Volume 44- No. 3
by Frank C Lorey III
The Navajo Code Talkers gained fame in World War II against Japan, where they spoke their own language that was completely undecipherable to the Japanese intelligence experts.
The idea is generally credited to the son of Navajo missionaries, Philip Johnston, who discussed his plan with Lt. Col. James E. Jones, the Signal Corps. officer at Camp Elliot, north of San Diego. Johnston believed that the complex language of the Navajos would provide an unbreakable code when combined with substituted words. The code had to be both verbal and memorized as the top secret nature of its use could not afford to have any printed copies captured.
Two USMC recruiters were sent to the Navajo Indian Reservation, Sgts. Frank Shinn and Paul Anderson. They had no luck for two days, then they appealed to Chee Dodge, chairman of the tribal council. Dodge sent the word out by short-wave radio to trading posts, and soon the recruiters had a crowd of applicants. The first inducted class would contain 29 Navajo volunteers, most between 16 and 18 years of age.
The Navajos proved to be rugged individuals, skilled in outdoor survival and excellent marksmen. All had to be fluent in both English and Navajo, and all of the approximately 450 Code Talkers became fully trained Marines. They were kept completely unaware of their eventual special mission until the basic training was completed, then the signal training and code memorization began.
It proved to be a great speed advantage to have such an unbreakable code that The Paper - 760.747.7119
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January 17, 2013
required no deciphering--a Navajo Code Talker was on both ends of the radio, simply speaking his own language and using some coded phrases for military terms not present in the Navajo language.
The word “battalion” was coded as “red soil” which was spoken in Navajo as “tacheene.” “Philippines” became “floating island” and was pronounced “ke-yah-dana-lhe.” The code for “artillery” was “many big guns,” spoken as “be-al-doh-tsolani.” A tank became a “tortoise,” in the Navajo “chay-dagahi.” Eventually over 600 special words were coded in addition to the normal language. Needless to say, the Japanese never came close to figuring out the code. Even our military was skeptical about the new code. Those who first heard of it thought it would be too hard to use, and take too long to decipher. An experiment was held at Camp Pendleton, testing the old codes against the Navajo Code Talkers. A message that took almost two hours to encrypt, transmit, and decipher utilizing the old codes only took the Navajos about two and a half minutes—no contest at all!
The Code Talkers were used in just about every major Marine Corps. battle in the Pacific--starting with Guadalcanal, on to New Britain, Bouganville, Tarawa, Guam, Iwo Jima, and finally Okinawa. The use of the Navajo code is credited with saving many lives in the heat of battle, as situations changed so rapidly that the Code Talkers messages were practically instantaneous and completely usable as received. The secret of the Code Talkers remained just that after the war--a secret. It wasn’t until 23 years later that some of the details were
Top right, Code-Talker Keith Little, top left, Congressional Recognition Medal, center, Code Talkers, bottom, the Radio code talkers used
released, and full information has only come out in the last couple of years. The Navajos have had to silently live with their amazing story untold, but when it finally came out even Hollywood took notice with the release of the major motion picture “Windtalkers”
that starred Nicholas Cage. Alfred Peaches, now of Winslow, AZ, was in the 6th Division of the U.S.Marine Corps. He trained at Camp Pendleton, north of San Diego, and was sent to Guadalcanal, Saipan, and Okinawa. He worked in cod-
“Navajo Code Talkers . . .” Continued on Page 2