Superintendent’s Chat

Richard McClements, Shonto Preparatory School

 

Veteran’s Day is November 11th.  It celebrates the end of World War I which occurred  on November 11, 1918 at 11 A.M.  It was thought back then that there would never be another war like that one.  Veterans’ Day recognizes all military personnel who have served in all of America’s wars.  I would like to pay tribute to the Navajo Code Talkers.  Those men who are still alive are now in their late 70’s and 80’s.  The following may help to understand what they went through during their early years:

  • They would have been born in the early 1920’s since they served in the war from 1942-1945.
  • Many of their grandparents would have experienced the Long Walk of the 1860’s.  These grandparents would have described the horror of that experience.  The youngsters who were to grow up and become the Navajo Code Talkers would have a natural fear and probable dislike of the Caucasian population. 
  • Some of their parents would have been born before the turn of the century.
  • The vast majority  would have grown up without electricity and running water. 
  • Most, if not all, would never have seen a movie,  listened to the radio, eaten ice cream, or tasted a candy bar.
  • Many would have lived in a hogan.
  • Paved roads on the Reservation would have been very rare.  It was likely that most travel was done by horse and wagon.
  • Their diets would have been significantly better than what most of our students now have.
  • The primary language spoken at home would have been Navajo.  Most of their parents would have spoken very little English. 
  • All would have lived through the Great Depression of the 1930’s.
  • Many, but not all, would have gone to the type of BIA schooling that I discussed in a previous article.  These schools did not treat Navajos well.
  • During their boot camp, again, most would have been poorly treated by their Caucasian counterparts.  I have spoken with a number of Navajo Viet Nam veterans who said even in the 1960’s and early 1970’s, this cycle of mistreatment continued.
  • During the time of their service, Navajos did not have the right to vote.
  • When these men came back following the war, they had experiences around the world that few Navajos could comprehend. 

The following gives you some websites for information on  Navajo Code Talkers: World War II Fact Sheet Research by Alexander Molnar Jr., U.S. Marine Corps/U.S. Army (Ret.) Prepared by the Navy & Marine Corps WWII Commemorative Committee:

 

 

American Indian Medal of Honor Winners
Navajo Code Talkers in World War II: A Bibliography
Navajo Code Talker Dictionary

 

Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Peleliu, Iwo Jima: the Navajo code talkers took part in every assault the U.S. Marines conducted in the Pacific from 1942 to 1945. They served in all six Marine divisions, Marine Raider battalions and Marine parachute units, transmitting messages by telephone and radio in their native language -- a code that the Japanese never broke.

 

The idea to use Navajo for secure communications came from Philip Johnston, the son of a missionary to the Navajos and one of the few non-Navajos who spoke their language fluently. Johnston, reared on the Navajo reservation, was a World War I veteran who knew of the military's search for a code that would withstand all attempts to decipher it. He also knew that Native American languages--notably Choctaw--had been used in World War I to encode messages.

 

Johnston believed Navajo answered the military requirement for an undecipherable code because Navajo is an unwritten language of extreme complexity. Its syntax and tonal qualities, not to mention dialects, make it unintelligible to anyone without extensive exposure and training. It has no alphabet or symbols, and is spoken only on the Navajo lands of the American Southwest. One estimate indicates that less than 30 non-Navajos, none of them Japanese, could understand the language at the outbreak of World War II.

 

Early in 1942, Johnston met with Major General Clayton B. Vogel, the commanding general of Amphibious Corps, Pacific Fleet, and his staff to convince them of the Navajo language's value as code. Johnston staged tests under simulated combat conditions, demonstrating that Navajos could encode, transmit, and decode a three-line English message in 20 seconds. Machines of the time required 30 minutes to perform the same job. Convinced, Vogel recommended to the Commandant of the Marine Corps that the Marines recruit 200 Navajos.

 

In May 1942, the first 29 Navajo recruits attended boot camp. Then, at Camp Pendleton, Oceanside, California, this first group created the Navajo code. They developed a dictionary and numerous words for military terms. The dictionary and all code words had to be memorized during training.

 

Once a Navajo code talker completed his training, he was sent to a Marine unit deployed in the Pacific theater. The code talkers' primary job was to talk, transmitting information on tactics and troop movements, orders and other vital battlefield communications over telephones and radios. They also acted as messengers, and performed general Marine duties.

 

Praise for their skill, speed and accuracy accrued throughout the war. At Iwo Jima, Major Howard Connor, 5th Marine Division signal officer, declared, "Were it not for the Navajos, the Marines would never have taken Iwo Jima." Connor had six Navajo code talkers working around the clock during the first two days of the battle. Those six sent and received over 800 messages, all without error.

 

The Japanese, who were skilled code breakers, remained baffled by the Navajo language. The Japanese chief of intelligence, Lieutenant General Seizo Arisue, said that while they were able to decipher the codes used by the U.S. Army and Army Air Corps, they never cracked the code used by the Marines. The Navajo code talkers even stymied a Navajo soldier taken prisoner at Bataan. (About 20 Navajos served in the U.S. Army in the Philippines.) The Navajo soldier, forced to listen to the jumbled words of talker transmissions, said to a code talker after the war, "I never figured out what you guys who got me into all that trouble were saying."

 

In 1942, there were about 50,000 Navajo tribe members. As of 1945, about 540 Navajos served as Marines. From 375 to 420 of those trained as code talkers; the rest served in other capacities.

 

Navajo remained potentially valuable as code even after the war. For that reason, the code talkers, whose skill and courage saved both American lives and military engagements, only recently earned recognition from the Government and the public.

 

The Navajo Code Talker's Dictionary

 

When a Navajo code talker received a message, what he heard was a string of seemingly unrelated Navajo words. The code talker first had to translate each Navajo word into its English equivalent. Then he used only the first letter of the English equivalent in spelling an English word. Thus, the Navajo words "wol-la-chee" (ant), "be-la-sana" (apple) and "tse-nill" (axe) all stood for the letter "a." One way to say the word "Navy" in Navajo code would be "tsah (needle) wol-la-chee (ant) ah-keh-di- glini (victor) tsah-ah-dzoh (yucca)."

Most letters had more than one Navajo word representing them. Not all words had to be spelled out letter by letter. The developers of the original code assigned Navajo words to represent about 450 frequently used military terms that did not exist in the Navajo language. Several examples: "besh- lo" (iron fish) meant "submarine," "dah-he- tih-hi" (hummingbird) meant "fighter plane" and "debeh-li-zine" (black street) meant "squad."

 

These men deserve our profound respect.  Whenever you attend a ceremony where they are present, applaud them and if possible, shake their hands.