The Odd History of WWII Domestic Map Censorship
Imagine you were newly arrived in California after the Pearl Harbor bombing, part of a massive influx of defense workers and military personnel that accelerated full throttle following the December 7, 1941 Japanese attack.
In San Diego, you opened up a road map of the city nicknamed “Defense City No. 1” by National Geographic and looked in vain to spot your Navy base, air field or defense plant. If in Los Angeles, you searched a map fruitlessly for airports, factories or oil fields. On a map of the San Francisco Bay Area, nowhere was the Presidio, or any other fort or base, to be found.
Those maps--indeed almost all WWII-era maps in California and a majority across the nation--were censored; "masked" in the parlance of mapmakers. Oil company maps produced by major cartographers Rand McNally and H.M. Gousha, and by the large Auto Club of Southern California were scrubbed clean of Army camps and Naval stations, military and civilian airports, refineries, shipyards and other locations considered potential wartime targets.
Mapmakers undertook the nationwide censorship voluntarily, albeit under strong pressure from military authorities working with the U.S. Office of Censorship (OOC). That executive agency was set up by President Franklin Roosevelt shortly after Pearl Harbor to establish guidelines for newspapers, radio, maps, mail and other forms of communications which enemies could use for military advantage. Companies were expected to ask themselves, "Is this information that I would like to have if I were the enemy?" and act accordingly, said historian Michael Sweeney, whose book Secrets of Victory profiled the censorship office.
On January 15, 1942, five weeks after the Japanese attack, OOC distributed its initial code. While the regulations philosophically were self-policing, in practice the OOC worked closely with military authorities to encourage pre-publication scrutiny, and map censorship often fell to individual Army and Navy officers, whose recommendations could differ regarding what map locations to remove for security reasons. These military reviews were necessary even when the OOC reached peak strength, as a dozen civilian office employees oversaw a large number of newspaper, radio, and postal issues in addition to cartography. The result was an inconsistent pastiche of maps as to which, if any, airfields, military bases, ports, and related facilities disappeared. A military base or civilian airfield censored on one map might show up on another. Small local mapmakers often failed to submit products for review at all, essentially flying under the radar. After 1942, production of 90% of maps nationwide ceased until 1945 as driving and tourism plummeted.
In the Golden State, where the Auto Club produced some maps throughout the war, censorship was early, extensive and consistently practiced, as fears of bombing and sabotage persisted until at least mid-1943. The Army’s Western Defense Command wielded quasi-martial control in the region. It reviewed civilian activities, ordered blackouts, required permission for large outdoor gatherings, and examined West Coast maps submitted in advance of publication. The Command’s fear of attack led to the only recorded domestic map seizure of WWII. It corralled 5,000 copies of the Jan. 2, 1942 Los Angeles Times intended for overseas mailing, and cut from each a map that showed the California locations of military airfields, naval bases and army camps, information that the military itself had supplied to the Times just prior to Pearl Harbor. On Feb. 23, 1942, a Japanese submarine shelled an oil field on the coast near Santa Barbara. In the early hours of February 25, an errant weather balloon floating over Los Angeles caused panic that a Japanese air raid was underway and brought an unfocused anti-aircraft barrage lasting until dawn. Other subs during the spring probed defenses along the West Coast and sank five ships.
Maps from Auto Club are notable because of the organization's close cooperation with the military. From mid-1941 through mid-1945, the club supplied the Command with 231,000 total maps detailing the hundreds of new bases and training areas located in cities and counties throughout California. For the influx of civilians, it issued masked versions. The covers looked the same but the cartography diverged radically, reflecting the best judgments of censors. There were no explanations on censored versions for users puzzled by blank or unidentified areas. For example, the club’s 1943 San Diego County map for military planners had every airport, base and pier clearly marked, and those too small to be drawn were listed along the map margin. In contrast, the early 1944 civilian edition eliminated all 33 locations deemed of military value. A 1945 club summary of wartime work noted that military cartographers worked alongside the club’s mapping engineers, and it hinted at masking in describing “culture and name deletions and additions” that followed field mapping surveys. The club’s extensive deletions reflected the better-safe-than-sorry judgments of the attached military personnel.
H.M. Gousha’s portfolio included 1942 road maps for Shell Oil. All but a handful of 59 Shell maps nationwide referenced voluntary compliance, with a special cover notice that "All points of military interest have been removed from this map and index." For California, the San Francisco map showed none of the dozen forts and bases around the Golden Gate Bridge and the Presidio military reservation, and eliminated all airfields. For the New York City region, blank spots existed for its half-dozen airfields, for the Brooklyn Naval Yard and for area Naval stations. While Gousha’s 1942 maps for other oil companies were similarly censored, their covers had no notices.
