The Pacific War: Coded contributions and Navajo talkers

During the Pacific War Japanese attempts to crack battlefront communications were frustrated by a dedicated band of native Americans stationed with the Marine Corps and transmitting in a Navajo code. Lynn Escue tells this hitherto little-known, story.

Like all peoples, the Navajo Indians date their past by important events. Where the average United States citizen starts with the Mayflower and marks off the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, two world wars and the Great Depression, the major events within the Navajo historical framework are more recent - the Long Walk of 1863-68, when more than 8,000 Navajos were forcibly relocated to a concentration camp in the New Mexico territory, the Livestock Reduction and the Second World War. The first two are purely negative events characterised by incomprehensible suffering and hardship, but the Second World War has a special place in Navajo histories.

The men who served as the Second World War Code Talkers have about them today the aura of heroes because their accomplishments seem to erase the lack of worth that has generally been attributed to Indian culture by the dominant society, and because the recognition accorded these men is seen, in small measure, as compensation for the demeaning treatment of Navajos during the Long Walk and Stock Reduction.

The Great Depression fathered the generation which fought the Second World War, but to the Navajo people, the Depression is merely a contributory factor to the economic debacle called the Stock Reduction. The true economic impact of Franklin Roosevelt's soil conservation programme and concomitant livestock reduction programme on the Navajo Reservation, as separate from the drought and economic depression, is hard to assess and the subject of on-going controversy. However, folk memories on the reservation rate it just below the Long Walk, and, regardless of what the statisticians may say, the majority of Navajos perceive it as a time of hardship and loss caused by the interference of the white man.

One angry tribal councilman, protesting at yet another stock reduction quota after the US entrance into the Second World War, appealed to tradition:

Give us our sheep. Give us our mutton, Jet us have herds as our fathers and grandfathers had. If you take away our sheep, you take away our food, and we have nothing... What will we say to our young men who have gone to war? What will they eat and how will they live when they come back to us? They are fighting now for our homes and our land, and these things will be useless if you take away our sheep. This is not right. You must let us keep our sheep or we die.

The year that the United States entered the Second World War, the Navajo Reservation was physically isolated and economically behind the rest of the country. Most Navajos still lived in traditional hogans heated by wood or coal fires; they had no piped-in water, no electricity, no telephones, few paved roads. Older Navajos remember that cars were rare, television sets almost a marvel. The trading post was the nearest place to buy or trade for necessities a family did not provide itself; Day schools had only become common within the last ten years; before that children were educated far from home at boarding schools run by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The predominant occupation, lifestyle and form of wealth was herding, particularly, as noted above, sheep. Even today sheep are so important to the Navajo culture that some medicine men believe that sheep, brought to the New World by the Spanish, were one of the sacred animals given to the first Navajos by Changing Woman.

As the largest Indian tribe in the United States, the Navajos had long been of interest to the white man. Representatives of various religions worked not only to convert, but to improve the harsh living conditions of a once war-like migratory people crowded together within small, permanent boundaries. Among these was the son of a Protestant missionary, Philip Johnston.

Johnston grew up on the Reservation speaking Navajo; as an adult, he moved to southern California where he attended college and settled down, working for the City of Los Angeles as a civil engineer. Shortly after Pearl Harbor, Johnston conceived an idea for an unbreakable military code using the Navajo Language.

Historically, Navajo is strictly an oral language. However, by 1941 the basic orthography for modern written Navajo had been developed, and was being taught in some reservation schools. Navajo is an exceedingly complex polysynthetic language with some structural similarities to Turkish and Japanese. It is a difficult language to Anglicise; new words are usually nouns because a Navajo verb includes far more than person and tense. It may also include pronoun, adverbial and repetitive information, and as one Navajo put it, individual words 'paint a picture in your mind'.

It was this language that Philip Johnston proposed to use as the basis of a secret military communications code. His proposal reached the desk of Major General Clayton B. Vogel, Commanding General of the United States Marine Corps Amphibious Corps, Pacific Fleet, in February of 1942. At his own expense Johnston brought four Navajos to Vogel's headquarters, had them translate from English to Navajo and back again. Vogel was impressed and requested the permission of the Marine Corps commandant in Washington DC to recruit 200 Navajos for the secret code project.

