The Occupation of Constantinople 1918-1923 [Provisional].

London: Historical Section, War Cabinet Secretariat, October,, 1944. The rarest official history First and only edition, classified as "For Official Use Only" and never further developed or issued. Print run of 51, just a single copy - in the War Office records in the National Archives - traced outside of the Imperial War Museum. Beyond scarce. The work of the director of the historical section, military branch, committee of imperial defence, author of the majority of the British official history series, this concise account was produced around the same time as he was working on his volume on the Occupation of the Rhineland. As the Second World War entered its closing phases it was deemed appropriate to review previous occasions when British troops had occupied vanquished nations. The German volume was officially sanctioned, completed at length, printed in an edition of 100 and given "a limited official circulation" (French, p. 72), and in July 1944 Edmonds, who in the introductory note bemoans the fact that "the war diaries for the period are far from complete" (p. 1), was circularizing officers who had served on the inter-allied military commission of organization and control at Constantinople requesting any papers or recollections that might flesh out the account, "the record of its proceeding and those of its subcommittees [having] not been found". However, after the production of this outline draft late in 1944 the project was taken no further. The text is obviously slight for such a complex subject but it benefits from the two great virtues of Edmonds' style identified by Cyril Falls, compression and lucidity (ODNB), and also his footnotes suggest material for expansion drawing from both published and unpublished sources. An ill-advised "first edition" of this text, with some extraneous additions and newly introduced errors, was issued in collaboration with the IWM in 2010, for unknown reasons being drawn from "a typed copy of the draft manuscript [which] was not of good quality, and in some places, small parts of the original text were either missing or unreadable". The present copy of the true first was one of several held by the IWM, and although not marked as withdrawn, its deaccession has been confirmed in correspondence with the head of collections. Folio 46pp. Wire-stitched in original black tape-backed buff printed card wrappers. Reproduced typescript, a few neat inked corrections to the text. Ex-Imperial War Museum, stamps to first and last pages only, inked press mark to the first, wrappers marginally lightly browned, text toned, overall very good. David French, "Sir James Edmonds and the Official History..." in Bond (ed.), The First World War and British Military History, 1991.