Admiral William Veazie Pratt, U. S. Navy
A Sailor's Life
by
Gerald E. Wheeler

The Author and the Book

During World War II Gerald E. Wheeler served as a Naval Aviator (Airship), an Air Navigator, and an Assistant Navigator on the aircraft carrier Bunker Hill (CV-17). After the war, he taught at the Naval Academy as Assistant Professor in the Department of English, History and Government. Having moved to California, he received his doctorate in history from the University of California in 1957, served as an Aviation Technical Training Officer in reserve squadron VP-871 at Oakland Naval Air Station with the rank of lieutenant commander in the Naval Air Reserve, and joined the faculty of San Jose State University where for a quarter century (1957‑1983) he would be a professor and eventually serve as Chair of the History Department, Associate Dean of Graduate Studies, and Dean of the College of Social Sciences; he found time to write numerous articles on naval topics and to serve on the various editorial boards, among others several years as editor of the American Aviation Historical Society Journal.

The biography of Admiral Pratt presented here was written by Prof. Wheeler when he was Ernest J. King Professor of Maritime History at the Naval War College in 1968‑1969. As we might expect from an author who made his name in naval history, however, the strictly biographical aspect of Admiral Pratt's life didn't engage the author's attention as much as did his naval career and wider questions of naval policy: a lacuna that makes itself felt here and there in the course of the book, as the admiral's "old friends" are suddenly introduced never having been mentioned before; the period of his life from birth to his graduation from the Naval Academy is covered in six scant pages of text.

Prof. Wheeler does give us, though, a thoroughgoing study of the years between the world wars, as seen from the standpoint of one of its key American naval officers; the biography is one of his three books on 20c American naval history. Prelude to Pearl Harbor (University of Missouri Press, 1963) is also onsite; Kinkaid of the Seventh Fleet: A Biography of Admiral Thomas C. Kinkaid, U. S. Navy (Naval Institute, 1995) is not, and remains under copyright for at least another fifty years.

 p. xvii  Contents

 p. xix  Illustrations

(Illustrations identified by numbers preceded by NH or NR&L are located in the Naval History Division, Washington, DC. All others are located in the National Archives, Washington, DC.)

Technical Details

Edition Used

The edition transcribed here is marked simply "First Edition", with no date. Published by "Harper & Brothers Publishers, New York and London", the book bears no copyright notice — properly, since it is an official report of the United States Navy and thus in the public domain; details here on the copyright law involved.

Illustrations

The 60 illustrations, all black-and‑white photographs, are very well placed in the print edition, as close as possible to the text they illustrate. For the most part therefore I've kept the original placement, only once or twice taking advantage of the flexibility offered by the Web to move one to what I felt was a slightly better place. Their original placement is given in the table above, but the links are of course to their actual location in my Web transcription.

The photograph of Admiral Pratt's official portrait that serves as the book's frontispiece is in black-and‑white like the other; I've substituted a color reproduction of the same portrait. The portrait itself, painted around 1930, is in the public domain; faithful flat reproductions of it are public domain per Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corporation.

Pagination and Local Links

For citation and indexing purposes, the pagination is shown in the right margin of the text at the page turns (like at the end of this line); p57  these are also local anchors. Sticklers for total accuracy will of course find the anchor at its exact place in the sourcecode.

In addition, I've inserted a number of other local anchors: whatever links might be required to accommodate the author's own cross-references, as well as a few others for my own purposes. If in turn you have a website and would like to target a link to some specific passage of the text, please let me know: I'll be glad to insert a local anchor there as well.

Proofreading

As almost always, I retyped the text by hand rather than scanning it — not only to minimize errors prior to proofreading, but as an opportunity for me to become intimately familiar with the work, an exercise I heartily recommend: Qui scribit, bis legit. (Well-meaning attempts to get me to scan text, if success­ful, would merely turn me into some kind of machine: gambit declined.)

My transcription has been minutely proofread. In the table of contents above, the sections are shown on blue backgrounds, indicating that I believe the text of them to be completely errorfree; a red background would mean that the page had not been proofread. As elsewhere onsite, the header bar at the top of each chapter's webpage will remind you with the same color scheme.

The printed book was remarkably well proofread. The inevitable typographical errors were very few, and all trivial: I marked them with a dotted underscore like this: as elsewhere on my site, glide your cursor over the underscored words to read what was actually printed. Similarly, underscored measurements provide conversions to metric, e.g., 10 miles.

A number of odd spellings, curious turns of phrase, etc. have been marked <!‑‑ sic  in the sourcecode, just to confirm that they were checked. They are also very few.

Any over­looked mistakes, please drop me a line, of course: especially if you have a copy of the printed book in front of you.

---

The icon I use to indicate this subsite is cropped from the portrait of Admiral Pratt that serves as the book's frontispiece, above.

Images with borders lead to more information. The thicker the border, the more information. (Details here.)
UP TO:		American Naval History	American & Military History	History of the Americas	Home
A page or image on this site is in the public domain ONLY if its URL has a total of one *asterisk. If the URL has two **asterisks, the item is copyright someone else, and used by permission or fair use. If the URL has none the item is © Bill Thayer. See my copyright page for details and contact information.

Accessibility