The end of the war

After Iwo Jima came Okinawa, the largest amphibious operation of the Pacific war, from 1 April to late June 1945. The 1st and 6th Marine Divisions fought there alongside the Army, with code talkers in their signal sections. When Japan surrendered in August, some code talkers went on to occupation duty. Teddy Draper Sr., who had been wounded on Suribachi, volunteered for occupation service in Japan and worked as an interpreter.

Peter MacDonald, who had enlisted at fifteen, served with the 6th Marine Division in the South Pacific and in North China, where Marines helped accept and manage the surrender of Japanese forces. “I was not on any landing,” he said later, “except in North China for getting the Japanese to surrender” (U.S. Navy, 2021). By the Defense Department’s count, about four hundred Navajo Marines served as code talkers in the Pacific, and thirteen of them never returned home (DoD fact sheet).

Coming home

The code talkers came home without parades. They had been told not to discuss their work, and they did not; many families learned what their fathers and grandfathers had done only decades later (Prologue). Philip Johnston tried to persuade the Marine Corps to keep a permanent Navajo code program after the war and was turned down (DoD).

The men returned to a reservation and a country that had not changed as much as they had. Native Americans in Arizona and New Mexico could not vote in state elections until court decisions in 1948 struck down the barriers, three years after the code talkers came home. Many veterans went back to herding and farming; others went to school on the GI Bill and became teachers, ranchers, engineers, tribal officials and soldiers again. Thomas H. Begay joined the Army in 1947 and served in the Korean War as a paratrooper and communications specialist. Chester Nez volunteered for Korea too. Draper spent his career teaching the Navajo language at Rough Rock Community High School, where he wrote a curriculum and two workbooks.

Twenty-three years of silence

The program stayed classified because the code might be needed again. Japan had never broken it, and in the uncertain years of the Cold War and the Korean War the military had reasons to keep a proven system in reserve. The code was declassified in 1968 (CIA; Prologue). Only then could the men tell their own story in public, and only then did historians begin to collect it. The first full account, Doris A. Paul’s The Navajo Code Talkers, was published in 1973.

Recognition

Recognition came in stages. On 28 July 1982 President Ronald Reagan signed Proclamation 4954, designating 14 August as National Navajo Code Talkers Day, and presented the code talkers with a certificate of recognition (Camp Lejeune; CIA). On 17 September 1992 the Pentagon opened an exhibit honoring them. In 2000 Senator Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico introduced the Honoring the Code Talkers Act, which President Bill Clinton signed on 21 December 2000. It authorized gold medals for the original twenty-nine and silver medals for the men who had followed them (Prologue).

The Rotunda, 2001

The gold medals were presented in the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol on 26 July 2001. Of the original twenty-nine, five were still living, and four came: Allen June, Lloyd Oliver, Chester Nez and John Brown Jr. President George W. Bush described them as men “who, in a desperate hour, gave their country a service only they could give.” John Brown Jr. spoke in Navajo, then joked, “Maybe Japan is listening!” The Sergeant Major of the Marine Corps, Alford McMichael, closed the ceremony: “Semper Fidelis, code talkers!” (Prologue).

Four months later, on 24 November 2001, about 250 code talkers, or families of men who had died, received Congressional Silver Medals. Navajo Nation President Kelsey A. Begaye called the award “long overdue” and told the veterans, “You are our true American heroes” (Marine Corps Logistics Base Barstow). Teddy Draper Sr. was among the silver medalists. He received his Purple Heart for the wound on Suribachi only in 2004, after years of appeals (Congressional Record).

A year later Hollywood found the story. The 2002 film Windtalkers brought the code talkers to a wide audience, though many veterans and Navajo viewers felt the movie made them supporting characters in their own history. Peter MacDonald has called for a new film that puts the code talkers at the center.

The other code talkers

The Navajo were the largest and best-known group, but not the only one. Choctaw soldiers in the American Expeditionary Forces passed messages in their language in France in 1918, and Comanche soldiers served as code talkers with the 4th Infantry Division in Normandy in 1944. Men from many other tribes did similar work in both world wars. The Code Talkers Recognition Act of 2008 extended congressional recognition to them, and on 20 November 2013 Congressional Gold Medals were presented in the Capitol Visitor Center to the first twenty-five of thirty-three tribes from eleven states whose members had served (U.S. Mint).

The last of them

Chester Nez, the last of the original twenty-nine, died at his home in Albuquerque on 4 June 2014, aged 93. “The recognition of the code talkers came late,” he had said, “but it has been good for my Navajo people” (CNN). Samuel Holiday died in 2018 at 94; Teddy Draper Sr. in December 2017 at 96.

In 2021 Arizona became the first state to make Navajo Code Talkers Day a state holiday. In March 2025 the Defense Department removed web pages honoring the code talkers during a purge of diversity-related content, then restored them after a public outcry and called the removal an error (CNN; Military.com). A dedicated code talkers museum has been planned for years on the Navajo Nation without being built; in 2026 New Mexico announced a $20 million investment in a museum in Farmington.

On 14 August 2026, National Navajo Code Talkers Day, Thomas H. Begay, 101 years old, traveled from the Navajo Nation to the Arizona State Capitol in Phoenix to be honored. He was one of the last two living Navajo code talkers; the other was Peter MacDonald. “I am so damn proud,” Begay said. “We used our language in World War II and won the battles.” Standing nearby, Dawn Manuelito, the granddaughter of one of the original twenty-nine, put it in five words: “Our language saved this country” (Military.com).

The code they built was never broken, and it was never needed again. What remains is the record of what about four hundred young men did with a language they had been punished for speaking, and the obligation to tell it accurately. Start again from the section home, or read the code talkers’ part in the Iwo Jima collection.

The Navajo Code Talkers chapters

Sources