By 1942 the United States military had a serious problem in the Pacific.
The Japanese had proven extraordinarily skilled at intercepting and breaking American military communications codes. Almost every code the US used was being cracked. Tactical communications could not be trusted.
The solution came from an unusual source.
Philip Johnston was a civil engineer who had grown up on the Navajo reservation as the son of a missionary. He was one of a handful of non-Navajo people who spoke the language fluently. He knew that Navajo was a language of extraordinary complexity, with tonal elements and grammatical structures that had never been written down in any formal system, and was almost completely unknown outside the Navajo people.
He proposed using Navajo speakers as military communicators.
What the Code Talkers Did
The Marine Corps accepted the proposal. Navajo recruits were trained not just to communicate in their native language but to use a specialized code built on top of it. Military terms were assigned Navajo words that described them in indirect ways. Submarines became iron fish. Bombs became eggs. Fighter planes became hummingbirds. Commanding generals became war chiefs.
The code was never broken. Not once during the entire war. Japanese cryptanalysts who had broken nearly every other American code system were unable to make sense of what they were hearing.
Code talkers served across the Pacific theater transmitting orders, coordinates, and tactical information in real time during some of the most intense battles of the war. Major General Howard Connor, who served at Iwo Jima, reportedly said that without the Navajo code talkers the Marines never could have taken Iwo Jima.
What Happened Afterward
When the war ended the Navajo code talkers were ordered not to talk about what they had done. Their contribution was classified. The code was considered too valuable to reveal. The US government wanted to keep it available in case it was needed again.
The code talkers returned home and could not tell anyone what they had done. They could not explain why they had joined the Marines or what they had contributed to the war effort.
The program was not declassified until 1968. It was not until 2001 that the original 29 Navajo code talkers received the Congressional Gold Medal, America's highest civilian honor. By that time most of them were very old. Many had already died without formal recognition.
The code talkers came from a people that the United States government had spent generations trying to destroy. Their language, which the government had banned in Indian schools and tried to eliminate, turned out to be one of the most important military assets of the Second World War.
That is a story that deserves to be told much louder than it has been.
Robert Lee Beers III is a writer and digital preservation advocate based in North Charleston South Carolina.
