Honoring WWII’s Marine Code Talkers for Veterans Day

Veterans Day becomes somewhat of a quandary if one seeks to highlight only one particular group amongst the magnitude of those deserving of focus. For indeed, while some may appear to shine more brightly, their luster and magnificent illumination is merely a reflection of a cast of more than a million military members who served, and continue serving our nation…. of which our FA “founding father”, Curt is one. (hat doff to you, guy….)

As the wife of a Navy enlistee during the Vietnam War, I can say that my military life still remains a strong and humbling memory in my life. The comraderie is unlike any bond I’ve seen… from soldiers and shipmates to their families. Their unquestioned loyalty to freedom, liberty and this country is uncomprehendable to most civilians. During decades of wars conducted on foreign soils – indeed even the strategic and import of these missions being even more foreign to the layman’s understanding – the sense of ultimate sacrifice of self for fellow Americans and country has suffered from lack of respect. Nay… has even been demeaned by some with words and spittal.

With this diminished view of our nation’s warriors in mind, I settled on honoring that less heralded and honored Marine crew of WWII, the Code Talkers.

I have no intention of deliberately slighting any of the 18 tribes that contributed Code Talkers to the great battlefield. For all Code Talkers returned to their reservation homes as heroes without a heroes’ welcome. Very little was revealed of their role in order to reserve this uniquely Native American communication system for future conflicts. But little by little over the decades, more has come out of their importance in the war, and the untold many lives they saved.

So with both an honored bow to not only the Native American tribes, and our remaining veterans and currently serving military personnel, I devote this post to the story of the more well known Navajo Code Talkers of the USMC.

AP’s Ula Ilnytkzy had a story today that also acknowledges the Code Talkers… but touches on their fear that their legacy will die with them. Out of the 400 Code Talkers, only 50 are believed to be alive. Thirteen of them came to NYC – many using canes – to walk in the Veterans Day parade today.

The young Navajo Marines, using secret Navajo language-encrypted military terms, helped the U.S. prevail at Iwo Jima and other World War II Pacific battles, serving in every Marine assault in the South Pacific between 1942 and 1945. Military commanders said the code, transmitted verbally by radio, helped save countless American lives and bring a speedier end to the war in the Pacific theater.

They were sworn to secrecy about their code, so complex that even other Navajo Marines couldn’t decipher it. Used to transmit secret tactical messages via radio or telephone, the code remained unbroken and classified for decades because of its potential postwar use.

“We were never told that our code was never decoded” or given identities of the original 29 Navajos who created it, said Keith Little, 85, who joined the Marines at 17 and remembers crouching in a bomb crater amid heavy fire on Iwo Jima.

“It was all covered by secrecy. We were constantly told not to talk about it,” Little said. The Code Talkers felt compelled to honor their secrecy orders, even after the code was declassified in 1968.

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“The code did a lot of damage to the enemy,” said Samuel Tom Holiday, 85, of Kayenta, Ariz., who also is joining the parade. He was a 20-year-old Code Talker when he and two other Marines went behind enemy lines on Iwo Jima to locate a Japanese artillery unit advancing on American forces.

Once the unit was located, Holiday transmitted a coded message to Marine artillery, which fired a big shell at the Japanese. After the Marine rifleman proclaimed it “right on target,” Holiday messaged “Right on Target” to a Navajo Code Talker in Marine artillery.

Prior to the entry of the original 29 Navajo Code Talkers, the Japanese – armed with exceptional English speaking code breakers – swiftly thwarted every attempt at a secure communication code between the allies. But the Japanese didn’t reckon with America’s first citizens.

Per the story on the Official Navajo Code Talkers website, it was Phillip Johnston – a California civilian and son of a Protestant missionary who grew up on a Navajo reservation and one of the few outsiders fluent in their difficult language – who came up with the idea to create a code using the Native American Navajo and pitched it to Major General Clayton B. Vogel, the commanding general of Amphibious Corps, Pacific Fleet, and his staff.

