“Were it not for the Navahos, the Marines would never have taken Iwo Jima,” Major Howard Connor, 5th Marine Division
It was from my father, who served in the Pacific during World War II, that I originally heard of the Navaho Code Talkers. While Pat Buchanan tries to claim it was only white men who won the war the truth is that many people, men and women, from all walks of life and of all races, were responsible for the success in both the European and Pacific fronts. As a small child I lived in New Mexico and that started my fascination with the Navaho people. This is the story of the brave men who risked their lives to help us win in the Pacific.
One of the biggest problems for the U.S. Armed Forces in the Pacific was communications. Japanese cryptographers were breaking our codes as fast as we could come up with them. Many of the Japanese code breakers had been educated in the United States and were familiar with American colloquialisms, slang terms and even profanity. This resulted in American battle plans being known to the enemy sometimes before they were even operational. We needed a code that could not be broken.
In spite of their treatment by the white man, the Navahos took an active part in World War I and World War II. In World War II 3,600 Navahos fought for their country. This represented one of the highest population of any ethnicity in the U.S. military. Most of the Navahos fought in the battlefields with ordinary soldiers. Over 10,000 Navahos worked in military factories during the war. 375 to 420 Navahos, however, worked as Code Talkers.
Philip Johnston was the son of Protestant missionaries and grew up on the Navaho Reservation and lived among the Navahos for 24 years. He was one of the few non-Navahos who spoke the language fluently. Johnston was a World War I veteran and knew that in that war that Native American languages, notably Choctaw, had been used in codes. He figured that the Navaho language was perfect for an unbreakable code since it was an unwritten language and included a number of words that, when spoken with varying inflections, may have as many as four different meanings and its verb forms are particularly complex. Its syntax and tonal qualities, not to mention dialects, makes it unintelligible to anyone without extensive exposure and training. With no alphabet or written form available for others to study it was a language that could only be understood by another Navaho. It has been estimated that only 30 non-Navahos could understand the language at the outbreak of World War II and none of those 30 were Japanese.
Philip Johnston, with the aid of four Navahos residing in the Los Angeles area and another who was already on active duty in Naval service in San Diego presented a demonstration to Major General Clayton B. Vogel, the commanding general of Amphibious Corps, Pacific Fleet and his staff. In simulated combat situations the Navahos demonstrated that they could encode, transmit, and decode three-line English messages in 20 seconds. The encoding machines in use at that time needed 30 minutes to perform the same tasks.
In May 1942, the first 29 recruits attended boot camp in Camp Pendelton in Oceanside, California. It was this first group that developed the code and a dictionary and numerous words for military terms. The initial code consisted of translations for 211 English words most common in military conversations. An additional 200 words were added making a total of 411 terms that needed to be memorized. The code was never written down and was always only spoken. Chester Nez was one of the original code talkers. He said, “Everything we used in code was what we lived with on the reservation every day, like the ants, the birds, bears. Thus the term for a tank was turtle, a tank destroyer was tortoise killer. A battleship was whale. A hand grenade was potato and plain old bombs were eggs. A fighter plane was hummingbird, and a torpedo plane swallow. A sniper was pick em off. Pyrotechnic was fancy fire.”
The Navajo Code Talkers took part in Guaalcanal, Tarawa, Peleliu, and Iwo Jimo. They took part in every assault the Marines conducted in the Pacific from 1942 to 1945. They served in all six Marine divisions, Marine Raider battalions and Marine parachute units during the war. They had to prove their worth but once they did it became obvious that we would need them to win the war. The Navahos had an additional problem because many of the young recruits had trouble with thinking that the Navahos were Japanese. It was at Iwo Jima that any doubts anyone had about the Navahos were laid to rest. The six men attached to that Marine Division worked around the clock during the first two days of the battle and sent and received over 800 messages, all without error.
The Japanese chief of intelligence, Lieutenant General Seizo Arisue, said that while they were able to crack the codes used by the U.S. Army and Army Air Corps they were never able to break the Navaho used by the Marines. These were truly valuable people.
So what did these heroes have to look forward to? They weren’t given the right to vote in Arizona until 1948, in New Mexico until 1953, and in Utah until 1957. The world didn’t even know about them until 1968. Many feel that a factor in this was the fact that while the Code Talkers were risking their lives during the Second World War at home their children were being punished for speaking their native language. Finally however in December 1981 they were awarded a Certificate of Appreciation from the President of the United States. The Navaho Code Talkers were the unspoken heroes of Iwo Jima and World War II.
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