Navajo Code-Talkers During The Battle of Iwo Jima

            In the 1940’s, communication lines were difficult to keep quiet from the opposition.  The Japanese forces were consistently able to decode the Americans’ transmissions which never allowed them to surprise the Japanese.  Nothing was done about this problem until the United States prepared for its’ invasion of the Pacific in 1942 (Bradley, 2009).

            Philip Johnston was an engineer living in California at the start of World War II and the son of a Navajo missionary.  He was not a Navajo, but grew up on the Navajo Reservation and knew all of the Navajo customs and spoke the language fluently.  In 1942, he had developed the concept of using the Navajo language for communications to help defeat the Japanese in World War II (2007).
      Philip Johnston was a veteran of World War I, and heard how eight Choctaw Indians had sent messages to each other in their native tongue during a battle against the Germans at the end of World War I.  These few messages had helped to win the battle, since the Germans had no idea of what was being said.  He knew that the military was searching for a new code to use against the Japanese (2007).  He thought that the Navajo language would be the perfect answer.  Johnston presented his idea to Major General Clayton B. Vogel, the commanding general of the Pacific Fleet.  General Vogel allowed Johnston to give a demonstration at Camp Elliot in California using a few Navajos who resided in California.  The demonstration was so successful that Major Vogel recommended the recruitment into the Marine Corps of at least 200 Navajos for the Code Talker Program.  Almost immediately, 29 Navajos were recruited, and they started developing their unbreakable code (Bradley, 2009). 

            After the successful demonstration, a codebook was created to teach common military terms and concepts to the new recruits.  The text was never allowed in the field, so anyone that was not initiated with the code would only hear parts of unrelated components of a sentence.  The Navajo code-talkers memorized all deviations and performed these codes rapidly during difficult training exercises (Bradley, 2009).  In 1942, there were nearly 50,000 Navajo tribe members.  Come 1945, about 540 Navajos served as Marines.  About 420 of those Navajo trained as code talkers; the others served in other capacities (Hansen, 2004).