Now It Can Be Told?

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.

In the 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 communique. . . ."

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."

Toward the end of the war, Pratt said, the Navy had begun to improve itself, but "the Army clung throughout to [Major] General [Alexander] Surles, retired, who . . . simply lacked the background to be anything more than one of the glorified lackeys the Army system produced."

Pratt's bitter conclusion: "The official censors have pretty well succeeded in putting over the legend that the war was won without a single mistake, by a command consisting exclusively of geniuses, who now have asked to be rewarded by being placed in control of all scientific thought and utterance."

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