RR Auction’s June Sale Features WWII Fine Autographs and Artifacts
Among the highlights in RR Auction’s June 10 WWII sale is an historic “short snorter.”
BOSTON, Mass. — RR Auction’s June sale, Fine Autographs and Artifacts Featuring WWII, presents an extraordinary selection of historic autographs, manuscripts, photographs, and artifacts centered around World War II and the defining figures of the twentieth century.
Leading the sale is British Admiral Bruce Fraser’s personally owned Eversharp Skyline fountain pen used to sign the Japanese Instrument of Surrender aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay on September 2, 1945. Engraved “Japanese Surrender 1945,” the pen was used by Fraser on behalf of King George VI and the United Kingdom during the formal surrender ceremony ending World War II.
Contemporary film footage provides unusually strong visual evidence linking the pen to the ceremony. After Admiral Chester W. Nimitz signed for the United States, the American desk pens supplied at the surrender table remained untouched while Fraser uncapped and used his own fountain pen to sign the official Allied copy of the Instrument of Surrender. Fraser later used the pen to write to Winston Churchill, who replied by coded signal thanking him for the letter written: “with the pen of the unconditional surrender of JAPAN.”
The auction also features 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. In the letter, Churchill writes: “All that we were able to achieve is now plunged in the greatest peril I have ever known.” The correspondence captures the enduring but often complicated relationship between Churchill and de Gaulle, whose wartime alliance helped sustain the Free French movement following the fall of France in 1940.
Another centerpiece of the sale is an extensive archive of top-secret operational battle directives issued by Field Marshal Bernard Law 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 totaling approximately 116 pages, including 21 documents signed in ink by Montgomery.
The archive traces the Allied campaign from Normandy and Operation Cobra through Market Garden, the Ardennes, the Rhine crossing, and the final advance into Germany. The 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. Comparable command-level operational archives from World War II are overwhelmingly preserved in institutional collections, with private holdings of this continuity and scale considered virtually unknown to the market.
Additional highlights from the WWII section include a rare Dambusters logbook, signed artifacts connected to the raising of the American flag at Iwo Jima, and an atomic bomb “short snorter” carried by members of the Enola Gay and Bockscar crews.
Beyond World War II, the auction offers a broad selection of material spanning politics, science, literature, entertainment, and world history. Featured figures include Albert Einstein, Charles Darwin, Ernest Hemingway, Franz Kafka, Vladimir Lenin, Mahatma Gandhi, Thomas Edison, and Walt Disney.
Fine Autographs and Artifacts Featuring WWII by RR Auction began on May 22, 2026, and will close on June 10, 2026. For more information, visit www.rrauction.com.
