The Navajo Code Talkers Helped to Win World War II

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The Navajo Code Talkers: Helped to Win World War II

The early hours of December 7, 1941, marked the dawn of what President Franklin D. Roosevelt called “a date which will live in infamy.” The day that the Japanese launched a surprise attack on the U.S. fleet anchored at Pearl Harbor in the Hawaiian Islands was the day that brought the United States into World War II.

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For the next three and a half years, many islands in the Pacific Ocean became a vast, fragmented battlefield. Allied soldiers, unaccustomed to guerrilla warfare, fought for weeks to gain a few yards in desperate attempts to force back Japanese.

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An incident on the island of Saipan was typical. One night the enemy retreated a few hundred yards and a unit of U.S. marines moved forward. But in the darkness and confusion, members of the unit immediately found themselves under artillery fire – from their own countrymen. The marines urgently radioed headquarters to explain their plight. But the gunfire only intensified; their message was being considered a Japanese ruse.

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Finally the mariners received a curious request: “Do you have a Navajo – and convinced headquarters that the unit was one of their own. The firing ceased immediately.

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Language Barrier: The unwritten language of the Navajo Indians was used at the basis of a cryptic code that the Japanese never deciphered throughout the Pacific campaign.

Hidden Weapons

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The Navajos – from Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah – had been recruited into the U.S. Marine Corps in 1942 at the instigation of lived with the tribe. They were trained to communicate in a code that no enemy was able to break.

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The qualifications of the Navajos for this specialized task were unbeatable: their language was totally incomprehensible to anyone who had not lived among them and studied it in depth. The Navajos were the only Indian tribe that German philologists had not studied prior to the war. In 1942 it was estimated that only some of 28 non-Indians could understand what Navajos said.

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As with other Indian tongues, Navajo is a “hidden” language, one with neither native alphabet nor written symbols, and it is spoken with extraordinary precision and subtlety of infection and pitch. Depending on how it is stressed, one word can have several meanings.

At first 29 Navajo recruits worked out the code that, by the end of the war, some 420 of their fellow tribesmen would use. The code’s vocabulary – 411 terms – was based on association: dive-bomber became chickenhawk; fighter-plane, humming-bird; battleship, whale; submarine, iron fish. The Navajos used imagination and humor too. They called ammunition “all sorts of shells,” and antitank missiles “tortoise shooters”; Australia was “rolled hat.” and China, “braided hair.”

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They also devised a code for the alphabet in order to spell out words not included in the 411-term vocabulary. For example, the letter A became wol-la-chee, the Indian word for ant; B was shush, the word for bear. To make the alphabet more complicated, the most common letters – A, E, I, O, N, and T – had several coded alternatives.

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Total Success

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Crouched over radios and field telephones, the Navajo code talkers became familiar figures from the Solomon Islands to Okinawa. They sent messages at lightning speed in a series of rapid, guttural, singsong sounds that were incomprehensible to their fellow soldiers and the Japanese alike.

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The Navajos needed no time-consuming codebooks or charts. They had memorized the entire code and carried in their heads. Japanese cryptographers tried every known technique to crack it. They never succeeded.