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This story delves into how the use of a certain communications tool
influenced World War II. This "invention," though not patentable, is
more native to America than apple pie and baseball. It was used in
every assault the U.S. Marines conducted in the Pacific from 1942 to
1945 -- Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Peleliu and Iwo Jima. It was used in
all six Marine divisions, Marine Raider battalions and Marine
parachute units, enabling our men to transmit messages by telephone
and radio in a code the Japanese never broke.
Without it, the Marines would never have taken Iwo Jima,
according to Maj. Howard Connor of the 5th Marine Division.
So what is this great "invention" that helped us win World War
II?
Navaho code talkers. These code talkers were Navaho Indians who
were recruited to transmit and interpret messages during the war.
Since November is National American Indian Heritage Month, I thought
you’d enjoy learning more about the earliest Americans -- the
"original" Americans.
The Germans had the Enigma machine as their code system, but it
was no match for the Navajo code talkers. The syntax and tonal
qualities of the Navajo language, not to mention dialects, make it
unintelligible to anyone without extensive exposure and training. It
has no alphabet or symbols, and is spoken only on the Navajo lands
of the American Southwest. One estimate indicates that less than 30
non-Navajos, none of them Japanese, could understand the language at
the outbreak of World War II.
How important to the American war effort were the Navaho code
talkers?
Connor had six Navajo code talkers working around the clock
during the first two days of the battle of Iwo Jima. Those six sent
and received over 800 messages, all without error.
The Navaho code talkers were the subject of a 2002 Hollywood
movie called "Windtalkers," and their code is the only unbroken code
in modern military history. The code enabled American translators
stationed outside the United States to decipher the code in minutes,
whereas other codes would take approximately two hours to decipher.
It would take only 20 seconds for the Navaho code talkers to decode
a three-line English message, whereas machines required 30 minutes
to perform the same job.
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So how did the Navaho code talkers go virtually unnoticed for
half a century after the war had ended?
Navajo remained potentially valuable as code even after the war.
For that reason, the code talkers, whose skill and courage saved
both American lives and military engagements, only recently earned
recognition from the U.S. government and the public.
A Navajo code talker exhibit is now a regular stop on tours of
the Pentagon. The exhibit includes a display of photographs,
equipment and the original code, along with an explanation of how
the code worked.
Thirty-five Navajo code talkers, all veterans of the U.S. Marine
Corps, and their families traveled from their homes on the Navajo
Reservation -- which includes parts of Arizona, New Mexico and Utah
-- to attend the dedication of the exhibit in September of 1992.
Who was the visionary individual who came up with this brilliant
plan to use the native Navajo language as code in World War II?
An American named Philip Johnston, the son of a missionary to the
Navajos and one of the few non-Navajos who spoke the language
fluently, came up with the idea. Johnston, who was reared on the
reservation, was a World War I veteran who knew of the military's
search for a code that would withstand all attempts to decipher it.
He also knew that Native American languages -- notably Choctaw --
had been used in World War I to encode messages.
[Paul Niemann]
Paul Niemann may be reached at
niemann7@aol.com.
Copyright Paul Niemann 2005
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