These Navajos, 'In addition to linguistic qualifications in English and their tribal dialect... should have the physical qualifications necessary for messengers'. Vogel was given permission to recruit thirty men for a pilot project. A prior historical basis existed for a secret Navajo code language. There are legends of a secret Navajo warriors' language used on raids in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries so that enemies might not overhear and understand.

Wartime communications using American Indian languages had been successful during the First World War. one of the most notable examples being the 141st Infantry's use of Choctaw Indians to transmit messages in Europe. Before entering the Second World War, communication using Indian languages was tried with indifferent success by a tank corps in Louisiana, but Johnston's idea of developing a code based on an Indian language was unique. In April 1942 recruiters travelled to Arizona to select the first group of young men for the project, principally from boarding schools at Fort Defiance, Arizona, and Fort Wingate and Shiprock, New Mexico. The group included twenty-nine (one man withdrew), and was organised as the 382nd Platoon of the US Marine Corps.

The Navajos were as eager as most other Americans to help defend their country. The Navajo Tribal Council had previously passed a resolution supporting the United States against the Axis, and the day after Pearl Harbor large numbers of young volunteers showed up at Bureau of Indian Affairs offices carrying clothing and hunting rifles. The extreme isolation of the Navajo Reservation and a desire for travel and adventure spurred others, along with the knowledge that they would soon be drafted anyway. Some, like Cosey Brown, were inspired by a sense of tradition. His grandmother had come back from the Long Walk as a young girl. The stories of her difficult childhood moved him to volunteer. After the war was over, he was able to verbalise the feelings that had motivated him:

I would think, 'I'm doing this for my people'. I believed what we did was right and it was worth it. We protected the many American people, also the unborn children, which would be the generation to come. Now, I see young men and women, and I am glad for what I did for them.

William Dean Wilson was under-age like many volunteers, and lied to be accepted. He remembers that he was wild as a young man; his teacher at Shiprock Boarding School suggested he sign up, but his parents would not consent because he was only sixteen. During lunch break at the Fort Defiance Indian Health Service Hospital where the physical examinations were being given, he wandered over to the recruiter's table. On it were the files of all of the young volunteers. His was set to one side with a note that 'parents will not consent', He slipped his file back underneath the rest, minus note, and by the time his seventeenth birthday rolled around, he was in the Pacific.

The commencement of warfare, sending young men out to fight the enemy, is 'm important event requiring special ceremonies in the religions of many Indian tribes. Jimmy King, Senior, part Navajo and part Kiowa, had two ceremonies performed before he left one from each of his parent tribes. The families of young Navajos had Blessingway Ceremonies performed for them.

The trip to boot camp was a great adventure. Carl Gorman remembers that the twenty-nine recruits sang songs and had a good time on the way to Camp Elliott near San Diego, California, but when they arrived, things were very different from what they had expected. Those who chafed at boarding school discipline or who had been educated at day schools, found basic training a difficult adjustment, but those like John Benally and Jimmy King, Senior, who had gone to an Indian school 'where a discipline... had been employed by the Bureau of Indian Affairs that was known as the military discipline; they taught us how to drill, and calisthenics', had no trouble.

Drill they did, with the same complaints and comic sidelights as most other recruits, such as the time a sergeant ordered the 582nd to count cadence in Navajo, rather than English. The white sergeant was unaware that it takes longer to count in Navajo than in English, with the result that the Navajos were instantly out of step. The drill quickly disintegrated when uncomplimentary Navajo words about the sergeant were inserted into the count, ending with the Navajos doubled over with laughter.

'At present', reported a 1942 issue of the Marine Corps Chevron, the Navajos are 'a typical Marine outfit of budding specialists. They gripe about the same things that all Marines gripe about - liberty, chow, and the San Diego weather'.

Along with basic, the 382nd Platoon received standard training in communications skills and equipment, then were set to the task of composing an unbreakable military code using their native language. Navajo has both pitch and inflection, so the code words had to be carefully chosen; even repeated under stress a message had to be clear and unmistakable.

