Navajo Code Talkers: The Unbreakable Code of the Pacific War

The Navajo Code Talkers were Navajo (Diné) men who served in the United States Marine Corps in the Pacific War between 1942 and 1945, passing battlefield messages by radio and telephone in a code built on their own language. Around 400 served in all six Marine divisions, from Guadalcanal to Okinawa. Their code was fast, accurate and never broken by Japanese intelligence, and it is one of the most celebrated communications achievements of the Second World War.

Background

Radio was vital to amphibious warfare in the Pacific, but messages could be intercepted. Standard cipher machines were secure but slow, and Japanese listeners, some of whom had studied in the United States, understood English well. The Marines needed a way to send orders and reports in voice quickly without the enemy understanding them.

The idea of using Navajo came from Philip Johnston, a civil engineer in Los Angeles. The son of a Protestant missionary, he had grown up on the Navajo Reservation and was one of the few outsiders who spoke the language. In early 1942 he proposed the plan to the Marine Corps and arranged a demonstration at Camp Elliott near San Diego, in which Navajo speakers transmitted messages far faster than the existing coding methods.

Navajo suited the task. It was then an unwritten language, its grammar and tones are complex, and it was spoken by almost no one outside the Navajo Nation in the American Southwest.

Building the code

In May 1942 the first 29 Navajo recruits, later known as the “First Twenty-Nine”, enlisted in the Marine Corps. After boot camp in San Diego they were sent to Camp Elliott, where they created the code themselves.

The code had two parts. The first was an alphabet: each English letter was represented by one or more Navajo words, so names and unusual words could be spelled out. The letter A, for example, could be sent as the Navajo word for ant, apple or axe, with alternatives added to defeat letter-frequency analysis.

The second part was a vocabulary of military terms expressed through Navajo words. A fighter plane was a hummingbird, a bomber a buzzard, a submarine an iron fish, a tank a tortoise and a battleship a whale. The original list had around 200 terms and grew to roughly 400 or more by the end of the war.

The code was memorised rather than written down in the field. Even a fluent Navajo speaker who had not been trained would have heard only strings of unrelated words.

In combat

The first code talkers went into action at Guadalcanal in 1942. More were recruited and trained as the programme grew, and code talkers served in every major Marine campaign in the Pacific, including Bougainville, Tarawa, Saipan, Guam, Peleliu, Iwo Jima and Okinawa.

They usually worked in pairs, one operating the radio and one transmitting or receiving. A message that might take half an hour to encode and decode by machine could be passed in a few minutes. Code talkers also served as ordinary riflemen and runners, and several were killed or wounded.

Iwo Jima became the best-known example of their work. Major Howard Connor, signal officer of the 5th Marine Division, later reported that six Navajo code talkers worked around the clock during the first two days of the battle and sent and received more than 800 messages without error. Connor credited them with a major part in the capture of the island.

Never broken

Japanese cryptanalysts broke several American codes during the war but never the Navajo code. Joe Kieyoomia, a Navajo soldier captured in the Philippines in 1942 who was not a code talker, was questioned by his captors about intercepted messages. He recognised Navajo words but could not understand the meaning, since the messages used the coded vocabulary.

Secrecy and recognition

Because the military thought it might use the code again, the programme stayed classified after 1945. The veterans could not speak publicly about their work, and many returned home to poverty and discrimination; Navajos living in Arizona and New Mexico could not vote in state elections until 1948.

Recognition came slowly after declassification in 1968. In 1982 President Ronald Reagan declared 14 August Navajo Code Talkers Day. In 2001 Congress awarded the Congressional Gold Medal to the original 29 and the Congressional Silver Medal to those who followed. Chester Nez, the last surviving member of the original 29, died in 2014.

Myths and facts

A common misunderstanding is that the code talkers simply spoke Navajo. In fact they used a code inside the language, which even native speakers could not follow without training.

The 2002 film Windtalkers suggested that Marine bodyguards had orders to kill code talkers rather than let them be captured. No documentary evidence for such orders has been found, though code talkers were often accompanied by other Marines for their protection.

Timeline

• 1942, February: Philip Johnston’s demonstration for the Marine Corps at Camp Elliott.
• 1942, May: The First Twenty-Nine enlist and begin developing the code.
• 1942, August–November: Code talkers first used in combat on Guadalcanal.
• 1945, February–March: Code talkers handle hundreds of messages at Iwo Jima.
• 1968: The code talker programme is declassified.
• 1982, 14 August: First Navajo Code Talkers Day.
• 2001, 26 July: Congressional Gold Medals presented to the original 29.

Why it matters

The Navajo Code Talkers gave US forces a secure, fast voice code at a time when communications could decide battles. Their story is also a reminder that a language the US government had long discouraged in Native American schools became a protected military asset, and it has helped encourage pride in, and preservation of, Native American languages.