Rand McNally had the largest and most varied client portfolio of any national cartographer and was the only one after 1942 to produce a reduced number of non-military maps and atlases throughout the war: for oil companies, corporations, hotels, airlines, railroads, and those under its own imprint. The covers of its 1943 Union Oil maps for Los Angeles, San Diego and San Francisco were in keeping with the nation's wartime footing. They featured a soldier, sailor and defense worker peering at a map. The irony, intentional or not, was that none of the three would have been able to find his base or place of work using the censored map. Its special Union Pacific Railroad maps identified approved military posts nationwide and their nearby train stations, and were regularly updated and widely distributed.
The company's interactions with OOC best illustrate wartime inconsistencies, and are the only records preserved at the National Archives. Documents show that Rand McNally stationed two full-time agents in Washington, DC, to liaison with the War and Navy departments and the OOC. They were often frustrated in early months by confusion over the number of Army camps cleared for inclusion. On February 14, 1942, Army Col. Falkner Heard warned them to limit information about pre-war Army camps to their geographical location, and to delete all airfield symbols, even if previously approved. The Rand McNally agents complained to the OOC that maps reviewed by Heard, in the Army’s Review Branch, were more rigorously scrutinized than those handled by a counterpart in the Army’s Quartermaster General’s office. Agent William Tufts pleaded for consistent guidance, writing that the company “has taken great pains to consult in advance with the War and Navy departments and we shall continue the same policy with your office.” All this undoubtedly led to motorists scratching their heads at times. As one example, in May 1942 a driver in Illinois could come across 11 road maps of the state and for Chicago, all with varying degrees of masking depending on how and when they had been reviewed by the military.
While there was greater uniformity by 1943, Rand McNally agent Helmut Bay lamented in April that, despite the OCC allowing for more identifiable locations, the military had again restricted the naming of several Army camps and facilities previously approved. This was particularly problematic for the Union Pacific map, which families of service personnel depended upon to plan visits. The OOC’s Bill Steven wrote a follow-up memo to colleagues, saying that “this [Army edict] seemed to be silly and I doubt this office would find objection to locating, in a general way, camps and industrial plants already announced by the War Department. I told Mr. Bay that this office would be the final judges of security in such matters.” Steven added that Bay seemed “a little timid” about sparring directly with military authorities.
Only two WWII maps from any cartographer specifically cited government censorship on the maps themselves, as opposed to the “voluntary” removal statements printed on Gousha’s Shell covers. Rand McNally’s 1943 Texaco dual city map of Houston and San Antonio outlined Fort Sam Houston’s extensive acreage in San Antonio, but showed no base streets or buildings. Rather, there was a text box in the large blank space that read, “Details deleted by order of War Department.” A 1942 Detroit street map booklet from a regional cartographer, Sauer Brothers, stated, “In compliance with the Federal Censorship, the publishers have deleted the location of all docks, depots and industrial sites from the map for the duration”—yet the booklet’s index still listed addresses for hundreds of these locations, big and small. A competing 1942 Detroit street guide by Barnes Press masked no maps, referenced no censorship, and included addresses. The city’s October 1942 official Detroit transportation map exquisitely detailed locations of war plants, railroad yards, shipping docks and airports. The Barnes and city transit items are examples of regional products that were probably never submitted for review.
By mid-1944, guidelines had been loosened considerably, and the military/OOC had approved public identification of a greater number of domestic camps and bases, although facilities connected with atomic bomb activity were not identified until after the war. While Auto Club maps remained masked until the war ended, Rand McNally issued 20 new multi-state unmasked Texaco maps in late 1944, and, along with Gousha and other cartographers, resumed production on a large scale with the war’s end in summer 1945.
The pell-mell nature of Rand McNally’s WWII production apparently resulted in a failure to remember, let alone document its wartime mapping activities. In 1978, a Wisconsin map collector wrote to company archivist Mary A. Severson-Tris about wartime maps. She replied that longtime employees had told her that “no road maps were produced in 1943, 1944, or 1945 as work centered on military maps. I feel quite sure this information is accurate, but if you should ever come across a Rand McNally road map produced during those years, please let me know.”
In retrospect, it's natural to ask whether map-masking dictates were necessary. The nation never faced a serious invasion threat. The few cases of sabotage did not hinge on saboteurs obtaining a road map. Further, thousands of pre-war road maps were floating around that spies could have easily procured, in addition to a few uncensored maps whose publishers were either unaware of censorship or believed it did not apply to them.
But hindsight is a luxury of history not enjoyed in the moment. Pearl Harbor severely rattled the nation. The sense of vulnerability was heightened by the phantom reports of West Coast air attacks and the early 1942 sinkings by German submarines of nearly 100 ships within sight of East and Gulf Coast coastal residents. Censorship did keep key post-Pearl Harbor bases and plants off maps and perhaps helped to thwart some sabotage. Within the context of radio and press censorship, postal monitoring, and incarceration of Japanese-Americans--among other actions--map masking became a cog in the government's domestic wartime restrictions.
Referenced maps are found in the David Smollar Map Collection in Special Collections at the San Diego Public Library, the David Smollar Collection at the Stanford University Branner Earth Sciences Library and Map Collections, or the Newberry Library in Chicago. Documents referenced are held in the Newberry or in the National Archives in College Park, Maryland.
