Ever
since the U.S. declared itself an independent nation, Native
Americans have served that nation in its armed forces. General George
Washington praised the bravery of the Indians who fought under
him—that's how far back I'm talking. But in World War II, Native
Americans served the nation in a new way.
They
created the only unbroken code in military history.
President
Ronald Reagan said in 1982, as he made August 14 National Navajo Code
Talkers' Day:
Equipped
with the only foolproof, unbreakable code in the history of warfare,
the [Navajo] code talkers confused the enemy with an earful of sounds
never before heard by code experts. The dedication and unswerving
devotion to duty shown by the men of the Navaho Nation in serving as
radio code talkers in the Marine Corps during World War II should
serve as a fine example for all Americans.
It
is fitting that at this time we also express appreciation for the
other American Indians who have served our Nation in times of war.
Members of the Choctaw, Chippewa, Creek, Sioux, and other tribes used
their tribal languages as effective battlefield codes against the
Germans in World War I and the Japanese and Germans in World War II.
Wikipedia also lists bilingual Lakota, Comanche, and Meskwaki, and Basque soldiers, as additional WWII code talkers. But it is the approximately 400 Navajo Marines who were the most successful and (after the war) the most famous of the code talkers.
Why
did Philip Johnston, a non-Navajo, suggest using the Navajo language
as a code? He had been raised on the Navajo reservation, the son of a
missionary, and was one of the few non-Navajos to speak the language
fluently. He knew that the language had a complex grammar and was not
understood by speakers of even the closest Na-Dene languages, and he
knew that the language had never been written down before.
The
first 29 Navajo soldiers recruited as code talkers devised the code.
They decided that the Navajo word for potato would mean hand
grenade, for example, and turtle would mean tank.
They developed portmanteaus (combinations of two words in which both
the sounds and the meanings are blended, such as “smoke” and
“fog” blending to create “smog”) such as gofasters for
running shoes and ink sticks for pens. (Some of these
portmanteaus are still in use in the Marine corps today—the English
versions, of course.)
The
Navajo code talkers were able to cipher and decipher coded messages
even faster than the coding machines in use at the time, and they
were praised for their skill and accuracy as well. The famous battle
of Iwo Jima, particularly, hung on their performance, as six code
talkers worked around the clock for two days, sending 800
messages—all without error. Signal officer Major Connor claims that
the U.S. would not have taken Iwo Jima, if it weren't for the
Navajos' amazing performance.
To
learn more, and to hear the Navajo language, watch this short video.
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| In 2000, the original 29 code talkers were awarded gold medals, and the other Navajo code talkers were awarded silver medals. |
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