Navajo Code Talkers

The need for mastering other languages is often linked to national security concerns. An episode in one of the fiercest battles of World War II, as the United States fought the Japanese, drove this point home. At Iwo Jima, one of the bloodiest battles of the Pacific theater, a mysterious language was heard crackling from American radios amid falling bombs and gunfire. These were the secret messages developed and transmitted by Native American soldiers who served as Navajo code talkers over tactical military radios. This entry describes the service of the Navajo code talkers in World War II, and the instrumental use of the Navajo language.

The Japanese military was known for its highly skilled code breakers. Until then, they had deciphered every message sent between American troops. Early in 1942, Phillip Johnston, a son of Presbyterian missionaries to the Navajo reservation who had learned the Navajo language from the age of 4, proposed the use of the Navajo language for combat communications to Major General Clayton P. Vogel. Vogel was then commanding general of Amphibious Corps, Pacific Fleet. Johnston's rationale for the use of Navajo was based on the complexity of that language. He told the general that fluency is extremely difficult if the language is not learned from birth because, at the time, it had no alphabet or symbols and was used only in remote areas of the American Southwest. The language was unknown outside the region and was likely to be totally foreign to Japanese code breakers.

According to retired Marine Alexander Molnar Jr., fewer than 30 non-Navajos could understand the language at the onset of World War II, and none of them was Japanese. This helped convince Vogel that the Japanese would be unable to break messages coded in that language by native speakers. Under simulated combat conditions, Johnston demonstrated how Navajo volunteers were easily able to encode, transmit, and decode a few lines of English in 20 seconds and break a cryptographic machine record that would typically take 30 minutes to send. Based on this demonstration, Vogel made an immediate recommendation to Commandant Thomas Holcomb of the Marine Corps to recruit Navajo volunteers.

In May 1942, the Marines started interviewing Navajos aged 17 to 32, of good physical condition, with high school diplomas, and with fluency in both the English and Navajo languages. The first 29 Navajo recruits were chosen and were sent to a boot camp in California. After a crash course in military coding systems, the Navajo recruits created and developed 411 terms often used in combat. A code-book was developed but was never taken into the battlefield. The code talkers memorized all the English-Navajo and Navajo-English word associations in the codebook. According to Molnar, when the Navajo code talker received a message, he had to translate each Navajo word into the English equivalent and then use the first letter of the English equivalent to encode the term in Navajo. For instance, the word “navy” could be coded as tsah (needle), wol-la-chee (ant), ah-keh-di-glini (victor), and tsah-ah-dzoh (yucca).

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