posted July 06, 2007 01:24 AM         

Prepared by the Navy & Marine Corps WWII Commemorative Committee

Related resources:

American Indian Medal of Honor Winners
http://www.history.navy.mil/faqs/faq61-3.htm

Navajo Code Talkers in World War II: A Bibliography
http://www.history.navy.mil/faqs/faq12-1.htm

Navajo Code Talker Dictionary
http://www.history.navy.mil/faqs/faq61-4.htm

Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Peleliu, Iwo Jima: the Navajo code talkers took part in every assault the U.S. Marines conducted in the Pacific from 1942 to 1945. They served in all six Marine divisions, Marine Raider battalions and Marine parachute units, transmitting messages by telephone and radio in their native language -- a code that the Japanese never broke.

The idea to use Navajo for secure communications came from Philip Johnston, the son of a missionary to the Navajos and one of the few non-Navajos who spoke their language fluently. Johnston, reared on the Navajo 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.

Johnston believed Navajo answered the military requirement for an undecipherable code because Navajo is an unwritten language of extreme complexity. Its syntax and tonal qualities, 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.

Early in 1942, Johnston met with Major General Clayton B. Vogel, the commanding general of Amphibious Corps, Pacific Fleet, and his staff to convince them of the Navajo language's value as code. Johnston staged tests under simulated combat conditions, demonstrating that Navajos could encode, transmit, and decode a three-line English message in 20 seconds. Machines of the time required 30 minutes to perform the same job. Convinced, Vogel recommended to the Commandant of the Marine Corps that the Marines recruit 200 Navajos.

In May 1942, the first 29 Navajo recruits attended boot camp. Then, at Camp Pendleton, Oceanside, California, this first group created the Navajo code. They developed a dictionary and numerous words for military terms. The dictionary and all code words had to be memorized during training.

Once a Navajo code talker completed his training, he was sent to a Marine unit deployed in the Pacific theater. The code talkers' primary job was to talk, transmitting information on tactics and troop movements, orders and other vital battlefield communications over telephones and radios. They also acted as messengers, and performed general Marine duties.

Praise for their skill, speed and accuracy accrued throughout the war. At Iwo Jima, Major Howard Connor, 5th Marine Division signal officer, declared, "Were it not for the Navajos, the Marines would never have taken Iwo Jima." Connor had six Navajo code talkers working around the clock during the first two days of the battle. Those six sent and received over 800 messages, all without error.

The Japanese, who were skilled code breakers, remained baffled by the Navajo language. The Japanese chief of intelligence, Lieutenant General Seizo Arisue, said that while they were able to decipher the codes used by the U.S. Army and Army Air Corps, they never cracked the code used by the Marines. The Navajo code talkers even stymied a Navajo soldier taken prisoner at Bataan. (About 20 Navajos served in the U.S. Army in the Philippines.) The Navajo soldier, forced to listen to the jumbled words of talker transmissions, said to a code talker after the war, "I never figured out what you guys who got me into all that trouble were saying."

In 1942, there were about 50,000 Navajo tribe members. As of 1945, about 540 Navajos served as Marines. From 375 to 420 of those trained as code talkers; the rest served in other capacities.

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 Government and the public.

The Navajo Code Talker's Dictionary

When a Navajo code talker received a message, what he heard was a string of seemingly unrelated Navajo words. The code talker first had to translate each Navajo word into its English equivalent. Then he used only the first letter of the English equivalent in spelling an English word. Thus, the Navajo words "wol-la-chee" (ant), "be-la-sana" (apple) and "tse-nill" (axe) all stood for the letter "a." One way to say the word "Navy" in Navajo code would be "tsah (needle) wol-la-chee (ant) ah-keh-di- glini (victor) tsah-ah-dzoh (yucca)."

Most letters had more than one Navajo word representing them. Not all words had to be spelled out letter by letter. The developers of the original code assigned Navajo words to represent about 450 frequently used military terms that did not exist in the Navajo language. Several examples: "besh- lo" (iron fish) meant "submarine," "dah-he- tih-hi" (hummingbird) meant "fighter plane" and "debeh-li-zine" (black street) meant "squad."

Department of Defense Honors Navajo Veterans

Long unrecognized because of the continued value of their language as a security classified code, the Navajo code talkers of World War II were honored for their contributions to defense on Sept. 17, 1992, at the Pentagon, Washington, D.C.

Thirty-five code talkers, all veterans of the U.S. Marine Corps, attended the dedication of the Navajo code talker exhibit. The exhibit includes a display of photographs, equipment and the original code, along with an explanation of how the code worked.

Dedication ceremonies included speeches by the then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Donald Atwood, U.S. Senator John McCain of Arizona and Navajo President Peterson Zah. The Navajo veterans and their families traveled to the ceremony from their homes on the Navajo Reservation, which includes parts of Arizona, New Mexico and Utah.

The Navajo code talker exhibit is a regular stop on the Pentagon tour.

