The Native American Code Talkers Helped Win World War Two and Were Told to Keep It Secret for Decades

 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.

Governments Have Been Hiding History From the Public for Centuries and Here Is Why That Has to Stop

 The Vatican is not the only institution sitting on history that belongs to the public.

Governments around the world maintain archives of historical documents that are sealed, classified, or restricted in ways that prevent ordinary people from understanding what was done in their name.

This is not a new problem. It is as old as power itself.

What Gets Hidden and Why

The documents that tend to get sealed are the ones that show institutions behaving badly. The things governments did that they do not want on the record. The deals made behind closed doors. The operations carried out without public knowledge. The decisions that hurt people in ways that were never acknowledged.

The United States government maintained classified records about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy for decades. Some of those records were only partially released in recent years and researchers say documents are still being withheld. The American people still do not have the full picture of what their government knows about one of the most significant events in twentieth century American history.

The British government holds records about its colonial activities that have never been fully released. Documents about what happened in Kenya during the Mau Mau uprising. Records about how British authorities treated people in colonies around the world. Historians have spent years fighting legal battles just to access what should be public record.

The American government conducted experiments on its own citizens without their knowledge or consent during the Cold War. The full scope of programs like MK Ultra and the Tuskegee syphilis study only became known because of investigative journalism and Freedom of Information requests. The governments involved had every intention of keeping those things secret forever.

Why Institutions Keep Secrets

There are legitimate reasons for some government secrecy. Ongoing national security operations. Intelligence methods that if revealed would put people in danger. Diplomatic communications that could damage relationships between countries if released prematurely.

But that legitimate category gets used to justify a much broader secrecy that has nothing to do with current security. Old records that embarrass institutions. Historical decisions that look indefensible in hindsight. Documents that would change how people understand their own history.

When a 70 year old document about a peacetime government program gets classified that is not about security. That is about protecting the reputation of an institution at the expense of the public's right to know its own history.

What People Can Do

Support journalists and researchers who fight for access to historical records. Organizations like the National Security Archive at George Washington University have spent decades using Freedom of Information requests to force the release of documents the government wants to keep hidden. That work matters.

Support legislation that sets real limits on how long documents can remain classified. Automatic declassification timelines with narrow exceptions are better than systems that allow institutions to keep records sealed indefinitely.

When records become available read them. Share them. Make them part of the public conversation. The release of historical documents only matters if people pay attention to what they contain.

History belongs to the people who lived it and to the people who came after. Not to the institutions that made it and would prefer some of it stay forgotten.

Robert Lee Beers III is a writer and digital preservation advocate based in North Charleston South Carolina.