With plenty of fluent English speakers at their disposal, they [the Japanese] sabotaged messages and issued false commands to ambush Allied troops. To combat this, increasingly complex codes were initiated. At Guadalcanal, military leaders finally complained that sending and receiving these codes required hours of encryption and decryption—up to two and a half hours for a single message. They rightly argued the military needed a better way to communicate.

He realized that since it had no alphabet and was almost impossible to master without early exposure, the Navajo language had great potential as an indecipherable code. After an impressive demonstration to top commanders, he was given permission to begin a Navajo Code Talker test program.

Their elite unit was formed in early 1942 when the first 29 Navajo Code Talkers were recruited by Johnston. Although the code was modified and expanded throughout the war, this first group was the one to conceive it. Accordingly, they are often referred to reverently as the “original 29”. Many of these enlistees were just boys; most had never been away from home before. Often lacking birth certificates, it was impossible to verify ages. After the war it was discovered that recruits as young as 15 and as old as 35 had enlisted. Age notwithstanding, they easily bore the rigors of basic training, thanks to their upbringing in the southwestern desert.

One of the original 29, now 92, was present for today’s Veteran’s Day Parade in NYC.

The young native Americans gathered at Camp Pendleton and devised an ingenious code of 200 terms, which grew to 600 by the war’s victory. What took coding machines 30 minutes to do could now be transmitted in 20 seconds – accurate, concise and undecipherable by the enemy.

It consisted of native terms that were associated with the respective military terms they resembled. For example, the Navajo word for turtle meant “tank,” and a dive-bomber was a “chicken hawk.” To supplement those terms, words could be spelled out using Navajo terms assigned to individual letters of the alphabet—the selection of the Navajo term being based on the first letter of the Navajo word’s English meaning. For instance, “Wo-La-Chee” means “ant,” and would represent the letter “A”. In this way the Navajo Code Talkers could quickly and concisely communicate with each other in a manner even uninitiated Navajos could not understand.

According to Katrena Wells on the WWII history site, there was only 30 or less non-Navajos that could speak the language at the beginning of WWII. In fact, translation of this new code baffled even the untrained Navajo soldiers themselves.

The Navajo language, which was spoken on Navajo reservations in the American Southwest, was unwritten and quite complex as it relied on the use of tone, syntax, and dialects. A Navajo soldier that was not trained as a code talker became a prisoner of war at Bataan and was forced to listen to transmissions in his own tongue. The Fact Sheet cited above quotes that Navajo soldier after the war as saying, “I never figured out what you guys who got me into all that trouble were saying.”

After training, they were sent to the Pacific theatre. Forbidden to write anything that referenced the code and it’s secrets, these Native American warriors became “living codes”, with the military taking great lengths to insure their survival. It was of this unique focus on particular soldiers’ lives that the Nicholas Cage/Christian Slater 2002 movie, “Windtalkers”, was born. In typical Hollywood versions of history, what was not made clear was that the Code Talkers were not only transmitters, but often performed the functions of messengers, along with the duties and responsibilities of any other Marine.

Left—Right: Cpt. Johnny Manuelito (Naschitti, NM); John Benally (Fort Defiance, AZ), Pvt. Rex Kontz (Fort Defiance, AZ), Howard Billiman (Sawmill, AZ), Peter Tracey (Ganado, AZ) Design the NTC Project: Tech Sgt. Phillip Johnson (Leupp, AZ)

Praise for their skill, speed and accuracy accrued throughout the war. At Iwo Jima, Major Howard Connor, 5th Marine Division signal officer, declared, “Were it not for the Navajos, the Marines would never have taken Iwo Jima.” Connor had six Navajo code talkers working around the clock during the first two days of the battle. Those six sent and received over 800 messages, all without error.