Although the codetalkers was declassified in 1968 making their existance during WWII unofficial knowledge, it was not until 2001 that their service in saving thousands of lives in the Pacific arena of WWII was regonized with medals of honor.
http://bingaman.senate.gov/features/codetalkers/

Marines salute Wordl War II 'code talker'
By Michael Tsai
Advertiser Staff Writer

The law said the land their people lived on was not their own. Teachers told them their native tongue had no place in proper society. But when the United States needed Teddy Draper and his Navajo tribesmen to help win the war in the Pacific, they didn't hesitate.

Draper, one of more than 400 Navajo to serve as "code talkers" during World War II, was the guest of honor yesterday at an early Thanksgiving lunch held at Camp Smith in Halawa Heights in honor of Native American Heritage Month.

"They told us we've got to go into the armed service and if we didn't go, we would go to jail," Draper told the assembled Marine audience, a smile forming at the edges of his mouth. "So I 'decided' to go into the service."

Assigned to six Marine divisions, the Navajo code talkers played a vital role in every Marine assault in the Pacific in 1942-45, using an encrypted form of their native language to transmit secrets. Draper and fellow code talkers relayed more than 800 error-free messages in the first 48 hours of the battle of Iwo Jima.

"Long ago, we fought the U.S. and they took our land," Draper says. "Our reservations were called trust lands. We weren't even considered citizens. In school, we were punished if we spoke Navajo.

"But it was the urgency of war that got us all to go out and help. We had to do a good job. And we did. We helped save thousands of lives."

The code talkers kept their mission a secret for a generation before information about their existence was declassified in 1968.

Since then, several books have been written about the code talkers' contributions to the the U.S. victory in the Pacific.

In July, President Bush awarded the code talkers Congressional Medals of Honor — 56 years after the end of World War II.

And more recognition is on the way.

MGM's "Windtalkers" — directed by John Woo and starring Nicolas Cage, Christian Slater and Adam Beach, and filmed in part on O'ahu's Kualoa Ranch — is due in movie theaters in June. (After the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the release was moved back from this month.)

Another film, "Whisper the Wind," is in the works from Pacific Western Productions and Red-Horse Native Productions.

All of this is heady stuff for Draper, 78, who grew up on a Navajo reservation in northern Arizona and vividly remembers seeing a white man for the first time at a trading post when he was 7 years old.

Draper said that while he was growing up, he never considered life outside the reservation. But he was hungry for an education. So, at age 13, he entered the first grade at a government school on the reservation.

He was 20 when the U.S. government lowered the draft age from 21 to 18 in 1943. At the time, military recruiters were visiting the reservations to look for Navajo men to join the war effort.

After completing basic training at Camp Pendleton in California, Draper was assigned to "code school," where he learned a newly developed method of relaying messages using Navajo-based code.

The Navajo Code Talkers Program had been established a year earlier on a recommendation by Philip Johnston, the son of a missionary to the Navajo tribe. Johnston believed that the unwritten, highly textured language could form the basis of an unbreakable code.

Draper and his fellow code talkers learned to relay messages containing seemingly unrelated Navajo words that could be translated into English. The first letter of each corresponding English word would then spell out a word of the message. For example, the word "Navy" could be relayed using the Navajo words "tsah" (needle), "wol-la chee" (ant), "ah-keh-di-glini" (victor) and "tsah-ah-dzoh" (yucca).

Early code talkers also invented some 450 words for military terms with no Navajo equivalent. "Besh-lo" (literally, iron and fish) thus became the word for submarine.

The new code was rapidly translatable and, as Johnston predicted, totally confounding to the Japanese.

Though lauded internally by Marine officials, the code talkers occupied a tenuous position within the military. In certain situations, "bodyguards" were assigned to the Navajo troops. The guards were assigned to protect the code talkers, but they also had orders to kill them in the event of capture.

"They were there sometimes, but we never knew who they were," Draper says. "They knew who we were."

Draper returned to school after the war, raised 12 children and taught the Navajo language to students on the reservation.

Draper's visit to Camp Smith was made possible through his grandson, Lance Cpl. Richado Tsosie, who is stationed at the base as a motor transfer driver. Tsosie said he was told of his grandfather's service by his mother, but "he never said much about it."

Tsosie's other grandfather, Roy Notah, was also a code talker. There are fewer than 150 living code talkers, according to the Navajo Code Talker Association.

posted July 06, 2007 10:15 AM         

I find this fasinating. My father was a Crytographer. He created code.

posted July 06, 2007 11:29 AM         

Cool that your dad was a Cryptographer and created codes.

I also find cryptography fascinating. I love to do those cryptograms in Dell Crossword books. They have pages and pages of them. I seem to have a knack for doing those and can spend hours deciphering those quotes. My husband tells me that I should have worked for the CIA because it comes so easy for me. LOL I don't know if I would be able to come up with my own codes though.

I go with the basis that the letter "E" is the most commonly used vowel in the English language.

Did you ever see the movie "Day of the Condor" with Robert Redford? Very suspenseful and intriguing movie. In that movie he worked for CIA reading books and deciphering secret messages in them.

posted July 06, 2007 02:02 PM         

Dad taught me and my virgo sister several code languages. It was cool. We had our own private language. My mother and my Libra sister never could understand it. It use to really make my libra sister upset.