Guadalcanal

The first Navajo code talkers reached Guadalcanal in November 1942, three months into the campaign. The 1st Marine Division had been holding its perimeter around Henderson Field since August against attacks by land, sea and air, and its men were worn out by combat, malaria and hunger. Chester Nez and his friend Roy Begay were among the new arrivals. “That was my first combat experience,” Nez said many years later, “and there was a lot of suffering” (CNN, 2014).

Their introduction did not go smoothly. In Nez’s telling, when the code talkers made their first transmission, the regiment’s own radio operators jammed it, convinced that the Japanese had broken into their frequency and were broadcasting in some unknown language. No one had told them what the Navajo Marines were for. The code talkers learned to open their messages with “New Mexico” or “Arizona” so that American listeners would know who was speaking (HistoryNet).

The value of the code showed quickly. Before the code talkers arrived, Nez recalled, American pilots had sometimes hit their own troops on a first pass because no one could safely tell them over the air where the lines were. A position sent in the Navajo code could be given in clear detail without telling the enemy anything. When the 1st Marine Division was relieved and left the island on 9 December 1942, about ten code talkers stayed on Guadalcanal with the units that replaced it.

Earning trust

Recruiting director Halford’s objection had been that commanders would not trust messages they could not check. The answer came from the field. In May 1943 the Marine Corps reported that division commanders found the program had achieved excellent results in training and in combat, and praise from commanders at all levels continued through the war (Marine Corps History Division). Officers who had been skeptical became the code talkers’ most demanding customers, asking for more of them than the program could supply.

The code talkers did not form a separate unit. They were assigned to the communications sections of Marine regiments and battalions, usually in pairs, and they went where those units went. On a quiet day they might handle routine traffic or work as ordinary radiomen and messengers. In an assault they handled the messages that could not wait: where a company was, what it faced, what it needed and where the supporting fire should fall. Artillery regiments used them too, as the photograph of the Toledo cousins shows, because fire orders were exactly the kind of traffic an enemy most wanted to hear.

Bougainville and Tarawa

In November 1943 the code went into two very different battles. On 1 November the 3rd Marine Division landed at Empress Augusta Bay on Bougainville, the largest of the Solomon Islands. Bill Toledo, a code talker in the headquarters company of the 3rd Battalion, 9th Marines, came ashore that morning. His sector met lighter resistance than some of the other landing beaches that morning, and he remembered being ready to use the code that first day without having to (National WWII Museum oral history). A month later a Marine photographer recorded Cpl. Henry Blake Jr. and PFC George H. Kirk at their radio in a jungle clearing on the island, the best-known wartime photograph of code talkers at work.

Three weeks after the Bougainville landing, the 2nd Marine Division assaulted Betio, the main island of Tarawa Atoll in the Gilberts, on 20 November 1943. Betio was less than half a square mile of coral sand, ringed with bunkers, and the Marines had to wade hundreds of yards across a reef under fire. Radio communications on the first day were badly disrupted as sets were soaked and operators killed. A Marine photographer recorded an unidentified code talker kneeling in the sand with his carbine, speaking into a handset; the photograph is held by the Marine Corps Archives at Quantico.

Mistaken for the enemy

For the Navajo Marines one danger came from their own side. Most of their fellow Marines had never met a Navajo, and in the dark, in a jungle, a man with black hair and brown skin speaking an unfamiliar language could be taken for a Japanese infiltrator. On the third day on Bougainville, Bill Toledo was found among the communications men by a rifleman who thought he was a Japanese soldier. The Marine marched him at gunpoint to the commander and was ready to shoot until someone identified Toledo as one of their own (National WWII Museum). Similar stories run through the code talkers’ recollections.

Toledo’s story has a second part. On Bougainville a rifleman was assigned to stay near him. Toledo took him for a friend. Only at a reunion in 1988, some forty years later, did that Marine tell him he had been ordered to protect him. Stories like Toledo’s are the origin of one of the most persistent beliefs about the code talkers, that their guards had orders to kill them rather than let them be captured with the code. That premise drives the 2002 film Windtalkers. The sources used in this section document protectors; they do not document an order to kill, and the program’s own safeguard against capture was the duress signal described in Chapter 2.

The Marshalls and the Marianas

In 1944 the Central Pacific drive gathered speed, and the code talkers went with it. The new 4th Marine Division made its first landing at Roi-Namur in Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands at the start of February. Samuel Tom Holiday, a code talker with the 25th Marines, went on with that division to Saipan, Tinian and finally Iwo Jima (Marine Corps Times). In June the 2nd and 4th Marine Divisions landed on Saipan; a National Archives photograph of three Navajo communication men there carries the note that they landed with the first assault waves to hit the beach. Tinian followed in July.

Guam was retaken in July and August 1944 by the 3rd Marine Division, the 1st Provisional Marine Brigade and Army troops. Bill Toledo was there; his commander was shot on the beach, and the island was declared secured on 10 August (National WWII Museum). In September the 1st Marine Division landed on Peleliu in the Palau Islands, where a battle that was expected to last days went on for more than two months. Chester Nez, one of the original twenty-nine, served there as well as on Guadalcanal and Guam (CNN).

Growing pains

The records in the National Archives show that the program was never as smooth in the field as the legend suggests, and that the Marine Corps worked hard to fix it. There were never enough qualified code talkers for every unit that wanted them, which meant that a Navajo Marine in one unit sometimes had no one trained to talk to at the other end. Navajo lacked terms for many new pieces of equipment, so the vocabulary had to keep growing. And men trained at different times and places sometimes used different words for the same thing, a problem officers called a difference of dialect (Prologue).

The Marine Corps answered by rotating code talkers between divisions so that they would learn each other’s usage, by revising and reissuing the dictionary, and by adding new terms centrally rather than letting each unit improvise. Those problems are worth stating plainly because they make the achievement larger, not smaller. The code worked because a few hundred young men kept hundreds of words straight in their heads under fire, across thousands of miles and dozens of units, and fixed the gaps as they found them.

The road on the map

Follow the code talkers’ campaigns from the Solomons to the doorstep of Japan. Select a marker or play the route.

By the end of 1944 every Marine division in the Pacific had Navajo code talkers in its signal organization. The next landing would put three of those divisions on a single island of eight square miles, with more radios crowded into a smaller space than in any battle the Marines had fought. That was Iwo Jima, the subject of Chapter 4.

The Navajo Code Talkers chapters

Sources