The vocabulary was taken from Navajo words describing nature: dive bomber =ginitsoh (sparrow hawk), grenades =nimasii (potatoes). There was a code word for most important military terms along with an English alphabet, with the first letter of the English translation code word (but not the Navajo) corresponding to the appropriate letter. The five vowels and four most important consonants were each given three code words to make the code harder to break. Later on each of these letters had eight different code words.

Once the initial code was completed, the men practiced it using operational orders from the Marine Corps Sample Operations Orders Manual. Then they went into the field to test the code under simulated combat conditions. Other Navajos, not members of the 382nd, were ordered to try to break the code. All failed.

Two men, John Benally and Johnny Manuelito, were kept at Camp Elliott as instructors; the remaining twenty-seven were shipped out to Guadalcanal to join various Marine detachments in the Pacific.

In the South Pacific the code was given one final test. The test message which the Marine Corps chose to record for posterity was Jimmy King Senior's closing statement: 'May the Navajo Nation endure for all time to come. In God we trust'. Sometimes the Code Talkers had to prove the efficiency of their Navajo code. One commander was only convinced after a competition between men using conventional military code and the new Navajo code proved the Navajos were able to transmit more quickly and accurately.

When word of the code's effectiveness got back to Camp Elliott, Washington DC was asked to authorise recruitment of an additional 200 Navajos for the programme. This time Vogel was given authorisation for unlimited recruitment. Benally and Manuelito were sent back to the reservation to recruit.

Meanwhile, Philip Johnston, who had followed the nascent programme from afar, applied to the Marine Corps for permission to enlist for a six-month tour of duty with non-commissioned rank. He was inducted as a staff sergeant and taught the first class of Navajo recruits under the expanded programme. Realising that he could not teach Navajo code as well as a Navajo, Johnston trained five men from his first class as instructors, then devoted himself to administrative functions.

During this early period, the code was evolving into something like the unbreakable, finished product. New words were developed for military terms necessary to clear transmission. At this point, the code contained 411 words.

Throughout the war the code was continuously added to and modified as the need or occasion arose. Descriptive Navajo names for enemies and enemy leaders were coined. Adolf Hitler was Daghailchjjh (Moustache Smeller), while Mussolini was Adee'yaats'iin Tsoh (Big Gourd Chin).

Not all Navajo volunteers were able to join the Code Talker programme. The equivalent of a tenth grade education was found necessary. White recruits, whose fathers owned reservation trading posts, often volunteered, but could not be accepted because they spoke what the Navajos called 'trading post language' dealing with flour, shoes and sugar, not the complex every day conversations among fluent Navajo speakers.

Quite early the Japanese became aware of the Navajo code. Code Talker Paul Blatchford, says that the Japanese discovered the Code Talkers' frequency on Iwo Jima. By the time American troops were fighting on Okinawa and Saipan, Alex Williams remembers that every time he tried to transmit, Japanese would come onto his frequency and ask in English: 'Who's this?' The Code Talkers often responded by cussing the Japanese in English with comments such as 'Aw, the hell with you Tojo. Get off.

Joe Lee Kieyoomia, a Navajo American soldier in the US Army, was captured by the Japanese and survived the Bataan Death March to be imprisoned in Manchuria. At the Manchurian prison camp he was asked repeatedly why a Japanese would fight his own people. Kieyoomia responded that he was not Japanese, but Navajo. Because of this, in 1944 he was sent to Nagasaki where Tokyo Rose tried to persuade him to translate segments of the Navajo code intercepted by Japanese. Kieyoomia was able to translate individual words, but told the Japanese it was some kind of code and meant nothing to him. For five months he was tortured because they believed he knew the key to the code. In order to maintain secrecy, from the very beginning the Marine Corps held back all letters written home by Code TaIkers.

