The Navajo Code Talkers Built an Unbreakable Code From Their Own Language

The most effective cipher machine of the Pacific war did not have gears, rotors or a patent. It had a grandmother. It was a language that a few dozen Marines had learned at home as children, and the enemy's finest cryptanalysts could listen to it all day and come away with nothing but noise.

That is the story of the Navajo Code Talkers, and it deserves to be told straight, because the straight version is better than the legend. It has an inventive idea from an unlikely place, a first class of twenty-nine volunteers, a code that worked under fire from Guadalcanal to Iwo Jima, and a secret kept so well that the men could not talk about it for more than twenty years. It also has a hard irony that a serious account cannot skip. Let me take it in order.

The problem every army has

Every army has the same two needs in the middle of a fight. It must say something to a commander a mile away, and it must keep the enemy from understanding what it said. Radios solve the first need and create the second problem, because anyone with a receiver can listen.

The standard answer in 1941 was a cipher machine or a codebook. Both are slow. A machine can take hours to encode and decode a message, and hours are a luxury that a landing force on a beach does not have. A codebook can be captured, and a code that is captured has to be replaced everywhere at once. Armies had also learned in the First World War that speaking in a language the enemy did not know could work. The Choctaw soldiers who used their language on the telephone lines in 1918 are the best-known example, and the lesson stuck with a few officers.

The Pacific war added a special difficulty. Japan had studied American communications for years and had people who understood English. Plain English was useless, and the more clever codes in the field were slow. What was needed was something fast, something that a trained speaker could say into a handset at the speed of conversation, and something that an expert who had never heard it could not unravel by pattern and statistics.

One man's idea

The idea came from a civilian named Philip Johnston. He was the son of a missionary who had worked among the Navajo, he had grown up on the reservation, and he spoke the language. He was also a veteran of the First World War. By early 1942 he was an engineer in Los Angeles, and he read a newspaper account of an armored division trying out Native American soldiers as radio operators. The thought arrived whole. Navajo, he reasoned, was the right language for the job.

His reasons were sound and they are the reasons the code worked. Navajo is a complex language with a grammar and a sound system unlike any European or Asian tongue. In the 1940s it was almost entirely unwritten, so there were no textbooks and no dictionaries for an enemy to study. And the number of people outside the tribe who could speak it was tiny. General Vogel's own letter of March 6, 1942 said that no more than about twenty-eight Americans outside the tribe had studied the dialect.

In February 1942 he took the proposal to Major General Clayton Vogel, the commander of the Amphibious Corps, Pacific Fleet, at Camp Elliott near San Diego. A demonstration followed. Navajo men were given English messages, put them into their language and sent them, and others received and translated them back, quickly and accurately. Vogel wrote to the Commandant in support, and the Marine Corps approved recruiting a first group of Navajo volunteers.

The first twenty-nine

The first group of Navajo recruits came to the Marine Corps in the spring of 1942, and twenty-nine of them formed the first class of what became the Navajo Code Talkers. They went through basic training like every other Marine, and then they were set to the task that no one had done before, which was building the code themselves.

That is the detail worth stressing. The Marines did not hand the recruits a code. The recruits made it. They worked out the vocabulary, the alphabet and the system of substitution, and they did it with a sense of what would sound natural, what would stick in the memory, and what a Marine under fire could say without a moment's thought.

The design had four parts.

1. An alphabet of words. Each letter of the English alphabet was assigned one or more Navajo words that stood for an English word beginning with that letter. In the best-known example, the Navajo word for ant stood for the letter A, and so on down the alphabet. A message could be spelled out letter by letter, and because several words could stand for a common letter such as E, the frequency patterns a cryptanalyst looks for were blurred.
2. Code words for military terms. The ones that came up all day were given their own short words so nobody had to spell them. A submarine became an iron fish. A fighter plane was a hummingbird, and a bomber a buzzard. The vocabulary eventually ran to hundreds of terms. The recruits chose animals and ordinary things because they were easy to remember and fast to say.
3. Memory, not paper. The code was not written down in the field. The men learned it and carried it in their heads, which meant there was no codebook to capture. Instructors drilled them until they could handle it under pressure.
4. Speed. In the February 1942 demonstration, Navajo speakers sent and decoded a short message in about twenty seconds, against roughly half an hour for the cipher machines of the day. That speed was the main selling point, though one colonel later argued that in the field it mattered less than advertised.

