The island

Iwo Jima is a small island shaped like a pork chop, with a dormant volcano, Mount Suribachi, at its narrow southern tip and a plateau of rock and ash to the north. The United States wanted it for its airfields, which lay halfway between the B-29 bases in the Marianas and Japan. Its defenders, about twenty thousand men under Lt. Gen. Tadamichi Kuribayashi, had spent months turning the island into a fortress of caves, bunkers and connecting tunnels. They were ordered not to contest the beaches but to let the Marines land and then destroy them from positions they could not see (Iwo Jima collection).

The 4th and 5th Marine Divisions landed side by side on the southeastern beaches at H-Hour, 0900, on 19 February 1945. The beaches were not sand but terraces of soft black volcanic ash in which men sank to their ankles and vehicles bogged down. Japanese fire from Suribachi and the high ground to the north swept the crowded beachhead, and the first day cost 2,420 casualties (Iwo Jima, Chapter 2). The 3rd Marine Division, held in reserve, began landing on 21 February and attacked up the center of the island.

A battle fought by radio

Iwo Jima was a radio battle. The island was too small and too exposed for messengers to run safely between units, and telephone wire was cut constantly by shellfire. Three divisions were packed side by side on a front only a few thousand yards wide, with naval gunfire ships offshore and carrier aircraft overhead, all of them firing close to the Marines’ own lines. Every advance depended on coordinating with the units on either flank and calling for fire on bunkers that could be seen only when they opened up. Every one of those messages could be overheard by Japanese radio intelligence.

That is the setting in which the Navajo code proved its worth. A company commander who found a bunker could get its location to his battalion in minutes in a form the enemy could not use. A battalion could tell a destroyer where to fire without telling the Japanese where the Marines were. Casualty reports, requests for water, plasma and ammunition, the positions of tanks and the boundaries between units all went the same way. The traffic was ordinary; what made it extraordinary was that there was so much of it, so fast, without mistakes.

Connor’s forty-eight hours

The most quoted testimony comes from Maj. Howard M. Connor, the 5th Marine Division’s signal officer. In the first forty-eight hours, by his account, six Navajo code talkers working around the clock sent and received more than eight hundred messages, all without an error. “Were it not for the Navajos,” he said, “the Marines would never have taken Iwo Jima” (CIA; DoD). Some retellings speak of six radio nets rather than six men; the unit profile on this site discusses both readings.

Connor’s figures come from his later account, not from a surviving message log, and they are best read as a commander’s judgment rather than a count. A National Archives record from the battle gives the same verdict in the drier language of a report. Capt. Ralph J. Sturkey called the Navajo code “the simplest, fastest, and most reliable means” available for transmitting secret orders over radio and telephone circuits exposed to interception (Prologue).

The map

The landing beaches ran northeast from the foot of Suribachi: Green and Red for the 5th Marine Division, Yellow and Blue for the 4th. The 5th cut across the narrow neck of the island to isolate the volcano, then turned north along the west coast. The 4th fought north along the east coast through some of the worst ground on the island, and the 3rd took the center, across the airfields. The pulsing circles stand for the radio nets on the crowded beachhead.

The flags on Suribachi

On the morning of 23 February a patrol of the 28th Marines, 5th Marine Division, reached the rim of Suribachi and raised a small American flag on a length of pipe. A larger flag replaced it a few hours later, and Joe Rosenthal’s photograph of the second raising became the most famous image of the war (Iwo Jima, Chapter 3).

The code talkers have their own place in that story. A 2018 tribute in the Congressional Record credits Teddy Draper Sr., a code talker with the 5th Marine Division, with radioing from Suribachi: “We have raised the flag; we have taken the hill.” The same record gives a date of 25 February; the flags went up on the 23rd, and the date may refer to a later message or simply be in error (Congressional Record). A more elaborate version, in which the code talkers spelled out the name of the mountain letter by letter, is retold widely but is not documented in the sources used here. You can, however, see how it would have sounded.

The flags marked the end of the fight for the volcano, not the end of the battle. The hardest fighting was still ahead, in the ridges, gorges and cave systems of the north: Hill 362, Nishi Ridge, the Meat Grinder, Cushman’s Pocket. The island was declared secured on 16 March, and the operation was announced complete on 26 March after a last Japanese attack near the western beaches. Nearly seven thousand Americans were killed. Twenty-seven Marines and sailors received the Medal of Honor for their actions on the island.

The men on the island

No complete roster of the code talkers on Iwo Jima has been published, and estimates of how many served there vary widely. The men below are among those whose service on the island is documented in the sources used for this section.

Their own accounts add what the reports leave out. Begay, asked about the battle at the age of a hundred, said simply, “It’s a scary thing” (CNN, 2025). Toledo remembered how his division landed into a battle already three days old and how many men had already been lost (National WWII Museum). Holiday, like many code talkers, kept his service largely to himself for decades, as the secrecy rules required (Marine Corps Times).

What Iwo Jima taught

Iwo Jima was the code’s greatest test, and the Marine Corps studied the results. The reports filed after the battle praised the code talkers and also listed what still went wrong: men from different classes who used different words, and units that had too few code talkers to keep circuits open around the clock. The recommendation was that all code talkers be “thoroughly trained in a standard Navajo military dictionary” and given refresher training every quarter (Prologue). The revised dictionary that survives today is dated 15 June 1945, three months after the battle ended.

Within weeks of Iwo Jima the Marines were fighting on Okinawa, and the code talkers went with them. What happened next, and why the country did not hear about any of it for a generation, is the subject of Chapter 5.

The Navajo Code Talkers chapters

Sources