The May Incident
The need for some form of censorship which blocks complete freedom of speech during wartime was clearly demonstrated by the May Incident of 1943. Andrew Jackson May was a member of the US House of Representatives from Kentucky. During the war he was the Chairman of the House Military Affairs Committee, a position from which he used his influence to direct contracts to business partners, accepting bribes and kickbacks for his efforts. Eventually he would go to prison for his graft, but before that he violated censorship rules in a manner which led to the loss of American submarines and their crews.
US submarines in the Pacific had by 1943 overcome many of the technical problems they had encountered with torpedoes early in the war, and sinkings of Japanese ships were steadily increasing. The Japanese had mistakenly estimated the maximum depths at which US submarines could operate, and when attacking them with depth charges they frequently set the depth at which the charges would explode at a too shallow level. Americans could foil the attacks by diving beneath them as they evaded the Japanese ships following an attack of their own.
In June 1943 May completed a fact finding trip to Hawaii and other locales in the war zone before returning to hold a press conference in Washington DC. At the press conference May announced the growing success of the American submarine campaign and the reasons why the submarines were performing so efficiently. May told the assembled reporters that the Japanese were setting their depth charges to explode at too shallow depths. The information coming from a US Congressman and head of the Military Affairs Committee was deemed to be printable by several of the reporters present, who filed the story with their editors.
The story appeared in several newspapers across the United States and in the Territory of Hawaii, as well as in newspapers in Australia and other areas in which US submarines operated. Within a month, submarine losses began to mount. Admiral Lockwood, commander of the US submarine forces in the Pacific, commented that Congressman May would be pleased to “…know that they set’em deeper now.” The actual cause of most of the submarines losses during the war was unknown until after the war, when the United States Navy was able to review the records and reports of the Imperial Japanese Navy.
Of the fifty-three American submarines lost in the Pacific, nineteen were attributed to depth charges dropped from surface ships and aircraft. All nineteen, with the loss of over 1,500 officers and crew, occurred after the press conference held by Andrew May. Whether the Japanese would have made the discovery on their own, as has been argued by some historians, is a matter of speculation. The need to apply censorship in some form during wartime to protect the lives of Americans cannot be demonstrated more clearly than in the May Incident. It was likely the worst failure to censor sensitive information during the entire Second World War.