Japan Broke Every American Code In WW2. They Never Broke The Navajo Language. D
February 1942, Washington D.C. Philip Johnston spread his maps on the desk in front of the Marine Corps recruiting offices and made an argument that he knew was going to sound impossible. Johnston was 60 years old, a civil engineer and the son of a Protestant missionary who had grown up on the Navajo reservation in Arizona and was one of fewer than 30 non-Navajo people in the world who spoke the language fluently.
He had served in the First World War and he had spent the months since Pearl Harbor thinking about a problem that American military intelligence had identified as critical and had not been able to solve. The problem was communication security. The Japanese had demonstrated at Pearl Harbor and in the campaigns that followed that they possessed a sophisticated signals intelligence capability that could intercept American radio communications and in many cases decrypt them in time to be operationally useful. American codes, while mathematically sophisticated, required encoding machines and trained cryptographers and processing time that the fast-moving combat operations of the Pacific War could not always accommodate. A battalion commander who needed to communicate with his company commanders in the middle of an assault could not wait for encoded messages to be processed through the chain of cryptographic equipment that military security required. The result was a choice between security and speed that cost lives in both directions. Fast communications that could be intercepted gave the enemy operational intelligence. Slow communications that were properly
encoded arrived too late to influence the action they were intended to direct. Johnston believed he had the solution and it was sitting on a reservation in Arizona and New Mexico and Utah in the form of a language that no Japanese linguist had ever studied, that no cryptanalyst had ever encountered in a signals intelligence context, that had no written form and no published grammar and no reference materials that could be acquired and used to develop a decryption capability. Navajo.
The Marine officers who heard Johnston’s proposal understood it immediately. They also understood the irony that an institution of the United States government was proposing to use a resource that the United States government had spent decades trying to eliminate because the suppression of Native American languages had been official federal policy since the 1870s, implemented through boarding schools that removed Navajo children from their families and punished them for speaking their native language. The men who would become the Navajo code talkers were products of this history. Many of them had been sent to boarding schools where they had been beaten for speaking Navajo. Many of their parents had been sent to boarding schools where they had been beaten for speaking Navajo. The federal government that was now proposing to use their language as a military asset was the same federal government that had spent decades treating that language as an obstacle to assimilation that needed to be eliminated. The Navajo men who volunteered for the program understood all of this. They volunteered anyway. The first group of 29 Navajo Marines
arrived at Camp Pendleton in May 1942 to develop what would become the Navajo code. The task they had been given required them to accomplish something that the military cryptographers at the highest levels of American intelligence had been unable to accomplish. Create a code that was both secure enough to resist Japanese cryptanalysis and fast enough to be used in the heat of combat.
The solution they developed reflected the specific character of the Navajo language and the specific requirements of military communications. The Navajo language is tonal, meaning that the meaning of a word changes depending on the pitch and inflection with which it is pronounced, a characteristic that makes it extraordinarily difficult for non-native speakers to learn accurately.
Its grammar is fundamentally different from any European language and from Japanese, the language of the enemy’s cryptanalysts. And it had no written form, meaning that any enemy who intercepted a transmission would be hearing sounds that their training and their reference materials could not help them decode.
The 29 Marines developed a code that used Navajo words as substitutes for military terms and letters of the alphabet. The word for turtle, chet, became tank. The word for iron fish, beshlo, became submarine. The word for buzzard, gish chu, became bomber. The alphabet substitutions used Navajo words for things whose English names began with the same letter, so that the Navajo word for ant, wol-la-chee, represented the letter A, and the Navajo word for bear, shush, represented the letter B.
The complete code, when it was finished, contained approximately 274 terms that were later expanded to over 600. Every Navajo code talker memorized the entire code. There were no written reference materials. The security of the code depended partly on its linguistic complexity and partly on the fact that any enemy who captured a code talker would not find a codebook that could be used to decrypt the communications.