From Guadalcanal to Iwo Jima

The Code Talkers went into the Pacific with the Marines, and the first use in combat came in 1942 at Guadalcanal, where American forces had landed in August and held an airfield through months of hard fighting. Before long Navajo code talkers were attached to the Marine divisions across the Pacific. They served in a long list of campaigns, the island-hopping war that took Marines across the central Pacific to places whose names ought to be memorized by every schoolchild: Bougainville, Guam, Peleliu, Iwo Jima and Okinawa.

On the beach and in the line, their work was simple to describe and brutal to do. A code talker with a radio would sit near a commander and pass orders, reports and requests for fire support. He would talk through artillery barrages, with the fighting around him, and he was a priority target for the enemy for the plain reason that anyone with a radio gets shot at. The danger was not only on the other side of the line. On Guadalcanal an Army patrol stopped a Navajo Marine and radioed that it had captured a Japanese in Marine clothing, and he was released only after a Marine officer identified him.

At Iwo Jima in February 1945 the Marines called on the code more heavily than in any earlier fight. A Marine signal officer of the 5th Marine Division, Major Howard Connor, is recorded as saying afterward that the Marines would never have taken Iwo Jima without the Navajos. Accounts credit his six Navajo code talkers, working around the clock through the first two days, with more than eight hundred messages sent and received without error. Check the figures in the Marine Corps history of the battle before you repeat them, because retellings differ a little. The story of that day is told in Iwo Jima in Thirty-Six Days and the Two Flag Raisings on Mount Suribachi.

By the end of the war about four hundred Navajo had served as code talkers. The number is approximate in the sources, and I would rather give you an honest "about" than a false precision.

Why the Japanese never broke it

This is the question that matters, and the answer has two parts.

The first part is that the code was sound in its design. A conventional cipher is a systematic transformation of a language the enemy already knows, and a patient analyst with enough messages can find the system. The Navajo code was something else. It stacked an unwritten language, a private vocabulary and spoken delivery, and nobody on the other side had any of the three.

The second part is a small, grim, well-documented episode. The Japanese did capture an American who spoke Navajo. He was a Navajo soldier named Joe Kieyoomia, taken prisoner on Bataan, and his captors wanted to know what the radio traffic meant. He could hear the words, because they were his own language, but they were not sentences in any form that he recognized, because the code made them nonsense to anyone who had not learned it. He told them truthfully that he could not make sense of it. His captors did not believe him, and he was treated cruelly for it. He survived the war. Kieyoomia's story is a reminder of the thing a code is for. Even a native speaker could not read it without the key.

I do not want to overstate this. The Navajo code was one tool among many, and the Pacific war was won by industry, by sailors, soldiers and airmen, and by a great deal of other cleverness, including the American codebreakers who read Japanese messages at Midway, a story told in Midway and the Codebreakers Who Let the Navy Set an Ambush. The Code Talkers did not win the war alone. What they did was shield the Marines' communications at the moment that those communications mattered most, which was in the middle of a landing.

The hard irony

Now the part that a serious account cannot skip. Some of these men had been sent as children to government boarding schools, where for decades the policy of the federal government was to suppress Native languages, and where children were punished for speaking the language of their families. The language that the nation tried to stamp out in the schoolhouse became, a generation later, the language that protected Marines on the beach.

The Code Talkers themselves did not dwell on the contradiction in the way that a modern writer might. They enlisted, many of them as teenagers, in a country that did not yet grant every Native American full citizenship rights in practice in every state, and they served. Arizona and New Mexico, where the Navajo Nation lies, kept Native Americans from the ballot until court rulings in 1948, and some obstacles lingered afterward. A man could risk his life for the country and then find that the county clerk would not let him cast a ballot.

Here is where I part company with those who think the right lesson is cynicism. The honest lesson is that the principle was always better than the practice, and that men like these held the country to its principle. They did not wait for justice to be perfect before they defended the nation that was trying, slowly and imperfectly, to deserve them. The Declaration states that all men are created equal and endowed with unalienable rights. The Code Talkers served the principle, and in time the law caught up with them. That is how a republic repairs itself, by citizens who insist on the promise.

