Word: pratt
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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From behind the thick-lensed glasses that give him a Martian rather than a martial appearance, Military Expert Fletcher Pratt last week shot a pained backward look at the war he had helped to report. Critic H. L. Mencken, who only knew what he read in the papers, had called its war correspondents "a sorry lot" (TIME, Jan. 14). Expert Pratt, a correspondent himself, is convinced that World War II "was very nearly the worst reported war in history." But he turned the blame elsewhere...
...February Harper's, Pratt blamed Army & Navy officers in the field, who used censorship to keep "news from Americans instead of facts from the enemy." Press-relations officers became "nothing but messenger boys," said Pratt, and most correspondents, under these official repressions, "turned into 'handout men,' waiting around headquarters for the communiqu...
From Pearl Harbor to the Normandy invasion, Pratt found few secrets that censorship had kept from Germany or Japan, "but [it] succeeded beautifully in concealing the name of the commander who asked for reinforcements to quell the 2,000 Japs at Attu when he had only a division of 15,000 men and the support of a fleet." It never told who, if anybody, was to blame for the Kasserine Gap and Ardennes defeats, the torpedoing of the Saratoga and the loss of the Wasp...
Official "errors," Pratt conceded, are a concomitant of war. "The novelty ... is the continuing official insistence that the official lies were perfectly true. ... A flat lie from the Navy Department about the loss of the cruisers off Savo Island eventually had to be corrected. . . . The really dangerous, because far more numerous, instances are those in which no corrective has been applied . . . because the event is not sufficiently newsworthy to bother with after the facts do become known...
...gone to Tokyo. But those with fewer points were still needed in Manila, especially as interpreters at the war-crimes trials. Ironically, they had brought this on themselves-they had dug up a great part of the evidence. Said their sympathetic commanding officer, Marine Major Harly D. Pratt: "If it were not for the Nisei interpreters, there would be no war-crimes trials." Pratt was now doing his best to let the Filipinos know how much they owed their Nisei friends...