The Navajo Code Talkers
U.S. Marines who used the Navajo (Diné) language as an unbreakable battlefield code in the Pacific during World War II, from Guadalcanal to Iwo Jima.
Where this fits on the timeline. In the Pacific theater of World War II, the war that began for America at Pearl Harbor and ended after Hiroshima, the U.S. Marines faced a deadly problem: the Japanese kept breaking their radio codes. The solution came from an unexpected source, the Navajo (Diné) language and the young Navajo men who spoke it. Their code was never broken, and it helped win some of the fiercest battles of the war.
A code the enemy could not crack
An idea rooted in a rare language. In 1942, a civil engineer named Philip Johnston, who had grown up on the Navajo reservation, proposed using Navajo as a military code. The language was spoken by few people outside the Navajo Nation, had no written form in common use, and was so complex that outsiders found it nearly impossible to learn. The Marines recruited an original group of 29 Navajo men, who created the code from scratch. They built a special vocabulary, using a 'turtle' to mean a tank and an 'iron fish,' or besh-lo, to mean a submarine, plus an alphabet in which Navajo words stood for English letters. It was a code within a language, and it could be spoken faster than machines could encrypt.
From boarding schools to the battlefield
A bitter irony at the heart of their service. The deepest injustice in this story is that many code talkers, as children, had been sent to government boarding schools where they were punished, sometimes beaten, for speaking Navajo. The United States had spent decades trying to erase their language. Now that same language became one of the country's most valuable military secrets. The very words the government had tried to beat out of these men helped save American lives, a painful irony the code talkers themselves felt keenly.
Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima, and beyond
Words that won battles. Around 400 or more Navajo eventually served as code talkers, moving with the Marines across the Pacific at Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima, and many other islands. They transmitted orders, troop movements, and artillery targets in real time, and the messages were accurate and secure. At the battle of Iwo Jima, code talkers sent hundreds of messages without a single error, and a Marine signal officer later said that the Marines would never have taken Iwo Jima without them. Throughout the entire war, the Japanese never broke the code, one of the only unbroken codes in modern warfare.
Kept secret, then honored
Heroes the country could not talk about. Because the military wanted to keep the code available for possible future use, the program stayed classified until 1968. For more than two decades, the code talkers could not tell anyone, not even their families, what they had done in the war. When the story was finally declassified, the nation began to recognize their extraordinary contribution. In 2001, the original 29 code talkers were awarded Congressional Gold Medals, and later code talkers received Congressional Silver Medals.
Why they matter
Service and sacrifice in the face of injustice. The Navajo Code Talkers stand alongside the Tuskegee Airmen and men like Dorie Miller as minority Americans who served their country with distinction even as that country denied them full equality and, in the case of the Navajo, had tried to erase their culture. Their story teaches a powerful lesson: the diversity a nation sometimes fears can become its greatest strength. Native traditions and the Navajo language, once targeted for destruction, helped secure an Allied victory in the Pacific.
Related on StudyQuest
Additional references
Further reading
Recommended, age-appropriate books to explore this further. Links open a library catalog search.
Code Talker: The First and Only Memoir by One of the Original Navajo Code Talkers of WWII
by Chester Nez Judith Schiess Avila
The firsthand memoir of an original code talker, honest about both the war and the boarding schools; best for older students.
Chester Nez and the Unbreakable Code
by Joseph Bruchac
A picture-book biography of Chester Nez that introduces the code talkers to younger readers.
Key Takeaways
In WWII the U.S. Marine Corps used the Navajo (Diné) language as an unbreakable battlefield code in the Pacific
Philip Johnston proposed the idea in 1942; an original group of 29 Navajo Marines built the code, including terms like a "turtle" for a tank
Code talkers served at Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima, and beyond; at Iwo Jima they sent hundreds of messages without error, and the Japanese never broke the code
Around 400 or more Navajo served as code talkers over the course of the war
Many had been punished as children for speaking Navajo in government boarding schools, making their service a profound irony
The program stayed classified until 1968; the original 29 received Congressional Gold Medals in 2001