The code was tested by American cryptographers who were told to break it. They could not. They reported that the transmissions they intercepted sounded like nothing they had encountered in any signals intelligence context, that the patterns they expected to find in coded communications were absent, and that they had no framework for approaching the decryption of a language they had never studied.
The first operational use of the Navajo code came in August 1942 at Guadalcanal, where the first deployed code talkers transmitted messages that Japanese signals intelligence units intercepted and could not decode. The Japanese military had an extensive signals intelligence capability that had successfully decrypted American codes throughout the early months of the Pacific War.
It had no capability against Navajo. Major Howard Connor, the 5th Marine Division Signal Officer at Iwo Jima, made the statement that became the most famous assessment of the code talkers contribution to the Pacific War. “Were it not for the Navajos,” Connor said, “the Marines would never have taken Iwo Jima.
” He was in a position to make that assessment with authority. At Iwo Jima, Connor had six Navajo code talkers working continuously, transmitting and receiving the communications that coordinated the most complex amphibious assault in the Pacific War. The communications that directed artillery fire and air support and infantry movements in the first critical hours of the Iwo Jima landing were transmitted in Navajo code at speeds that conventional coded communications could not match.
The Japanese signals intelligence unit responsible for monitoring Marine communications at Iwo Jima intercepted the Navajo transmissions and reported to their superiors that they were hearing something they could not identify. The report was that the Americans appeared to be using either an extremely sophisticated new coding machine or a language entirely outside the experience of Japanese cryptanalysts.
They were right. It was a language entirely outside their experience and it would remain outside their experience for the duration of the war. The code talkers who served in the Pacific operated under conditions that combined the specific demands of their military specialty with the general demands of combat infantry service.
They were not rear area personnel protected by their communications role. They were Marines trained and deployed as Marines who happened to also carry the responsibility for a communications capability that no other unit could replicate. At Bougainville in 1943, code talker Private First Class Samuel Tso maintained communications under Japanese mortar fire for 6 hours transmitting and receiving while the position around him was repeatedly hit.
The messages he transmitted coordinated artillery fire that stopped a Japanese counterattack. He was wounded twice during the 6 hours and continued transmitting. At Saipan in 1944, code talker Corporal Henry Bake transmitted the communications that coordinated the Marine assault on Mount Tapochau, the high ground that dominated the island.
The assault had stalled under Japanese fire and the coordination that resumed it required communications that could be transmitted and received faster than the combat situation was changing. The Navajo code provided that speed. The value of the code talkers was so well understood at the operational level that individual code talkers were sometimes assigned bodyguards not to protect them from enemy fire but to ensure that if they were captured, they could be killed before the Japanese could interrogate them about the code. The existence of Navajo code talkers was itself classified and the Marine Corps took extreme measures to ensure that the classification was maintained. The bodyguard assignment was not theoretical. At one point during the Pacific campaign, a code talker was detained by American military police who did not know about the program and mistook him for a Japanese American attempting to infiltrate a Marine position. He was held for a night before his commanding officer intervened. The incident illustrated both the security classification that surrounded the program and the racial dynamics of a war in which the country’s willingness to
use the Navajo language was not matched by its willingness to see the Navajo people as fully American in every context. The racial dynamics of the code talker service were present throughout their experience in ways that the Marine Corps official records do not fully capture but that the code talkers own accounts describe with clarity.
They were serving in a war being fought for freedoms that they had not been fully granted. They were using a cultural asset that the government had spent decades trying to destroy. They were proving their value to an institution that had historically excluded or marginalized Native Americans. Private First Class Carl Gorman, one of the original 29, described his motivation for volunteering in a post-war interview that became one of the most quoted statements from any code talker.
“We were Navajos first,” Gorman said, “but we were also Americans and when America needed us, we went. Not because America had always been good to us, because we believed in what America could be. The land was ours before it was theirs. But the idea, the idea of a country where people were free, that idea was worth fighting for.
