The Unbroken Code

The boy who'd become the first Marine Corps Code Talker — Chester Nez, born 1921 on the Checkerboard area of the Navajo Reservation in northwestern New Mexico — had been beaten as a small kid in a federal Indian boarding school for speaking the language in which he'd one day, twenty years later, send the most consequential radio traffic of the Pacific War. Nobody told him the beatings were part of an official United States Indian policy. He was just told to stop. He stopped, at school. He kept speaking it at home. He grew up. In May 1942, just turned 21, he walked into the Marine Corps recruiting depot at Fort Wingate and enlisted — fuzzy on his own age (the records are unclear; he believed he had to be 21 for the Marines when actually he had to be 17) — and within weeks he was on a train to Camp Pendleton, California.

Nobody had told him yet what the Marine Corps wanted him for. He found out at Pendleton, where he and twenty-eight other young Navajo men — recruited specifically for this, all fluent in Navajo and English — got put in a closed room and handed an extraordinary instruction. The Corps, the briefing officer said, needed a battlefield code the Japanese couldn't break. The cryptographic codes the Corps was running in the spring of 1942 were getting broken often enough to jeopardize operations in the Pacific. Japanese signals intelligence was, by Allied estimate, one of the best such services in the world. The Corps needed something better than mathematics.

What they'd been recruited for, the officer said, was building that something. These young men — a lot of them barely literate in English, most of them never off the reservation — were going to take their own language and construct, on top of it, a tactical military code. Invent vocabulary for the equipment and the formations and the geography of a war they hadn't seen yet. Memorize it. And when the time came, carry the radios into combat themselves.

The twenty-nine men sat with that for a moment. Then they got to work.

What the code actually was

Worth getting straight what the Code Talker code was, because the popular version — "they spoke Navajo on the radio" — is true and radically incomplete.

Navajo by itself was already a brutal barrier to a non-native codebreaker. It's an Athabaskan-family language: tonal phonology, complex verb morphology, and a vocabulary with no real written form before twentieth-century missionary efforts produced partial transcriptions. In 1942 there were no published grammars a Japanese intelligence officer could meaningfully get at. No native Navajo speakers outside the American Southwest. In the cryptographic sense the language was low-resource — even a sophisticated adversary, hearing it transmitted, had no reasonable place to even start.

But they didn't just speak Navajo on the radio. They spoke a code built on top of Navajo, one the original twenty-nine worked out across the late spring and summer of 1942. Two layers. The first was a substitution alphabet: every English letter got a Navajo word that began (in English) with that letter — wol-la-chee (ant) for A, shush (bear) for B, moasi (cat) for C. The second was a vocabulary of operational terms, each a Navajo word the original twenty-nine picked for how aptly it described the thing: gini (chicken hawk) for dive-bomber, jay-sho (buzzard) for bomber, besh-lo (iron fish) for submarine, chay-da-gahi (tortoise) for tank, lo-tso (whale) for battleship, ne-as-jah (owl) for observation plane.

Besh-lo: iron fish, submarine. Lo-tso: whale, battleship. Chay-da-gahi: tortoise, tank. The vocabulary was poetry first and code second, and the code was better for it.

In real use a transmission mixed both layers. A Code Talker reporting an enemy tank column might spell a grid reference with the substitution alphabet and identify the contact with the operational vocabulary. The whole thing went out over a field radio at the speed Navajo gets conversationally spoken. A receiving Code Talker at battalion HQ decoded it in his head and wrote it out in English for the signal officer.

Japanese intelligence — which, by the testimony of its own surviving senior officers after the war, had cracked nearly every other Allied tactical code at one point or another — never broke this one. Not on Guadalcanal, not on Tarawa, not on Saipan, not on Peleliu, not on Iwo Jima, not on Okinawa. The code held, transmission for transmission, from August 1942 through August 1945.

What it did

By the end of the war the program had grown from the twenty-nine original recruits — known ever after, in Code Talker circles, as the original 29 — to roughly four hundred Navajo men in active service across all six Marine divisions that fought the Pacific. Doctrine assigned them to communications platoons at the regimental and battalion level. They humped the standard Marine field radio of the period, the SCR-300, on a backpack frame. They went ashore with the assault waves. In a meaningful number of cases they were among the first Marines onto the beach.

The operational record lives in unit histories, not headlines, because the program was classified at the time and stayed classified for over two decades after the war. Internally, the Marine Corps documented its value in detail. Major Howard Connor, signal officer of the 5th Marine Division at Iwo Jima, said after the war that the six Code Talkers under his command put through more than 800 messages in the first 48 hours of the battle — no errors, no successful enemy intercept — and that without them the division would not have taken the island.

Without them, the division would not have taken the island. — Major Howard Connor, 5th Marine Division Signal Officer, on the six Code Talkers under his command at Iwo Jima.

