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...
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