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Pratt & the Graf Spee. Military Expert Fletcher Pratt of New York City invented in 1929 and has since developed a Naval War Game which actually approximates sea war. One night in 1939 the players looked at each other and whistled. Three light ships had just sunk the German pocket battleship, the Admiral Graf Spee, a supposedly impossible feat. But their calculations showed it could be done—and they were not so much surprised as vindicated when the Graf Spee actually got her comeuppance in just that way six months later off Brazil.
Pratt's game uses wooden ship models, representing most of the fleets of the world. Each ship has an exact valuation (worked out from Jane's Fighting Ships and other authoritative references) in thousands of points—so much for armor thickness, so much for fire power, speed and other characteristics. Opposing ships maneuver, and then fire at each other by a complicated system. (Airplanes, torpedoes and submarines are added factors.) Publication by Pratt of a 30-page book describing his game, in 1940, resulted in the formation of over 20 clubs about the country, whose members crawl around the floor one night a week, cheerfully destroying the capital ships of the world.
Morals. The case for war games was perhaps best made, pacifistically, by H. G. Wells in his Little Wars: "How much better is this amiable miniature than the Real Thing! Here is the premeditation, the thrill, the strain of victory or disaster ... and no smashed or sanguinary bodies, no shattered buildings, no devastated countrysides Here is War down to rational proportions. . . . You have only to play at Little War three or four times to realize just what a blundering thing Great War can be.
"Great War is at present . . . not only the most expensive game in the universe, but is a game out of all proportion. Not only are the masses of men and material and suffering and inconvenience too monstrously big for reason, but—the available leads we have for it are too small."