7040 - Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery's Top-Secret Battle Orders for the Liberation of Europe, May 1944-June 1945 - (28) Documents from the Papers of Major-General Miles Graham

Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery's Top-Secret Battle Orders for the Liberation of Europe, May 1944-June 1945 - (28) Documents from the Papers of Major-General Miles Graham One of the most important surviving private archives of Allied high command operational papers from the Second World War: a near-sequential sequence of top-secret battle directives issued by Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery during the campaign from Normandy to the fall of Nazi Germany, preserved from the personal files of Major-General Miles Graham, Montgomery’s senior administrative officer at 21st Army Group. Covering every major phase of the Northwest Europe campaign—from D-Day and Operation Cobra to Market Garden, the Ardennes, the Rhine crossing, and the final advance into Germany—the archive provides an offensive-by-offensive documentary record of how victory in Western Europe was planned, directed, and executed at the highest level. The comprehensive collection consists of 28 original World War II-dated "Top Secret" battle orders and briefs, totaling approximately 116 pages, including 21 signed in ink by Bernard Law Montgomery. These orders were circulated in limited numbers to no more than twenty members of the senior Anglo-American leadership of the war in Western Europe—the named recipients are a small and immediately recognizable circle including Churchill, Eisenhower, Bradley, Patton, Dempsey, Crerar, Bedell-Smith, Alan Brooke, de Guingand, Leigh-Mallory, Cunningham, Simpson, with the staff officers Graham, Poole, and Belchem. Most retain Graham’s contemporary ‘seen’ initials, acknowledging receipt. Most significantly, these are operational documents, issued in their day by Field Marshal Montgomery and his staff, carrying throughout Montgomery's unmistakable command voice: his personality runs through them with directness, certainty, the occasional flash of impatience, and an unmistakable sense of a single mind in command. As Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force, General Eisenhower delegated to Montgomery the conduct of all Allied ground forces in the field from D-Day until 1 September 1944, the date on which the United States 12th Army Group under Bradley and the 6th Army Group under Devers were fully deployed in France and Eisenhower assumed direct ground command himself. For those eighty-eight days, a British general directed American armies in the field—a circumstance which had not occurred since the eighteenth century, and which speaks to the trust that existed between the two commanders. The directives of this period are accordingly of unusual significance, and the archive contains the fullest sequence of them known to remain in private hands. The documents, chronologically: May 8, 1944 (Operation Bigot, codename for the planning of the Normandy landings on D-Day, unsigned) - Brief outlining the planning and decisions relating to bulk petrol for the ground forces, administrative control on the continent, the British use of US Mulberry and Cherbourg, and the establishment of posts for US invasion forces in Brittany. June 30, 1944 (unsigned) - Montgomery's battle directive for developing the break-out from Normandy: "My broad policy, once we had secured a firm lodgment area, has always been to draw the main enemy forces in to the battle on our Eastern flank, and to fight them there, so that our affairs on the Western flank could proceed the easier. We have been very successful in this policy. Cherborg has fallen without any interference from enemy reserves...the First US Army is proceeding with its re-organisation and re-grouping, undisturbed by the enemy; the Western flank is quiet...It is not yet clear whether Hitler proposes to concentrate great strength in N.W. Europe so as to annihilate the Allied forces in Normandy. He may decide that this is a good proposition; and in order to achieve success he may be quite prepared to give ground gradually on the Russian front, and to accept reverses in that theatre." He goes on to give orders to the Second British Army and First U.S. Army to develop operations for the capture of Caen and for a southward offensive. July 21, 1944 (M512, unsigned) - Montgomery's plan for the break-out from the Normandy beachhead, Operation Cobra: "Since the attack of Second Army on 18 July, our general position on the eastern flank has become greatly improved. We now hold a good and firm bridgehead beyond the Orne in the Caen sector; and we thus have the ability to operate strongly in that sector, when desired, in an easterly, south-easterly, or southerly direction. In the last three days we have not only improved our positions on the eastern flank, but in doing so we have 'written off' a large amount of enemy personnel and equipment...It is now vital that the western flank should swing southwards and eastwards, and that we should gain possession of the whole of Cherbourg and Brittany peninsulas. The whole weight of our Army Group will ther