Poland was very, very, very close.
Had Jaruzielski not seized power, the Russians would have done. There were no Russian troops in Poland; there were some HQ elements that would have formed, IIRC, the Northwestern Front Forward CP, but there were no Russian combat or logistical troops, unlike East Germany and Czechoslovakia that played host to 22 and 5 division respectively. Jaruzielski knew that if the Russians came, as they did to East Germany in '53, Hungary in '56, and Czechoslovakia in '68, they wouldn't be going. (Russians were in East Germany before '53, but not 22 divisions of the sonofabitches. There were over a quarter million Russians crammed into that little country).
In Saint Augustine, Florida in the 1970s I saw an OSS weapon I've never seen before or since. It was in the private collection of a Class III dealer there who had all kinds of groovy stuff like a working Colt Potato Digger, and yes, he had a Liberator (didn't see a Deer Gun there).
But this weapon was a shotgun that had 3 parts. The barrel was a simple 12 GA tube. The receiver/stock group was a wooden stock, with a receiver that was a slightly larger tube with a base in it containing a mortarish fixed firing pin. You loaded the shotshell into the barrel, then slammed the barrel into the receiver. BANG. There was a comic-strip instruction sheet (as both the Lib. and the Deer Gun had).
The third part of the gun? That was a hardwood dowel to knock the shell out of the barrel!
These were apparently made in massive quantities with a view to arming the Phillipine resistance. When MacArthur got over his high dudgeon over some guys disobeying his orders to surrender -- one gets the impression that the narcissistic old man was unused to being disobeyed -- he realised that he had something good.
One incongruity about the OSS shotgun (I never learnt a proper name for it) was the materials. While the metal was cheap mild steel, seamless tubing and welded sheet, with a half-assed job of parkerizing, the stock was American walnut! (The dowel was oak or something very like it).
Re the M72: it got its bad rap for three reasons. 1. The trigger design makes it inaccurate. And reusing the triggers in the subcaliber device makes it so stiff and inaccurate that the troops completely lose confidence. 2. It is what it is and 66mm shaped charge isn't going to kill any tank made after about 1943, just light tanks, armoured cars, and APCs.
3. They don't (or at least the earliest ones didn't) store well. Contrast the poor performance of the LAW at Lang Vei with the performance of the same weapon at Ben Het. Difference? Ben Het had fresh stocks when they got hit, Lang Vei had LAWs that had been in outdoor storage for 2+ years.
d.o.l.
Criminal Number 18F
They predate the American involvement, but the US version was in response to the search for a weapon that could be easily transported by submarine; weight was not a consideration, but bulk was. And the simple tubing barrel assembly could be carried aboard even the cramped confines of a submarine by the hundreds.
The reason the stocks were so well-made was because the first ones, with a pine or maple buttstock frequently split and had to be replaced with locally-made replacements made from damaged M1917 Enfield [whose flat ejector springs routinely break or Jap rifles or from native Phillipine mahogany. Accordingly, later production was walnut shaped suspiciously like the back half of an M1 Garand buttstock less the buttplate and cleaning kit inletting woodwork, until eventually it dawned on someone that it was only necessary to ship barrels and brass shell cases with replacement primers and powder, and the guerrillo workshops could take care of the rest. The example of the Phillipine *Guerrilla Gun* owned by Mitch Werbell was one such, [with mahogany stock] but whether an early *replaced stock* version or one of the later ones built from components, I'm not at all certain. But it had 4 notches cut in the fairly crudely whittled-out stock, and I do not think they represented successful pig hunts.
The US manufacturer/contractor was Richardson Industries of East Haven, CT who tried to market a somewhat better-built version after the war, primarily in the agricultural South. They were marked *Richardson Industries Guerrila Gun* and *East Haven, Conn.*, branded into the stock and so far as a *proper* name for 'em, were variously known as the *slambang* or *zip gun* [ever wonder where the New York gang punks picked up that moniker for their home-built handguns!] or by the term paliantod in the Phillipines.
They're a useful bit of tool for an occupied people, but the price for series production of the WWII Sten Gun in quantity was around $9.00 each, and you might think that would be money better spent.