Consequently, in 1943 Philip Johnston received a request from Navajo Indian Affairs Superintendent James M. Stewart, asking if he could find out what had happened to these young men; their families were coming to Stewart, asking why they had heard nothing from their sons. Against his better judgment, Johnston sent a letter to Stewart explaining that the men were involved in a top secret code project using the Navajo language, but he must keep it a secret. A few months later, Stewart published this information in an Arizona Highways Magazine story, 'Navajo Indians at War'. Stewart was chastised by the US Department of the Interior, but Johnston was courtmartialled. Johnston was not convicted, merely censored, and since his tour of duty was nearly over, he returned to his engineering position. On his last day with the Marines, Johnston, a maverick to the end of his life, stole all of the documents pertaining to the Code Talkers, believing that his action would save them from oblivion. He later gave the papers to the Code Talkers Association.

Having gone to war with the prayers and protection of Navajo tradition, many of the Code Talkers attempted to maintain traditional beliefs and practices throughout their enlistment, sometimes in the face of wartime realities. Some carried bags containing sacred corn pollen through the war, whether or not they performed the rituals associated with it. One group of Code Talkers-in-training, at liberty at Catalina Island off the coast of southern California, built a sweat lodge in the mountains behind the town of Avalon and held a purification ceremony led by a recruit with training as a medicine man.

Many Navajos had traditional beliefs about dead bodies and the malevolent ghosts of the dead severely tested during their tours of duty. William Dean Wilson found the landing on Tarawa Atoll a seventy-six hour ordeal until the island was secured:

And of course the real hard test, I thought at the time, was just prior to us leaving the island. We had to run around all over the place and find all the bodies that we could find of our comrades, that we buried - I think about five hundred that one morning.

Some Code Talkers found traditional beliefs strengthened by unusual combat experiences. One Navajo Marine dreamed that his family had held a purification ceremony for him. Through a letter, he later discovered that the ceremony had been performed during the period of his dream.

After a pleasant 'rest and recreation' in Melvin, Australia, where the Navajos were warmly received by Australian ranchers and fed their favourite meat - mutton, Cosey Brown found himself in charge of some new Navajo recruits on the Island of New Guinea. One of the young men disregarded Navajo tradition which states that soldiers should not speak 'evil words whiIe in war'. He made a joke, saying: 'I'm getting fat and I eat too much. It would seem like the enemy would butcher me any time'. On a subsequent evening, Brown and the recruits were sitting beside their foxhole when they heard approaching Japanese aircraft. Instead of jumping into the foxhole with the others, the young man who had made the joke continued to sit outside, disregarding the attack. 'The silly guy got killed there', concluded Brown.

Paul Blatchford was with the second wave of Marines who hit the beaches at Iwo Jima and, consequently, witnessed some of that battle's bloodiest fighting. During this period, a lieutenant made the lives of the men under him (including Blatchford's) miserable by insisting that they shave every morning. Blatchford went to a Captain Thomas whom he liked and trusted, explaining to him that Navajo tradition was strongly against the cutting of hair, particularly before any serious event, such as a battle. He explained it this way:

We can't do that, Indian custom, you cannot do that - once you touch your beard or pull your hair, you die... That's why all our men are getting killed. Didn't you ever notice that when they shave that morning, that's the one that dies?

The lieutenant, who was present at the conference, asked if this was really the case. Upon being assured that it was, he promised that he would try it himself next day. Blatchford continued:

So he did shave that morning, and at nine o'clock he got shot right square in the forehead. And Thomas said: 'I guess that's right. Okay, tell all the sergeants to come up...' After then, when they didn't shave anymore, why, none of our outfit got killed again.

Numerous Indian tribes held traditional ceremonies while in combat. Many of these ceremonies were war dances or were associated with weakening the enemy. According to Code Talker Alex Williams, a number of such ceremonies were held on Pavavu Island after its capture from the Japanese. He described a Zuni war song and a war dance done by Oklahoma Indians in which two men danced in front of pictures of Hitler and Tojo. At the end of the dance, each dancer stabbed one of the pictures with his knife. In a more private ceremony, six Navajos on Pavavu held a Yeibechi dance (to restore harmony), Williams said. Shortly before his death, war correspondent Ernie Pyle interviewed two Navajo Code Talkers on Okinawa. The Code Talkers had held a ceremony in the Solomon Islands prior to the invasion of Okinawa, in order to 'sap the Japanese of their strength for this blitz. They put the finger of weakness on the Japs. And then they ended their ceremonial chant by singing the Marine Corps song in Navajo'.

