When the Japanese broke Allied military codes used to protect operational plans in the Pacific theatre during World War II, the U.S. Marines turned to the Navajo Nation for help.
The Marine Corps selected 29 Navajo men to develop a code based on the complex, unwritten Navajo language. When the Marines hit the beaches for pivotal battles at Guadalcanal in 1942, and Iwo Jima in 1945, Navajo Code Talkers were at their side.
“We were out there using Navajo language, transmitting messages,” Thomas Begay said in November 2023, remembering his experience as a Navajo Code Talker at Iwo Jima amid the horrors of battle. “War is a sad thing but what do you do, if you’re there? You provide communication and you don’t stop communication.”
The Code Talkers sent communications by telephone and radio in their native language, substituting Navajo words for military terms that weren’t part of their language. For example, the word for “bomb” was “potato” and the names of different birds stood in for different types of aircraft.
They also used alternative terms for letters in the English alphabet to spell words that weren’t part of the code. Code Talkers could translate three lines of English in 20 seconds, instead of the 30 minutes it took to encode a message with existing machines, according to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
And while those machines needed to be kept secure, a Code Talker with a radio could go anywhere. The Code Talkers participated in every major Marine operation in the Pacific theatre, giving their fellow Marines an important advantage throughout the war.
During the nearly monthlong battle for Iwo Jima, for example, six Code Talker Marines successfully transmitted more than 800 messages. Other Native Americans, including members of the Comanche and Meskwaki nations, transmitted secret messages in the European and North African theatres of World War II.
Their service continued a tradition that began a generation earlier, when members of the Choctaw, Cherokee, Comanche, Osage, Lakota and Cheyenne nations all carried secret messages during World War I, according to the U.S. Department of Defence. The Code Talkers are credited with creating the only unbreakable code in modern military history.
Their service continued through V-J Day, which marked the end of World War II in 1945. By the end of the war, some 400 Navajos had served as Code Talkers and 13 had been killed in action.
The Code Talkers kept their work a secret for decades until the military declassified the program in 1968. In July 2001, the original Code Talkers were awarded the Congressional Gold Medal for creating the code, and dozens more who served as Code Talkers received the Congressional Silver Medal.
“We recall a story that all Americans can celebrate, and every American should know,” President George W. Bush said at the medal ceremony. “It is a story of an ancient people called to serve in a modern war.
“It is a story of one unbreakable oral code of the Second World War, messages traveling by field radio on Iwo Jima in the very language heard across the Colorado plateau centuries ago. Above all, it’s a story of young Navajos who brought honour to their nation and victory to their country.”
The National Museum of the American Indian unveiled the National Native American Veterans Memorial in Washington on Veterans Day November 11, 2020, to honor the military service of Native Americans, including the Code Talkers.
