The Navajo Code Talkers: How a Language Helped Win WWII
During the Second World War, a group of Navajo Marines used their own language to create a battlefield code that Japanese forces never broke. The Navajo Code Talkers sent thousands of messages in the Pacific between 1942 and 1945, including during the Battle of Iwo Jima. Their work stayed classified until 1968, and they were not honoured nationally until decades later. This guide explains how the code worked and why the Navajo language was so well suited to it.
Why the Navajo language?
The idea came from Philip Johnston, a civil engineer who had grown up on the Navajo Nation as the son of a missionary and spoke the language. In early 1942 he proposed it to the US Marine Corps. Navajo (Diné bizaad) had several advantages:
- Almost no outsiders spoke it. It was unwritten in everyday use, and very few non-Navajo people knew it.
- It is hard to learn as an adult. Navajo verbs pack subject, object, tense and manner into a single word through layers of prefixes, and meaning can change with tone and vowel length.
- It sounds unlike languages that codebreakers knew. It has sounds such as the glottal stop and the “barred l” (ł) that are rare in European and Asian languages.
The first 29
In May 1942, the first 29 Navajo recruits completed training and built the original code at Camp Pendleton in California. Eventually around 400 Navajo men served as Code Talkers in all six Marine divisions in the Pacific. Some were still teenagers who had lied about their age to enlist.
How the code worked
The code had two layers. First, about 200 (later over 600) military terms were given Navajo words for familiar things:
| Military term | Code word (Navajo) | Literal meaning |
|---|---|---|
| Submarine | besh-lo | iron fish |
| Fighter plane | da-he-tih-hi | hummingbird |
| Bomber | jay-sho | buzzard |
| Tank | chay-da-gahi | tortoise |
| America | ne-he-mah | our mother |
The spellings above are those used in the declassified code lists, not modern Navajo spelling.
Second, for names and words without a code term, each English letter had one or more Navajo words. “A” could be wol-la-chee (ant), be-la-sana (apple) or tse-nill (axe). Using several words per letter made the code resistant to frequency analysis. A trained Code Talker could encode, send and decode a three-line message in about 20 seconds, where coding machines of the time took around 30 minutes.
Iwo Jima
During the first two days of the Battle of Iwo Jima in February 1945, six Navajo Code Talkers worked around the clock and sent more than 800 messages without an error. Major Howard Connor, signal officer of the 5th Marine Division, later said that without the Navajos the Marines would never have taken Iwo Jima.
Recognition
Because the code might be needed again, the Code Talkers were ordered to keep their work secret, and it was declassified only in 1968. President Reagan declared 14 August National Navajo Code Talkers Day in 1982. In 2001 the original 29 received the Congressional Gold Medal and the others the Congressional Silver Medal. The last of the original 29, Chester Nez, died in 2014. Members of other Native nations, including Comanche, Choctaw, Meskwaki and Hopi soldiers, also served as code talkers in both world wars.
The irony
Many of the Code Talkers had been sent to boarding schools where they were punished for speaking Navajo. The language they had been told to give up became one of the most effective secret codes in military history. Navajo is still spoken today by around 170,000 people, making it one of the most widely spoken Native American languages in the United States.
Learn some Navajo
Our Navajo Translator translates English words and greetings into Navajo with the correct tone marks and nasal hooks, such as yá’át’ééh (hello) and ahéhee’ (thank you).
Sources
- National Museum of the American Indian, Code Talking
- The National WWII Museum, “Native Words, Native Warriors“.
- Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Navajo language“.
- Chester Nez with Judith Schiess Avila, Code Talker (2011).