We went to fight for the idea.” The program expanded throughout the war. By the end, approximately 420 Navajo Marines had served as code talkers. They participated in every major Marine operation from Guadalcanal in 1942 to the occupation of Japan in 1945. Not one code talker was ever captured by Japanese forces. Not one transmission in Navajo code was ever successfully decoded by Japanese cryptanalysts during the war.
The security classification that surrounded the Navajo code talker program was maintained after the war ended. The code talkers were told when they were discharged that their service was classified and that they could not discuss the code or their role. For 23 years, they returned to civilian life in the American Southwest as veterans whose specific contribution to the war could not be acknowledged.
They returned to the same reservation poverty and the same legal limitations that had characterized their lives before the war. The GI Bill that provided education and housing benefits to returning veterans was difficult for many Navajo veterans to access because the administrative requirements assumed a level of English literacy and familiarity with federal bureaucracy that many reservation residents did not possess.
The country that had relied on the language to win the war had not adequately prepared to integrate them into the post-war prosperity that the GI Bill was designed to create. The declassification of the Navajo code talker program came in 1968, 23 years after the war ended. The public recognition that followed was genuine and the appreciation was real, but it came decades late and was received by men who had spent those decades carrying a secret that prevented them from receiving the credit they were owed.
The Congressional Gold Medal that was awarded to the original 29 code talkers in 2001 and the Congressional Silver Medals awarded to the remaining code talkers in the years that followed acknowledged what the country owed the men whose language had won the Pacific War’s most critical communications battle.
The acknowledgement was 56 years late for the original 29, most of whom had died before the medals were awarded. Chester Nez, the last surviving member of the original 29 code talkers, died in June 2014 at the age of 93. In his memoir, published the year before his death, he described returning to the Navajo reservation after the war.
“I came home,” Nez wrote. “The land was the same. The sky was the same. The people were the same. Nobody knew what I had done. Nobody could know. I had this thing inside me that I couldn’t tell anyone about. I had helped win a war and I couldn’t say how. That was strange to live with for a long time.
He lived with it for 23 years before the declassification. He lived with the recognition of what he had done for 46 more years after that until he died in 2014, the last of the original 29. The Navajo language that the United States government had spent decades trying to eliminate had helped win the Second World War. The people whose culture and language had been suppressed had used that culture and that language in service of the country that had suppressed them.
The code that Japanese cryptanalysts had described as an unidentifiable transmission using either a sophisticated machine or an unfamiliar language had been two men talking to each other in the language they had grown up speaking, the language they had been beaten for using in school, the language that the federal government had tried to make extinct.
They had used it to win a war. The Navajo nation, the people, and the culture, and the language had contributed something to the United States that nothing else could have contributed in the same way. The code that won the Pacific War’s communications battle was not invented in a laboratory or developed by cryptographers.
It was the Navajo language, alive and unbreakable because it had survived everything that had been done to destroy it. The men who transmitted and received in that language had grown up on a reservation, had been punished for speaking it in school, had watched their parents and grandparents be punished for speaking it, and had then used it to do something that the most sophisticated cryptographic technology of the Second World War could not duplicate.
They were Navajos first, but they were also Americans. And when America needed them, they went. That was enough. That has always been enough. The code was never broken. The war was won. The language survived. Go home and tell the story. Not just the story of the code and the war and the medals that came 56 years late.
Tell the story of the language that survived. Tell the story of the people who kept it alive when everything was trying to kill it. Tell the story of the 29 young men who took that language and turned it into the most effective military communications tool in the Pacific War. Tell it because it deserves to be told.
Tell it because Chester Nez lived with it alone for 23 years and then kept telling it for 46 more. Tell it because the code was never broken and because that means something, not just about cryptography and military history, but about the people who made it and what they were and what they proved about the America that used their language while it was still trying to suppress it. The code was never broken.
That is the story. That is all of it and enough of it. The code was never broken.
