Codetalkers

Native Americans speaking their own dialect as American soldiers in wartime, effectively using their native languages as a code. The codetalkers provided the U.S. forces with fast communications over open radio communications nets without any chance that enemy eavesdropping would succeed.

During World War I and World War II, members of the Navajo, Comanche, and Choctaw tribes served as most of the codetalkers. However, experts believe that approximately 19 tribes contributed such wartime services in the 20th century. All saw action primarily in World War II, during the infancy of tactical voice radio, which remained vulnerable to interception and exploitation by all sides.

The first known official use of codetalkers occurred in October 1918, when eight Choctaws serving in a battalion in France were put to use as telephone communicators during the Meuse-Argonne offensive. Their use of native dialect denied the Germans any use of telephone tapping. Too little time remained in the war for this improvisation to be studied and exploited on a larger scale, but the potential of codetalking had at least received official notice. During World War II, Navajo missionary Philip Johnston approached the Marine Corps with a proposal to use the Navajo language as a foolproof code for radio and telephone transmissions. The Native American dialects have no alphabet, and their unique syntax and tonal qualities would defy any attempt by an enemy to intercept and exploit information being transmitted by voice. After field testing the concept on the West Coast, the Marine Corps initiated its employment of the Navajo codetalkers with its first cohort of 29 recruits in May 1942. They served in all of the marine divisions and their major campaigns. By the end of the war, the Marine Corps had taken in 540 Navajos for service, 375 to 420 of whom were trained as codetalkers.

The U.S. Army also employed codetalkers in Europe, including 13 Comanche codetalkers who were assigned to the Fourth Infantry Division when it landed at Normandy in June 1944. Navajo codetalkers continued to be used after World War II; much less is known about their use then, a factor that undoubtedly delayed the public recognition of their wartime exploits.

Although simple in concept, the employment of codetalkers required much innovation. Native American dialects contained few military terms, and these had to be improvised or drawn up in an official lexicon that was promulgated during the war. About 450 military terms made up this lexicon, such as: besh-lo (iron fish) for “submarine,”dah-he-tih-hi (hummingbird) for “fighter plane,” and debeh-li-zine (black street) for “squad.” Public recognition of the wartime codetalkers occurred only in the 1990s, although the U.S. Army and Marine Corps had recorded the basic factors surrounding codetalkers in their earlier published official histories.