc.

During my pre-internet forumlative teen years, it was a little harder to get supplies(pipe, lots of fireworks, fuses, etc.), but not much. And we still made some pretty good "bangs" without reading any books or watching how-to videos.

If some "kiddie" is looking to make some "homemade entertainment", I hardly see this thread as being at the top of a Google search. As such, I think we can discuss such matters with a clear conscious.


As to crude, I would have to go with the FP-45 "Liberator" - came with, IIRC 10 .45 cal rounds, but in reality, you only got one shot.
Liberator - Rapid fire: Rapid Fire shooting of the FP-45 Liberator Pistol - YouTube

 

The Liberator was an interesting gun. One source I read said that the idea was less to arm insurgents, than to drop so many in occupied countries that the Germans freedom movement would be curtailed. Fritz wasn't going to wander around town if some guy might step out of an alley and shoot him in the head. Of course, they never followed through, which is kind of a shame.

 

The SOE provided idea if not body of...the rat bomb...leave one dead rat, filled with military plastic, one fuse, leave inside building near boiler house etc. Hopefully someone comes along...no rat expert, not noticing too closlely stitches, throw in boiler or on fire...Bingo. The Natural History museum had a whole area given off in ww2 for SOE and the famed early Q of fiction days...A right royal bunch of inventors.

 

Was it the SOE who created chunks of some explosive made to look like coal? I guess the idea was similar; somebody would toss it into a pile and eventually it would end up shoveled into a boiler.

The Poles seem to have been especially clever about designing weapons. The Błyskawica submachine gun was built in Poland. At least 600 were made in Warsaw alone, and an unknown number in other places.

 

Yep Coal too...I only found out today though that the London Natural History Museum had a whole section given up to their field agents as a sort of shop...without trolleys of course.

 

I thought the coal was an especially clever idea. Of course, it might be difficult to make sure the coal was going to be used in a military or industrial facility rather than a school or something, but it seems like using such a material could have widely disrupted the infrastructure in occupied countries.

 

There's an espionage museum in Times Square (I think run by the Discovery Channel and in the same complex as the Harry Potter museum) that includes an example of one of the coal bombs, and it indeed looks exactly like a lump of coal. I didn't get to touch it (obviously), but presumably you'd need to pick it up to tell the difference. Then again, they may have even weighted it properly so you'd need to actually poke and prod at it to figure out that it was a bomb, and good luck being suspicious enough of a random bit of coal to specifically examine it.

As for directness, no difficulty at all. They didn't just toss it in the truck as it left the factory and hope that it would go to the right place: they'd specifically put it in the pile that was actively being used for a specific train or furnace. So a saboteur would run up to a supply train as it was leaving and toss it in the tender, or sneak into a building (or if they were supposed to be there, casually walk in) and drop the coal in the bucket and exfil as fast as their legs could carry them.

 

Am not sure, if these devices are qualified into this thread, but here they are anyway...

In the Winter War the lack of anti-tank weapons in the Finnish army was one of biggest (of many) problems. Some improvised/semi-improvised
devices were created, such as:

- the Molotov's cocktail. The "cocktail" got it's name after the soviet foreign minister after he claimed, that the soviet bombers bombing the Finnish towns and cities with the cluster bombs were only dropping "bread baskets" - which were suitably named after him as "the Molotov's bread baskets". One surely needs a drink after eating so much of soviet bread...

- "kasapanos" / the satchel charge, which also was thrown onto a tank

- a meter-long log, which was jammed (by hand!) between the track and the wheel

Antitank weapons used by the Finns in Winter War, Part 2

 

I didn't know the log was an actual weapon people were trained to use, but they did demonstrate its use in the film "Talvisota" along with a molotov cocktail in one excellent scene.

 

Did someone mention cocktails?

View attachment 18547

 

As I recall from the Freeman book the Chetnik placed the coal bomb in the coal car so as to avoid German reprisals in his area.

 

Don't suppose they were actually trained to use the log, but I've understood that such a method was used more than once.

 

From what I've read, very few Liberator pistols were ever dropped. My understanding is that most were scrapped right after the war. You hardly, if ever, hear or read of one being used in an occupied country. Surviving examples go for an obscene price.

 

This is indeed true. Millions were made for cheap and in a very fast time period, but the top brass found at and had a reaction along the lines of "Ehhhh....."

So only a few thousand got dropped, mostly in the Pacific theater, and most of them were scrapped. The concept was revived again for Vietnam as the Deer Gun by the CIA, which was identical in concept and very similar in form and operation except for being chambered in 9x19mm. Like the Liberator, it went unused; Vietnam went from clandestine assistance to a full scale war.

Fortunately, Vintage Ordnance produces an accurate firing replica of the Liberator (identical except for superior manufacturing) that you can purchase, complete with a reproduction of the box and instruction sheet.

 

http://www.culture24.org.uk/history%20%26%20heritage/war%20%26%20conflict/world%20war%20two/tra14554

Soe Section 15 mentioned here...Rat bombs and exploding coal if any one still interested...