Indian Givers: Wartime Code Talkers
How Native American Choctaws and Navajos helped win two world wars
Back when we were enduring the fourth grade, not too long after the invention of manned flight, my buddies and I became intrigued with secret codes and would make them up on scraps of paper so that nobody, especially Mrs. Benson or Mrs. Bethea, would ever be able to figure them out. Shortly after we made them up we couldn’t figure them out, either, which made them even more intriguing.
We’d speak that mysterious foreign tongue known as “pig latin” on the playground, certain that nobody would know what were talking about. That was before television, when we’d tune the radio after school to our favorite programs, all of which tried to sell us stuff like “secret code telescopes” or “secret message rings”, or “code cypher books” so that we developed a deep longing for making up stuff that nobody could understand. As far as I was concerned, that’s what school did, too.
During World War 2, a few years before those ancient school days, our country was engaged in fierce combat in the Pacific against the Empire of Japan. As in World War One, the transmission of messages in combat was always in danger of being heard and interpreted by the enemy and result in ships being sunk and sailors or soldiers being killed. Both sides developed intricate codes which could not be broken quickly, sometimes not for days, giving a tremendous advantage to the sender.
Native Americans stepped in to turn the tables, starting with the Meuse-Argonne offensive in World War One. It was one of the largest commitments of American soldiers in that war but the Germans had deciphered our codes are were causing heavy casualties. It was a huge problem.
The solution was stumbled upon by chance. An Army captain overheard two Choctaw soldiers of the 142nd Infantry Regiment chatting away in their language and, shazzam! there was the answer. Choctaw was a language unknown outside the tribespeople. It totally bamfoozled the Germans, who thought the Americans might even have invented a contraption that could speak under water. And it helped US troops win several key battles.
There was a terrible irony in all this which the Choctaw fighters saw immediately … their language was being used as a formidable weapon of war in Europe and yet their children back home in Oklahoma were being beaten in school for speaking it!
The subtle complexity and unusual phonetic structure of Choctaw made it completely impenetrable to German cryptographers. All the talkers had to do was simply speak their native language to secure the transfer of vital information.
Fast-forward a couple of decades …
America is once again in a brutal world war, this time part of it in the Pacific. Even before the bombing at Pearl Harbor, Japanese military cryptographers were cracking codes faster than Allied Intelligence could make them up, literally within hours. The Allies had no defense. Time after time, the Japanese code breakers were quickly able to learn the location of Allied troops, the timing of troop and equipment movements and when and where reinforcements were expected.
But then all that began to change. In 1942, the US Marines rushed 29 Navajo volunteers through basic training at San Diego and gave them the imperative of coming up with a code in their own language.
“This major took us into a great big room and he said ‘you guys are going to have to make up a code in your own native language’ That’s all he said . He left, closed the door behind him and locked the door. We didn’t know what to think.”
(Chester Nez, founding Code Talker).
Within just a few hours, the Navaho soldiers had made up a code so impenetrable that the Japanese were never able to break it during the entire course of the war.
The Navajo language is spoken not written so there is no alphabet and no printed books on Navajo. One can only imagine the contorted faces, hair-pulling, fist-pounding and sheer agony of the Japanese code breakers. Try as they might, they could not squeeze a molecule of meaning out of the radio transmissions they picked up from the Marines.
The conventional image of a military cryptographer is a guy secured safely in a bunker. The opposite was true for the Code Talkers. These largely unsung heroes operated in teams of two often in the very heart of combat, sometimes even behind enemy lines, reporting their movements and troop strength back to base command.
Out in the field, Japanese snipers were ordered to target radiomen and medics as a top priority. This meant that the code talkers had to keep moving as they transmitted, while lugging heavy equipment over difficult terrain. This was especially true during the campaign on Iwo Jima, by the end of which the code talkers had sent and received over 800 messages, all without a single error! A Marine signal officer who fought in that campaign said, “were it not for the Navajo code talkers, the Marines never would have taken Iwo Jima.”
Further frustrating the hapless Japanese is the fact that Navajo is also a tonal language. The same spoken word can radically change in meaning depending on the speakers pitch. Anybody not familiar with the language is going to miss such nuances of sound. Moreover, even if you could discern individual words, you’d still be up a creek trying to deal with the syntax which is completely different from any other language.
With no prior cryptography training the Navajo code talkers came out of that locked room back in San Diego in just a few hours with a system that was amazingly efficient and secure. No encoding machines were needed. Those guys could transmit and receive a message in seconds that would take the Japanese or anybody else a stretch of minutes.
The efforts of the code talkers uniquely helped win two world wars for the United States, whose representatives told them to keep quiet about it. They kept quiet.
Finally, in 2000, the United States Congress passed legislation to honor the Navajo Code Talkers and provided them with special gold and silver Congressional Medals. A statement in the Navajo language on the back of the medals translates to: “With the Navajo language they defeated the enemy.”
I don’t know about you but as far as I’m concerned these guys were a singular and amazing asset for the victory of American forces in that nasty, bloody war. Nobody made their language and nobody made the code they used except they themselves. Indeed, these original Americans defended their home country in giving it a superlative advantage over its enemies in two world wars.
They are the true Indian givers!
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