That sentence — without them the division would not have taken the island — is the kind of line that gets said sometimes in after-action assessments as a courtesy. This time the officers wrote it with their pens flat. Iwo Jima was, tactically, an artillery and small-unit infantry fight run under nearly continuous radio communication. The volcanic terrain killed line-of-sight. The fighting was mostly small teams advancing from one fortified Japanese position to the next, and the coordination of those teams happened on the radio. Every transmission the Japanese listening posts heard and couldn't understand was a transmission that didn't call an enemy mortar barrage down on a Marine position. There were a great many of those over the 36 days of the campaign. The code, in those 36 days, almost certainly saved several thousand Marine lives.

The men

The country, to the extent it carries an image of the Code Talkers at all, carries a faceless one — the Navajo Code Talkers, a category, not a list of names. The men were specific. They had childhoods and families and postwar lives, and most of them came home from the Pacific to find the country they'd served hadn't, while they were gone, meaningfully revised how it treated Indian people.

Chester Nez, original 29, came back to New Mexico, finished a fine-arts degree at the University of Kansas, worked at the Veterans Administration hospital in Albuquerque as a painter — literal painter, walls and signs — and lived modestly until his death in 2014, the last of the original twenty-nine. Peter MacDonald served in the Pacific as a teenage Code Talker, came home, earned an electrical engineering degree from the University of Oklahoma, worked briefly in aerospace, then served four terms as Chairman of the Navajo Nation between 1971 and 1989. Carl Gorman — father of the painter R.C. Gorman, who'd become one of the most collected Native American artists of the twentieth century — fought as a Code Talker on Guadalcanal and Tarawa and came back to civilian life as a painter and a college instructor at UC Davis. John Brown Jr. Thomas Begay. Roy Hawthorne. Joe Kieyoomia — captured on Bataan, survived the Death March, tortured repeatedly to give up a code he'd never even been trained on, and lived to come home. Samuel Tom Holiday. The names go on. The verified roster runs to roughly four hundred.

The men kept the program's existence to themselves for twenty-three years, like their wartime oaths required. The code was declassified in 1968. The Marine Corps started, slowly, to acknowledge what they'd done. The Code Talkers Association formed in 1971 and began the long work of getting the history into the schools and museums. In 1982 President Reagan declared August 14 — the anniversary of the Japanese surrender — National Navajo Code Talkers Day. In 2001, in a ceremony at the Capitol Rotunda with the four surviving members of the original twenty-nine in attendance, President George W. Bush awarded the Congressional Gold Medal to the original 29. Silver medals went to the several hundred Code Talkers who followed. The ceremony was bipartisan, both parties' senior leadership there, broadcast in full on the major networks. It had taken the country 56 years.

What it means

There's a temptation, writing about the Code Talkers, to reach for a redemptive frame — to make the program some kind of resolution of the very long, very ugly American argument over the place of Indian people in the Republic. That frame isn't available, and the men themselves would've rejected it. The same federal government that classified the program for two decades had, within living memory of the Code Talkers' own service, run the school policy of beating Navajo children for speaking the language that won the war. The same Marine Corps that depended on Navajo for its tactical comms discharged its Navajo veterans into a Southwestern economy that, in 1945 and for years after, wouldn't seat them at a Phoenix lunch counter or rent them a Gallup hotel room. They came home to the same reservation roads, the same Indian Health Service shortages, the same long fight over land and water their parents had inherited. The medals, when they finally came, did not undo any of that. Say it plain. It's the truth, and the men deserve it told straight.

What their service does mean, more modestly, is this: the long American argument over who's American — and what being one means — has, at certain moments, been settled not by the speeches in Washington but by what the people in the field decided to do. The twenty-nine young men who walked into the recruiting depot at Fort Wingate in May 1942 had every reason to say no. They'd been beaten as children for the language they were now being asked to use as a weapon. They'd been told, over and over, from positions of authority, that the language was a thing to be ashamed of. They volunteered anyway. They built the code anyway. They carried it ashore across twelve Pacific island campaigns over three and a half years, and the code held.

The country in 1942 had not earned the loyalty the Navajo Code Talkers gave it. They gave it anyway. That gift, more than the medals that came 56 years later, is the measure of the men.

What they gave the country in the end wasn't just the code. It was the proposition that the language the country had spent fifty years trying to stamp out was, in fact, one of the country's strategic assets. The proposition turned out true. And that's the kind of truth a republic that wants to keep going has to be willing to get schooled on.

The Marine Corps has, since the war, set up a permanent Code Talker exhibit at the National Museum of the Marine Corps in Triangle, Virginia. The Navajo Nation runs a Code Talker Museum at Window Rock, Arizona. The Naval History and Heritage Command holds the program's surviving records, the once-classified material now open to researchers. The last of the original twenty-nine, Chester Nez, was buried in 2014 with military honors at the Santa Fe National Cemetery, the Marine Corps Color Guard in attendance, his code-talking dictionary set on top of the coffin.

The country remembers now. It took its time.

— floridaman@america.cool