The Cigarette Diaries

Army Air Corps 2nd Lieutenant bombardier Frank Pratt was captured by the Germans when his B-24 was shot down near Wadowice, Poland, on September 13, 1944. He spent eight months as a POW at Stalag Luft I outside of Barth, Germany. While there, he kept journals that he wrote mostly on the backs of cigarette packs from Red Cross parcels, bound with cardboard and canvas. Together the three books tell the story of day-to-day life as a prisoner of war in Germany as WWII drew to a close.

Frank J. Pratt was born Oct. 24, 1915, in the then thriving town of Blanchard, Washington. His father, Thomas, worked the lumber camps. His mother, Clara (known to nearly everyone as Dot), ran a boarding house for the workers. Clara died when Frank was nine, leaving him and his father to fend for themselves, as Frank's three older brothers were already living on their own.

After a year or so his father took off for Seattle, leaving Frank to be raised by his mother's sister, Aunt Bess, who also lived in Blanchard. For the next few years he divided his time between Aunt Bess and his brother, Loren, in Bellingham, Washington, where he graduated from high school and later attended Western Washington State College.

Music had always been important to Frank, and as a young man he spent a lot of Saturday nights at the local dancehall. He liked the bass fiddle best and spent a lot of time standing in front of the stage just watching. Apparently this caught the attention of the bass player, who eventually struck up a conversation and at the end of the evening offered to let Frank borrow his fiddle. Frank said sure, found a way to get it home (he had no car) and then taught himself to play by strumming along with the radio and favorite phonograph records. The dancehall musician never asked to have his fiddle returned, but apparently he passed Frank's name along to a local bandleader as one day Frank got a call from a man named Barney, looking for someone to fill in on bass that Saturday night in place of an injured player. Frank was mighty nervous playing his first real gig, but must have passed the test as Barney and the band asked him back for the following Saturday and the following one. Soon he was a full-fledged member of the group. Over the next decade he played steadily with local swing bands before being inducted into the military in 1943 and returned to playing after coming home from the war. He finally hung up his bass for good in the late '50s. Along with his fiddle playing, Frank worked for a number of years in the service station business, eventually owning two stations of his own.

When the war started Frank was interested in joining the Army Air Corps as an officer candidate and enlisted in the fall of'42, just before his 27th birthday. He completed his training as a bombardier, attaining the rank of 2nd Lieutenant. Eventually [early April, 1944?] he was sent, via North Africa, to the European theater. [Insert summary of three pages of Book II diary entries here?] From April 20, he and his crew were stationed in Venosa, Italy. ("Life in Combat Theater begins! Hooray.")

By fall of 1944 Frank's regular unit had completed all of their missions and most of the men returned to the US. Unfortunately, Frank had developed an ear infection that grounded him for a couple of weeks and he was still completing his makeup flights with other crews when he was shot down on September 13, 1944, over southern Poland, near Wadowice, about thirty kilometers from Krakau. It was Frank's 43rd mission. His B-24 plane was hit and five of the crew members parachuted out. Six didn't make it.

When he landed he was picked up by a pitchfork- wielding German on a motorcycle and taken prisoner. Over the next few days he was interrogated and taken by train from Poland through central Germany to a transient camp in Frankfurt. There he was assigned and sent by train once again to Stalag Luft I, a permanent POW camp for American and Britis

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