"A Sorry Lot"

Was World War II, as many a newsman proudly boasts, the best reported war in history? No, said crabby, square-rigged Henry Louis Mencken with characteristic sourness. In the opinion of Baltimore's aging (65) iconoclast, an old-newspaperman himself. World War II was covered wordily but not well.

The war correspondents, said Mencken, were "a sorry lot, either typewriter-statesmen turning out dope stuff drearily dreamed up. or sentimental human-interest scribblers turning out maudlin stuff about the common soldier, easy to get by the censors. Ernie Pyle was a good example. He did well what he set out to do, but that couldn't be called factual reporting of the war.

"The historian will find very little that is useful in it, because the reporting was a lot of feature stuff. The primary duty of reporters is to tell the truth until it becomes dangerous. There wasn't much of that. Any honest effort to get the real news went out the window with the arrival of voluntary censorship, which was an idiotic idea, a lot of poppycock. The papers fell all over each other thinking up schemes for hobbling themselves that even the military hadn't thought of."

Said Old Reporter Mencken, who for four years has read his Sunpapers (he is still on the board of directors) but not written for them: "The Battle of the Bulge hasn't been reported accurately even yet. I don't even know yet what generals got licked."

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