The Navajo Code Talkers

WWII

During World War II, the Americans were hesitant at first to enter into the war, until Japan attacked us at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. We were losing the war in the Pacific; the Japanese were able to easily break the codes we would send out and they knew everything we sent. The U.S. military had decided to send out a fake message to see if the Japanese were able to read our messages, and after the Japanese attacked where we said we would be, the U.S. military knew that their messages could be decoded. After we found out that the Japanese could easily read our codes, we had to create a new code that would be very hard to break. So, the government turned to the reservations to get recruits to join the Marines, convinced that the Navajo’s speaking their own language would stun even the best Japanese code breakers (“Protecting”).

According to a Navajo Code Talker named Chester Nez, a Major in the military took them into a room and told them that they needed to create a code out of their own native language. Then he closed the door to the room and locked it behind him. Nez and everyone else was very confused. He said, “What does he mean by making a code in our own language? We sat there for about three or four minutes thinking, ‘how are we going to develop this code?’” (“Chester Nez”). In addition to the Navajo language being complex, and already hard to learn, they had to come up with a code in order to stop the Japanese from decoding their messages. The Navajos would use words like “potato” in English to describe a hand grenade, and “hummingbird” in English would mean fighter planes. In addition to those words as well, they would play word games to make it even more confusing, and even harder for the code to be cracked (“Protecting”).

Given the past history between the Native Americans and the government, it still was not a surprise for the Navajos to jump right in and help the Americans with the war. A Navajo Code Talker said,

I think the Navajo tribe, I think they did the right thing because of how badly they were treated in the past, they were still willing to protect their land, they were willing to protect people that punished them, willing to protect people that conquered them, there is no Code Talker that would say ‘the heck with that, the heck with the United States, the heck with America’ they’re going to say, ‘this is my mother, this is my land, this is my everything that I have right here’ (deleted video).

The Navajo Code Talkers helped the United States win WWII. The idea came from a man named Phillip Johnston who was a missionary’s son and a WWI veteran who had heard about the success the Choctaw had doing the same thing by telephone. Johnston had been brought up on a Navajo Reservation and he spoke the language known as Diné. His idea was to create a code from the Navajo language and use it in the war to transmit messages. As a result, about 420 Navajos were recruited in the U.S. Marines from 1942 to 1945 to serve in the Pacific (“Protecting”).

Many teenage Navajo Code Talkers lied about their ages. Many, as young as fifteen, went into World War II to protect their people and their land. “More than 12,000 American Indians served in World War I—about 25 percent of the male American Indian population at that time. During World War II, when the total American Indian population was less than 350,000, an estimated 44,000 Indian men and women served” (“Protecting”). A total of four hundred and twenty Navajos served in World War II.

            Many of the Navajos that served became Code Talkers. The Code Talkers did not just speak into hand held radios; it was more complex than that. They had to know how to operate both the wire and the radio equipment, carry them on their backs, and know how to set up and maintain the electronic wires or lines. The messages were given to them in English and then they had to translate them into code without writing them down. The other Code Talkers would then receive the message, and write it down in English and then enter it into a message log book. “The Code Talkers also sent messages in English and the messages were only coded if absolute security was needed” (“Protecting”). That made them very vulnerable to the Japanese soldiers, therefore they had to be highly protected by their fellow Marine soldiers.