The strongest objection, answered

There is a respectable objection to telling the story as I have told it. It runs like this. The Code Talkers are celebrated now, it says, but they were treated as expendable then and forgotten afterward, and the celebration lets the country feel good about itself while the underlying injustices went unaddressed. A tidy tale of heroism, the critic says, is a way of avoiding the harder history.

I take the objection seriously, and part of it is right. The boarding-school policy was a wrong, the delay in honoring the men was a failure, and a country that praises a veteran in a ceremony and neglects him in a clinic has not paid its debt. Seven Myths About Veterans That Shape Bad Policy, and the Facts argues that the real measure of a nation's gratitude is how it treats veterans in ordinary years.

But the objection fails as a reason to stop telling the story, for three reasons.

1. The honor is real, not a cover. The men did the thing. The code worked. The Marines who used it said so at the time, in their own reports. A fact does not become false because it is also convenient.
2. The wrong and the heroism are not rivals. The same account can hold that the boarding schools were wrong and that the men who survived them were heroes. Telling both is what a mature country does.
3. Silence is the worse alternative. The code was kept secret for decades by order, not by neglect alone, and the men themselves were not allowed to speak. The remedy for a secret that hid heroes is to tell what they did, and to tell it accurately.

The secret, and the thanks

The code remained classified after the war. The military kept it because it had been so effective and because it might be useful again, and the Code Talkers were under orders not to discuss it. It was declassified in 1968. That is more than two decades in which men who had done something extraordinary went home, worked, raised families, and were not permitted to tell their own children what they had done in the war.

They were told to be silent, and they were silent. Most of us cannot keep a surprise party quiet for a week.

Recognition came slowly. The Navajo Code Talkers were honored in various ways in the following decades, and in 2000 Congress passed a law to award Congressional Gold Medals to the original twenty-nine. President Clinton signed it in December 2000, and in July 2001 President George W. Bush presented gold medals to four surviving members of the original group and, on behalf of the others, to their families. Later, Congress and the Marines recognized the other men who had served as code talkers with silver medals. Each of the original twenty-nine received a gold medal in his own right, and the Navajo Nation's own museums and memorials preserve their story.

A Congressional Gold Medal is among the nation's highest civilian honors, and it is Congress's to give under its power to appropriate and to honor. That is worth a moment for anyone who reads the Constitution with care. The medal comes through the legislature, voted by the people's representatives, signed by the President. It is not a decree from a bureau. It is the republic saying thank you in the way the Constitution provides.

What the story asks of us

Three things.

First, it asks us to remember that talent does not come from where the credentialed expect it. The best secure communications system of the Pacific war was designed by Marines who were, to the planners, not even on the list of possible solutions, and it was proposed by a civilian with no rank. A free country benefits when ideas can come from anywhere and a general is willing to listen. Compare Bicycle Mechanics From Dayton Beat the Government-Funded Langley Into the Air for another case of the same thing.

Second, it asks us to keep our promises to those who served. The country that asked these men to keep a secret owed them its thanks on the day the secret ended, and it was late. We can be quicker with the veterans of our own time.

Third, it asks us to teach it. A story that is not taught is a story that dies. If you want your children to know what it means to be an American, tell them about twenty-nine volunteers who built a code out of their mother tongue and used it to protect their country.

The case in brief

1. A civilian engineer, Philip Johnston, proposed Navajo as a battlefield code in early 1942, and the Marine Corps tested it and adopted it.
2. The first twenty-nine Navajo recruits built the code themselves, with an alphabet of words, hundreds of terms for military things, and a rule that it was learned and never written down in the field.
3. From Guadalcanal to Iwo Jima the code carried orders at the speed of speech, and Japan never broke it.
4. The men served a country that had tried to suppress their language and had not yet given every one of them a full vote, and they served anyway, which is a rebuke to cynicism and a credit to the principle they held the country to.
5. The code stayed secret until 1968, and Congress awarded gold medals to the original twenty-nine in 2000 and 2001. The thanks was late but it was real.

What you can do: search your state or county for a veterans' memorial or a Native American veterans' event, and attend it with your family.