Favor Cancel Or Snuck Thru The Mail?

I came across a small bunch of these covers in a recent large lot acquisition, all of which were created by cover dealer George Williams of Oakland, California. Each has been "franked" by a strip of 3 WWII Patriotic Cinderellas and each is addressed to another dealer, this one to Parson's of Brooklyn, NY (the next one to the Merit Stamp Co. also of Brooklyn, and so on), each with the same style of address label. Each cover is un-sealed and verso has only Williams' return address as a green handstamp.

Each strip of three has been cancelled by a Washington, D.C. machine cancel in May of 1945, on different days of the month in small batches.

I'm leaning towards these as having been struck by favor cancels but am wondering if there was any chance these actually made it thru the mail stream and were delivered even though they are obviously not legal issues. Opinions?

Something was arranged since these a V-E day cancels. Now the dealer's shop was 3000 miles from DC so I am not sure he had enough advance note to create and sent them.

Unless similar are post clearly showing indications of individual mail stream travel, I would guess these went and returned via the mails but undercover or in a package as a group.

In either case they are both nice items.

Thanks ParcelPostGuy. The bulk mailing idea is a solid one that hadn't occurred to me. Expanding on that, the fact that a quantity of these are all found together today lays even more doubt that these ever saw individual mail use and may even indicate their not ever having been distributed to the intended recipients.

"I snuck back into his office and overheard".
"You what?"
"I snuck".
"Please do not be witty, Mr Marlowe".

I do not know about a large PO like this one, but in Victory, VT, covers wanting VE day postmarks were sent well in advance, held until it occurred, and then postmarked. After D-Day, there was general confidence before the end of 1944 that the war in Europe was won, and victory was just a matter of time, so the fact that the exact date was not known beforehand does not really matter here. If the DC post office was accepting covers ahead of time to be postmarked when victory was announced, this could have been placed in with the batch of the rest of such covers and received the postmark that way. That a batch of them was created makes that even more likely to me.

Nice to see another Raymond Chandler fan here.

blcjr - Thanks for the interesting tidbit. I had never heard about that before (gotta love this mb!).