Montgomery Secret Battle Orders, Churchill–de Gaulle Letters, and WWII Surrender Pen to Auction

Leading RR Auction’s upcoming Fine Autographs and Artifacts sale is an extensive archive of top-secret operational battle directives issued by Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery during the Allied liberation of Europe between May 1944 and June 1945. 

Preserved from the personal files of Major-General Miles Graham, Montgomery’s senior administrative officer at 21st Army Group, the archive contains 28 original wartime battle orders and briefs totalling approximately 116 pages, including 21 documents signed in ink by Montgomery.

The archive (estimate: $200,000) traces the Allied campaign from Normandy and Operation Cobra through Market Garden, the Ardennes, the Rhine crossing, and the final advance into Germany. Documents include Montgomery’s operational directives regarding the liberation of Paris, the capture of Antwerp, the Battle of the Rhine, and the closing stages of the war in Europe. Similar command-level operational archives from World War II are almost all preserved solely in institutional collections.

Other highlights include:

• a Winston Churchill typed letter signed to Charles de Gaulle dated August 22, 1950, reflecting on their wartime alliance and the growing anxieties of the early Cold War period (estimate: $50,000)
• British Admiral Bruce Fraser’s Eversharp Skyline fountain pen used to sign the Japanese Instrument of Surrender aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay on September 2, 1945, and engraved “Japanese Surrender 1945” (estimate: $400,000)
• a rare Dambusters logbook

Among other items is a Franz Kafka handwritten draft letter on painting ("I possess—as do many people, I suspect—absolutely no innate, ‘primary’ eye for the visual arts", estimate: $50,000)

Fine Autographs and Artifacts Featuring WWII runs online until June 10.