Navajo Code Talkers: The Weapon Classified for Twenty-Three Years

In nineteen thirty-six, federal boarding school policy for Native American children in Arizona was still in full operation. Hopi and Navajo children were taken from their families and sent to off-reservation schools where speaking their native languages was prohibited. The punishment for speaking Navajo at school could be physical. The explicit goal of the policy was to separate children from their languages, because a language is a culture and a culture is a nation.

Six years later, the United States Marine Corps came to the Navajo Nation with a different proposition. They wanted Navajo men to transmit battlefield communications using their own language.

The reasoning was straightforward. The Japanese military had by nineteen forty-two broken or decoded virtually every American communications system in the Pacific theater. Cryptographers could not stay ahead of the Japanese code-breakers. But Navajo is a tonal language with an extremely complex grammar, had never been written down in a standardized form, and was spoken by fewer than thirty people outside the Navajo Nation, none of them Japanese. It was, in the most literal sense, an unbreakable code, because it was not a code at all. It was a language.

Approximately four hundred twenty Navajo men served as Code Talkers in the Marine Corps during the Second World War. They transmitted orders, coordinates, and tactical reports in real time under battlefield conditions. Japanese code-breakers never cracked it. Marine Major Howard Connor, who served at Iwo Jima, later said that without the Code Talkers, the Marines would not have taken the island.

The program was classified in nineteen forty-five. The Code Talkers could not speak of their service. For twenty-three years, they carried the knowledge that they had done something decisive, without being permitted to say what it was. Many attended reunions with men who did not know what they had done. Some died before the classification was lifted in nineteen sixty-eight. The men who had been punished in school for speaking Navajo had used that language to help win the war and were then forbidden to say so.