A problem of speed and secrecy

Every army that fights by radio has the same problem. A message sent in plain language goes out at the speed of speech, and the enemy can listen to it. A message protected by a cipher is safe, but someone has to encipher it at one end and decipher it at the other, by hand with code books or with a machine, and in a battle those minutes can cost lives. In the first months of 1942 the U.S. Marine Corps was preparing to fight its way across thousands of miles of ocean and onto defended islands, where a rifle company might need artillery on a ridgeline right now, not in half an hour.

The Japanese were good listeners. They had trained English speakers in their radio intelligence units, and the Americans assumed that anything said in English on the air would be heard. The Marine Corps also knew that its own codes, like every code, might be broken given enough time and enough intercepted traffic. What it wanted was something close to the speed of plain speech with the security of a cipher. In February 1942 a civilian walked in with a proposal (Marine Corps History Division).

Philip Johnston

Philip Johnston was in his fifties, a World War I veteran and a civil engineer working for the city of Los Angeles. His parents had been Protestant missionaries on the Navajo reservation, and he had grown up there among Navajo children, learning the language well enough that by the age of five he translated for his parents. At nine, according to a Defense Department account, he interpreted for a Navajo delegation that went to Washington to lobby for Indian rights (DoD fact sheet; CIA).

Early in 1942 he read a newspaper story about an Army unit in Louisiana experimenting with Native American soldiers to send messages during training maneuvers. Johnston knew the history: Choctaw soldiers had passed messages by telephone in their own language in France in 1918. He also knew something most Americans did not, which was how hard Navajo was. It was an unwritten language for nearly all of its speakers. Only a few scholars, anthropologists and Franciscan missionaries had attempted a dictionary, and its grammar, tones and sounds made it extraordinarily difficult for outsiders to learn. He went to the naval office in Los Angeles, then to the headquarters of the Eleventh Naval District in San Diego, and finally to Camp Elliott, the Marine training base north of the city, where he met Maj. James E. Jones (Prologue).

Johnston’s argument fit in one sentence, which the Marine Corps History Division still quotes: Navajo was “an unwritten language and completely unintelligible to anyone except another Navajo.” Jones was interested enough to ask for a demonstration.

The test at Camp Elliott

Within two weeks Johnston had found four Navajo men in the Los Angeles area, and a fifth was located on active naval service in San Diego. They met Jones on 27 February 1942. The demonstration was the next day, Saturday, 28 February, before Maj. Gen. Clayton B. Vogel, who commanded the Amphibious Corps of the Pacific Fleet. Vogel had a telephone link set up between two offices and wrote out six messages of the kind a field unit might send. The Navajo men took them in English, put them into Navajo, passed them over the line and turned them back into English at the other end (Prologue).

One of Vogel’s test messages read: “Enemy expected to make tank and dive bomber attack at dawn.” It came back as “Enemy tank dive bomber expected to attack this morning.” The words had shifted, but the meaning had not, and the speed impressed the observers. Accounts of the test differ in their details. A later Marine Corps article put it in dramatic terms, a three-line message encoded, sent and decoded in twenty seconds against half an hour by machine. The National Archives account is plainer and more useful: the men did what Johnston said they could do, and the general who watched them was persuaded.

The test had one obvious weakness, which everyone could see. The men were speaking ordinary Navajo, and Navajo had no words for dive bombers, tanks or battalions. They had improvised. Turning a language into a code would take more than speakers. It would take a vocabulary that did not yet exist.

Vogel’s letter and the doubters

On 6 March 1942 Vogel wrote to the Commandant of the Marine Corps recommending that the Corps recruit two hundred Navajo men for communications duty with its amphibious forces. He described the language as “completely unintelligible” to members of other tribes, reported that only twenty-eight Americans who were not Navajo had more than a superficial knowledge of it, and passed on Johnston’s assurance that a thousand qualified Navajo men could be found. That last estimate proved badly wrong; recruiting would struggle for the rest of the war. The memorandum survives in the National Archives, which now uses it as a teaching document (National Archives).

Not everyone was convinced. On 26 March Col. Frank Halford, the director of recruiting, objected that speed was of little value in the field, since truly urgent messages were usually sent in the clear anyway, and that commanders would be uneasy depending on translations they could not check. Those were reasonable objections, and the program would have to answer both. Headquarters split the difference. It approved a pilot group of thirty men on three conditions: they had to meet the ordinary standards for enlistment, they had to go through the same seven-week boot camp as every other Marine recruit, and they had to meet strict language qualifications in both Navajo and English.

The Navajo Nation in 1942

The men the Marines were looking for came from the largest Indian reservation in the United States, spread across northeastern Arizona, northwestern New Mexico and southern Utah, where many families lived far from paved roads and raised sheep. The Navajo people call themselves the Diné. In 1942 most of their children learned Navajo at home and met English, if at all, in government and mission boarding schools, where speaking Navajo could be punished. Chester Nez, one of the men who would build the code, described in his memoir being disciplined by teachers for speaking his own language. Thomas H. Begay, who served on Iwo Jima, grew up speaking only Navajo and learned English at a boarding school at thirteen.

There is a hard irony in that history, and the code talkers themselves pointed it out for the rest of their lives: the language the government had tried to take from them became the weapon it asked them to use. It is also worth remembering what the reservation had just been through. In the 1930s the federal livestock reduction program had forced the slaughter of a large share of Navajo sheep, goats and horses to fight soil erosion, a policy many families experienced as a catastrophe. Young Navajo men nevertheless volunteered for the armed forces in large numbers after Pearl Harbor. Some lied about their ages to get in. Peter MacDonald, one of the last living code talkers, enlisted at fifteen.

The first twenty-nine

In the spring of 1942 recruiters went to Window Rock, Arizona, the seat of the Navajo tribal government, with the approval of the Navajo Tribal Council (DoD). The recruiters wanted young men who were fluent in both languages, could pass the Marine Corps physical and could handle the training. The recruits were sworn in at Fort Wingate, New Mexico, where a photographer recorded them raising their right hands outside a stone building with a bus waiting behind them. One of the thirty dropped out, and twenty-nine reached the Marine Corps Recruit Depot in San Diego on 5 May 1942 (Prologue; CIA).

They became Platoon 382. Boot camp was the same for them as for every recruit that summer: drill instructors, rifle range, long marches, inspections. The Marine Corps itself had no idea what kind of men it was getting; most of its officers had never met a Navajo. The platoon graduated, and instead of going to infantry units the men were sent to the Fleet Marine Force Training Center at Camp Elliott for courses in message procedure and radio operation.

There, in the summer of 1942, the twenty-nine were given the job for which they had been recruited. They were told to create a code in their own language, test it, memorize it and make it work under fire. They had no cryptographers among them and no precedent to follow. What they built in a few weeks, and how it worked, is the subject of Chapter 2.

The Navajo Code Talkers chapters

Sources