Code Talkers: Language as a Weapon

The Navajo Code Talkers program began with a proposal that most military officers dismissed as absurd. In nineteen forty-two, a civil engineer named Philip Johnston, who had grown up on the Navajo reservation as the son of a missionary and was one of the few non-Navajos who spoke the language fluently, approached the Marine Corps with an idea: recruit Navajo men to transmit battlefield messages in their native language, which had no written form, no existing dictionary available to foreign linguists, and a tonal structure that made even expert Japanese cryptographers unable to decode it.

The Marines ran a test. Navajos encoded, transmitted, and decoded a complex military message in twenty seconds. Machine encryption took thirty minutes. The program was approved immediately.

From the Navajo Nation, which surrounds Gallup on three sides, more than four hundred men were recruited and trained at Camp Pendleton. They served in every major Pacific campaign from Guadalcanal onward. At Iwo Jima, Major Howard Connor, the signal officer for the Fifth Marine Division, said that without the Code Talkers he would not have taken the island. The Japanese never broke the code.

The program was classified until nineteen sixty-eight. Many of the Code Talkers returned home to the Navajo Nation, never able to tell their families what they had done. In two thousand and one, the original twenty-nine Code Talkers received the Congressional Gold Medal. About three hundred others received Congressional Silver Medals. Several of the original twenty-nine were from communities within a short drive of where you are now, and the Navajo Nation honors them with a memorial at Window Rock, the tribal capital to the northwest.

Gallup's connection to the Code Talkers is woven into the civic identity of the city, appearing in murals, monuments, and the annual Inter-Tribal Ceremonial parade.