Who were the ‘Code Talkers’?

Everyone knows who the Washington Redskins were. The football team still exists, but the name Redskins and the two-feathered Indian warrior logo are no more. The owners retired the name and mascot, which Native Americans said were racist. Until they acquire a new name and logo, the team’s name is the Washington NFL (National Football League) football team.

Why not call the Washington NFL football team the Washington ‘Code Talkers’?  This name would honor the Navajo and other American Indians who served as military coders/decoders in World War II?

But as quickly as members of the Navajo Indians suggested the name, it was retracted. The Native Americans don’t want to be associated with a team’s mascot or name.

But who were the ‘Code Talkers’?

Philip Johnson, an American, lived among Native Americans on the Navajo reservation because his father was a missionary to the Indians. And Philip learned to fluently speak the Navajo language.  As a Word War I veteran, he knew the benefits of the unwritten Navajo language, which had no alphabet or symbols.

The military’s search for an unbreakable or undecipherable code led Johnson to recommend the Navajo language. But this wasn’t the first time the American Indian’s and their language facilitated the U.S. during war times.  The Choctaw and Cherokee Indians engineered code talking in World War I. But the name, code talker, generally refers to the recruited Navajos during World War II.

The Navajo’s dialects, syntax, and tonal abilities were extremely complex to understand without proper training and prolong exposure. The language was only spoken on the Navajo lands in the American Southwest.

The U.S. Marine Corps realized the strategic advantage of such a language and recruited hundreds of Navajos and other American Indians.

The first Navajo boot campers created the Navajo code at Camp Pendleton, Oceanside, California. The military developed a dictionary of words that corresponded to military terms. Each letter of the English alphabet corresponded to a word in the Navajo or another Native American language. Memorization was the key to utilizing the codes and dictionary.

Sometimes there was a direct translation from English to the native language. The Indians created new words if there were none for a specific English military word. The word submarine became ‘ironfish’ for the Navajos. The Indians who received the new military code training were called ‘Code Talkers.’ The ‘Code Talkers’ principal duty was to communicate vital battlefield orders, tactics, and other critical information over military telephones and radios.

Major Howard Connor, a 5^th Marine Division officer, said, “Were it not for the Navajos, the Marines would never have taken Iwo Jima.” The ‘Code Talkers,’ who worked 24/7 during the first two days of the battle, sent and received an excess of 800 messages, without error.

The Navajo Code Talkers served in every U.S. Marines’ assault in the Pacific from 1942-1945, and the Japanese never broke their code.

Thank you active and veteran Native Americans military persons for your service!