Frank Pratt graduated from Fairhaven High School, attended Western for a while, became a musician, and played with a swing band for about a decade. It’s reasonable to assume he had no thought, during those years, that he would become a bombardier in WWII, get shot down, spend eight months as a Prisoner of War, or that the diaries he fastidiously wrote on the backs of cigarette packs would be the subject of a book, a museum exhibition, and three videos.
There are two stories to tell about the amazing exhibition currently at the Skagit County History Museum. Frank Pratt kept the story of his service and imprisonment to himself, typical of so many veterans whose relationship to war remains private. Pratt thought, again, as others do, that his experience wouldn’t be interesting to anyone. That is, until his daughter, Rebecca Pratt, ultimately found out about the diaries and, through a remarkable chain of events, brought them to life in the book “The Cigarette Diaries,” and now an exhibit at the Skagit County Historical Museum.
Frank Pratt
Frank Pratt enlisted in 1942 and joined the Army Air Corps as an officer candidate. He trained for nearly a year and, finally, in1944, was sent to the European Theatre as a bombardier on a B-24. By the fall of that year, his crew had flown 50 missions, dropping bombs on war-ravaged lands, hoping to bring a terrible war to an end, and had also enough missions to get them sent home. By a quirk of fate, an ear infection had sidelined his last few flights, requiring him to fly make-up missions with any available crew that needed a bombardier before finally heading home. His make-up flight on September 13, 1944, was shot down over Poland. Six crew members lost their lives, while Frank and four others were captured immediately.
After a short time in captivity in Poland, the men were separated and transferred to POW camps in Germany. In dreadful conditions, the prisoners found ways to survive and sustain hope. Frank decided to keep a diary. Red Cross packages had cigarettes, and he noticed that the insides of the packages made good writing surfaces. For eight months, he wrote in pencil, now fading and spidery, about conditions in the camp, describing a life of deprivation, and also incredible resilience with dreams of food and life after war.
The diaries are a mixture of “letters from camp” about softball, volleyball, and card games, interspersed with reports of the meagre rations – sometimes days of only cabbage soup, relieved by rutabagas – beds made of skimpy bags of straw laid over slats, sickness and deaths of prisoners. Many entries are dream menus and, toward the end of captivity, a list of eleven things Frank wanted to do when he got home, seven of which had to do with food; eight, if you count the quart of whiskey to which he was looking forward.
Frank’s Life At Home Resumes
Once home, Frank resumed his life and threw the diaries into a drawer, where they rested, unseen, for 50 years.
Rebecca, his daughter from his second marriage, knew nothing about them or anything about his wartime experience. The family settled in Anacortes, where Frank owned a service station. He kept the family property in Blanchard and moved there permanently in the 1980s. Rebecca grew up, went to college, and got a job at Newsweek Magazine in New York. Her only exposure to his war years was when her parents took her to see “The Great Escape” as a child and a few random conversations over the years. She had no idea her dad had been a POW.
Fast forward to 1994, when the Polish government decided to honor the men shot down over Poland all those years ago, men who had fought for Poland’s freedom and suffered greatly. Identifying them was a miracle in itself. Once the Iron Curtain fell, the Pentagon sent people to Eastern Europe to discover whatever they could. A historian located a piece of the plane’s fuselage, incorporated into a memorial to the men in the town, with enough information to identify its crew.
Coincidences Abound
Rebecca’s father and three of the surviving crew members were reunited at a ceremony in Washington, DC, where they each received the Polish Home Army Cross. Also attending the ceremony, in addition to the survivors and their families, was a man, an employee of the Polish government who was visiting DC that week. He went to the event, according to Rebecca, “because it was a party, something social to do”. He had no idea what it was about, only to discover that it was the very plane he had seen blown out of the sky 50 years before when he was a teenager in Winowice, an image one would not soon forget. The young man had wondered all those years about what had happened to the men he saw dropping from the sky, and here they were, in front of him.
The Pratts went home, and Rebecca went back to her job at Newsweek. On a visit home that summer, the family got out the medal to admire. Frank abruptly stood up, left the room, and returned with something he tossed onto the dining room table. “What are these?” his daughter asked. “They’re my diaries,” he told her, “of my months in the prison camp.”
These treasures and documentation, that no one else knew had existed for five decades, because Frank thought no one would be interested in them. Newsweek featured the diaries in an online story about World War II and commissioned videographer Jonathan Groat to create pieces about Frank Pratt that are in the exhibition and also available online. While searching for photos to use in the videos, Groat came across a man who had drawings of Stalag Luft 1, the camp where Frank had been held. As they talked, he realized he was the fifth survivor of that crew. Another wonderful reunion followed.
Rebecca Pratt: An Unexpected Author
Rebecca ultimately turned the diaries into a self-published book that she gave to her father before his death in 2008. Later, Réanne Hemingway-Douglass, a founder of Cave Art Press, happened to see the book when she introduced herself to someone in a car with WWII license plates and wanted to talk to him about the war. The man happened to be reading “The Cigarette Diaries.”
So, Réanne tracked down Rebecca through the videographer. Assuming she was still in New York City, Réanne proposed that they fly somewhere to meet “because I’m in a very small town you probably never heard of, Anacortes.” “Oh,” said Rebecca, who had by then moved back to Washington, “I’m right across the Bay from you in Blanchard.”
The book, reflecting part of Skagit County’s history, is available at the Historical Museum in La Conner. A popular item, Rebecca was approached by Ann Maroney at the Museum about reprinting. According to Museum Executive Director Jo Wolfe, “Rebecca mentioned that she had some ‘artifacts’ from her dad’s experiences, and one thing led to another! And it is a hit! We are so glad we could extend the exhibit until March 1, so more people can come and see it!”
A True Hero
So it is through a daughter’s admiration and love for her father, and an instinct that these diaries had to be preserved, that the fading, spidery writings of a young man in a prisoner of war camp in Germany were revealed. When the Skagit County Historical Museum decided to mount the exhibition, an opportunity was created for us all to deepen our understanding.
Not everything is in the diaries – prisoners had to be careful about what they said and wrote – but what we do have is at the heart of why that war was fought: what it means to be free and to have freedom denied.
See The Cigarette Diaries exhibit at the Skagit County Historical Museum through February 2026 and find the book for sale there as well.