In this Sunday, Oct. 4, 2009 photo, Keith Little, 85, of Crystal, N.M., attends a book signing with fellow Navajo Code Talkers in Albuquerque, N.M. Little will join 12 other Navajo Code Talkers in the New York City Veteran’s Day Parade on Wednesday, Nov. 11. Navajo Marines helped the U.S. prevail at Iwo Jima and other World War II Pacific battles with an unbreakable code that stymied the Japanese. The code of Navajo language-encrypted military terms used to transit secret tactical messages was classified for decades after the war – and was so complex that even Navajos Marines who weren’t in the elite unit could’t decipher it. (AP Photo/Felicia Fonseca)

Code Talker Keith Little, 85 (pictured above) was one of those in Iwo Jima.. where in the first 48 hours they coded over 800 transmissions with perfect accuracy alone.

Despite their importance and value, the Code Talkers returned home, ordered to remain silent on their skills and communication codes. It took decades before their code was declassified in 1968.

Long overdue for official recognition, George H. Bush’s Department of Defense honored 35 former Marine Code Talkers at the Pentagon in September, 1992.

Thirty-five code talkers, all veterans of the U.S. Marine Corps, attended the dedication of the Navajo code talker exhibit. The exhibit includes a display of photographs, equipment and the original code, along with an explanation of how the code worked.

Dedication ceremonies included speeches by the then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Donald Atwood, U.S. Senator John McCain of Arizona and Navajo President Peterson Zah. The Navajo veterans and their families traveled to the ceremony from their homes on the Navajo Reservation, which includes parts of Arizona, New Mexico and Utah.

The Navajo code talker exhibit is a regular stop on the Pentagon tour.

It took another nine years before another Bush… this time the son, George W… again honored the Navajo Code Talkers by presenting four of five living Code Talkers, plus the relatives of 24 others, with the Congressional Medal of Honor in an afternoon ceremony in the Capitol Rotunda in 2001. [Mata Note: link is to a July 2001 CNN story of the ceremony presentation]

“Today we give these exceptional Marines the recognition they earned so long ago,” Bush said. The president said they brought honor to the United States as well as the Navajo Nation.

“Our gratitude is now expressed for all time in the medals you are about to receive,” he said.

Before Bush presented the medals, the names of the code talkers were read aloud and those attending the event gave them a standing ovation.

“It is, I think, one of the greatest honors that you can bestow on the code talkers,” said code talker Chester Nez. “I’m really happy about it.”

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“When we went into the Marine Corps, we didn’t know what it was that we were going to do,” said Nez. “But after we got out of boot camp and went to a place called Camp Elliot … and there was the first time we found out that we was to use our own language to translate in the combat area.

“All of the 29 Marines that I went in [with], we got together and made a code in our own language. There were over 400 or 500 words that we made up at that time. We memorized them and everything was up here,” Nez said, pointing to his head.

“And nobody knew. The Japanese pulled all of their hair out trying to decipher the code. But it’s one of the hardest languages to learn, that’s why it was never decoded or deciphered.”

But like their ancestors and our warriors today, these quiet heroes never demanded recognition, nor craved the spotlight. Yet for posterity, such a breed of Americans should not be lost to history and their stories buried.

“They really weren’t given any special recognition,” Melson** said. “Most of them I don’t think wanted special recognition, other than that they had done their duty and they had survived, because there was a lot of people that they knew who did not survive.”

[**Mata musing: Chuck Melson, chief historian for the U.S. Marine Corps]

“This was a chapter of our military history that has not been given sufficient attention, and there are some real genuine heroes here who deserve recognition,” said Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-New Mexico, who sponsored the congressional resolution to honor the code talkers. The Navajo reservation is in New Mexico and Arizona.

Such is the stuff of American heroes. And the Code Talkers stand tall amongst the best of them this Veterans Day. Many in this nation owe our very existance to their superb service, for it may have been our parents or grandparents who’s lives they saved. We are forever grateful for their innovative skills, and their dedication to fight for their homeland against foreign enemies.