ied July 20, 2005 (more on him later)
The most ambitious effort to employ native languages as secret codes was championed by Philip Johnston. Johnston was a World War I veteran who had come by covered wagon to settle on Navajo land in northern Arizona with his missionary family. By age 9, he had gained such proficiency in Navajo language that he acted as interpreter between two Navajo leaders and President Theodore Roosevelt when they met in 1901. Johnston had heard of the Choctaw Code Talkers, and he was convinced that the Navajo language would also be nearly impossible for an enemy to understand. After all, he was one of perhaps 30 non-natives who understood the complex and subtle Navajo expressions. Now, all he needed to do was convince the skeptical military that he had the answer to their security problems.
Johnston did convince Lt. Col. James E. Jones, a Marine signal officer, to let him put on a demonstration at Camp Elliott, near San Diego, in February of 1942. Navajo volunteers translated typical military messages from English to Navajo, and sent the messages to another room where other Navajos translated them back to English within 20 seconds. Using coding machines to convey the same messages took 30 minutes. The Marines agreed to enlist Johnston and 30 Navajos to try their system in actual combat...but it had to be foolproof. Allied forces in the Pacific would be staking their lives on the security of the orders sent via the Code Talkers.
Carl Gorman was one of the Navajos sent to Guadalcanal in the fall of 1942. As a young boy attending school at the Rehoboth Mission in Chinle, Arizona, he had been locked in chains in the school basement for refusing to speak English instead of Navajo. With Japanese forces sweeping over Guadalcanal and listening to every Marine radio frequency, Gorman and his friends William Yazzie, Jack Nez and Oscar Ilthma called in artillery fire and provided status reports in what again sounded like gibberish to the enemy.
The Japanese cracked every code that the Army and Navy came up with, but not the Navajo code.
Navajo is a spoken language handed down orally from generation to generation. The Code Talkers created a system of native words to represent characters of the English alphabet, so that they could spell out English words that had no Navajo equivalent. They also assigned their own expressions, like "iron-fish" to mean submarine, for over 400 important military terms. Each Code Talker memorized these special words. There were no written materials that could be captured.
Joe Kieyoomia, a Navajo soldier who was not trained as a Code Talker, was captured and survived the Bataan Death March, only to be tortured into trying to decode intercepted Marine communications. Left standing naked in the snow, feet frozen to the parade ground, he couldn't confess to what he didn't understand. The secret code made no sense, even to another Navajo.
It was said by high military officers that the Marines would never have taken Iwo Jima without the Navajo Code Talkers, and World War II might have had a different outcome without their contribution.
The 400 Navajos who were recruited and served as Code Talkers came home from the war and went through special native ceremonies called the "Enemy Way" to exorcise them of the painful memories of hand to hand combat and ghosts of the dead.
Incredibly, one of America's most valuable secret weapons had been developed thousands of years before there even was a United States....
It was the power of the Native American Language.
The Navajo Code