By Peter Guinta
Associated Press
ST. AUGUSTINE, Fla. — While helping his sister clean out her garage, Walter Kelly ended up with historic World War II documents — and a mystery as well.
The documents he found include original operational plans, maps, overlays, air routes, and final orders for Operation Overlord, the invasion of France by Allied airborne units on D-Day, June 6, 1944.
Now, Kelly wants the world to see and study what was hidden from sight for nearly 60 years. D-Day was the largest opposed landing of all time, and it proved the beginning of the end for Hitler’s Germany.
“These plans are one of 10 copies made between May 31 and June 1, 1944,” Kelly said. “This was the big picture.”
Landing involved 176,000 men and 2,700 ships attacking the Atlantic Wall, the German fortifications, along 60 miles of Normandy beaches. Part of that force included 20,000 paratroopers from the 82nd and 101st Airborne divisions, the British 6th Airborne Division and Allied glider units who dropped inland — many right on top of the Germans — to cut capture bridges and railroad tracks, spread confusion and prevent reinforcements from reaching the defenders on the coast.
Kelly’s documents also include many historical details, such as the contributions of French intelligence agents as well as analyses of enemy strength, gun emplacements and radar installations. They also pinpoint airborne and glider drop zones, passwords and countersigns.
However, according to Marty Morgan, research historian for the National D-Day Museum in New Orleans, other sets of these plans do exist.
“It’s difficult to say without actually seeing them, but we have four or five sets of those plans already,” Morgan said. “These were an absolute necessity for briefing troops. It sounds like material we have here in abundance.”
Kelly said that he called and wrote collectors and experts all over the country and no one had anything like it.
“What they did have were plans held by company and battalion commanders, which were only a portion of the whole plan. No one had a full, detailed battle plan, which these are,” he said. “When you look at the documentation in history books, no written record was kept by any official organization that participated in the battle. All the documents surfaced later.”
This particular set came from 9th Air Force headquarters, which was in charge of the airborne troops and the gliders, he said. Kelly has had the plans examined by four officers from the Air Force Museum in Warner-Robbins, Ga., who want the plans for a D-Day exhibit.
Unearthing these historic documents sparked a mystery that still isn’t solved. Where did they come from?
That story begins with Staff Sgt. Drury McCarthy, an artillery observer with the 11th Armored Division of Gen. George Patton’s Third Army. He was stationed at Fort Ord, Calif., during D-Day and arrived in France Dec. 24, long after the landing. McCarthy fought through the Battle of the Bulge and ended the war in Germany.
Afterward, he came home, went to Stanford University in California, and met and married the former Donna Kelly, Walter’s sister. He became an architect and builder and died of a heart attack at age 69 in 1993.
Walter Kelly and McCarthy’s son, Michael, cleaned out McCarthy’s garage when Donna McCarthy decided to move to Florida. In doing so, they found a safe buried deep inside a file cabinet. The plans were inside. All pages were marked “Top Secret,” with “Neptune-Bigot” underneath, the true authenticating words for D-Day plans.
“We had no idea what it was,” Kelly said. “We wrote to the Department of the Army, and they declassified them in 1996. We also had them archivally preserved.”
The family is interested in the historical context of these documents.
“We want a way that they can be honored as they should. This has given me a fresh new way of looking at World War II veterans. Everyone who was there is a hero. So many men sacrificed their lives.”
But no one knows how a staff sergeant who wasn’t at D-Day could have had plans from the highest echelon of Allied command. Kelly said McCarthy hung around with World War II vets and might have taken them in trade for architectural work or building a veteran’s house. “But he never said anything about them,” he said.
The family’s gotten offers from collectors and one from an auction house to sell them _ for remarkable amounts of money _ but Kelly refuses because he believes that if sold they would be “busted up and sold to different collectors. We want to keep them intact and in a place where people could learn from them,” he said.
Last month, Kelly showed the documents to friend Tom Crawford, a member of American Legion Post 194. Crawford realized Kelly owned a rare historic document and convinced him it was too important to keep under wraps.
“These things are going up to the Air Force Museum and have never been on public display,” Crawford said. “We have them here in St. Augustine right now. It would be a shame to put them in a museum in Georgia without displaying them at least once in St. Augustine.”
Kelly said the first time he ever took the documents out of his vault and showed them was to a group of World War II veterans.
“Some of them came to tears,” he said. “Again they heard the anti-aircraft fire, saw planes drop around them in flames. They were experiencing it all once more. These have that effect on people.”
Link HERE.