In fact, the Marine Corps' First Division found the landing on Okinawa easy, but later, when the going got rough, one Marine turned to a Code Talker and said: 'OK, Yazzey, what about your little ceremony? What do you call this?' 'This is different,' answered the Navajo with a smile. 'We prayed only for an easy landing'.

The Navajos were just one of many Indian tribes attached to the First Division which put on ceremonial dances after the conquest of Okinawa. A Marine Corps correspondent described a dance from the Navajo Mountainway, the Apache Devil Dance, the Eagle Dance, the Hoop Dance, and the War Dance, put on by various Indians including Sioux, Comanche, Pima, Kiowa, Pueblo and Crow.

Because of their special position, one of the greatest risks the Code Talkers ran was not death from an enemy bullet, but being mistaken for a Japanese by their fellow Americans. This situation was made more hazardous when Japanese soldiers dressed themselves in the uniforms of dead GIs and tried to infiltrate US lines. Marine Corps officers found it necessary to introduce new men to their Code Talkers immediately in order to avoid dangerous mistakes, So many Code Talkers were fired on or captured by American troops that eventually some battalions assigned them white bodyguards for protection in combat zones.

By the end of the war most Marine Corps battalions in the Pacific had a pair of Code Talkers. It was found that pairs of friends made the best teams because they could perfect their transmissions through regular personal contact.

The Navajo Code Talkers made an undoubtedly significant contribution to the American war effort in the Pacific. They were 'considered indispensable for the rapid transmission of classified dispatches' during operations on Guam and Peleliu, and on D-Day at Iwo Jima, Code Talkers were used to transmit messages from the beach to division and corps commanders. They accompanied the Marines from the Solomon Islands to Okinawa, and some were stationed in Japan after the US occupation began.

Returning Navajo veterans were given the respect traditionally tendered a victorious returning warrior. They were honoured by the Tribal Council and elders alike. In a 1949 study comparing the re-integration of Navajo and Zuni veterans into their respective cultures, John Adair and Evon Vogt found that even the most conservative leader of the Ramah New Mexico Navajos was exceedingly positive in his reception of homecoming veterans:

The way I feel about these soldier boys is that most of them can already speak English and write. It looks like they should go on with the white people and learn more and more and then lead their people.

Which is what many of them did in the years that followed, becoming tribal leaders and recognised artists although some died young from that perennial reservation blight, alcoholism.

Adair and Vogt contrasted this open-arms attitude with the more secretive, highly-structured approach of the Zunis, who had done everything possible to keep their young men from heing drafted into what they considered an irrelevant war, and, when the men returned, employed religious sanctions to re-integrate the veterans into tradition, driving out those who persisted in 'white man's ways'.

Approximately 3,600 Navajos (about 6 per cent of a total population of 60,000) served in US Armed Forces. Navajo Service records for the period after 1945 show that the low number of inductees was due, not to reluctance to serve, but to illiteracy and bad health. Of the 3,600, some 420 served as Code Talkers.

During the war there was a standing order to shoot any Code Talker captured by the enemy; despite the vicissitudes of the Pacific campaigns, the code remained unbroken throughout the Second World War.

When the war was over, the US government acknowledged the contribution of the Code Talkers, but the men did not receive official recognition until 1968, when the code was declassified.

In 1969 a number of Code Talkers attended a reunion of the 4th Marine Division in Chicago, Illinois. All attending Code Talkers were presented with a special medal commemorating their service. And, in July 1971, a two-day Code Talker reunion, jointly sponsored by the US Marine Corps and the Navajo Tribe, was held in Window Rock, Arizona, at which time the Code Talkers had organised themselves into a veterans group associated with the Marine Corps.

During 1982 President Reagan honoured the Code Talkers with a Certificate of Recognition and established August 14th as National Code Talkers Day. Members of the Code Talkers Association still participate in local celebrations and parades.

The Navajo tradition of honouring elders has brought the Code Talkers respect and recognition for the moment in time when, as an old Navajo aphorism has it, the Navajos had 'the whole world in their hands'.

Article by Lynn Escue

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