The Japanese, who were skilled code breakers, remained baffled by the Navajo language. Those six sent and received over 800 messages, all without error. 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. Praise for their skill, speed and accuracy accrued throughout the war. They also acted as messengers, and performed general Marine duties. 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. Once a Navajo code talker completed his training, he was sent to a Marine unit deployed in the Pacific theater. The dictionary and all code words had to be memorized during training. They developed a dictionary and numerous words for military terms. Then, at Camp Pendleton, Oceanside, California, this first group created the Navajo code. In May 1942, the first 29 Navajo recruits attended boot camp. Convinced, Vogel recommended to the Commandant of the Marine Corps that the Marines recruit 200 Navajos. Machines of the time required 30 minutes to perform the same job. Johnston staged tests under simulated combat conditions, demonstrating that Navajos could encode, transmit, and decode a three-line English message in 20 seconds. Vogel, the commanding general of Amphibious Corps, Pacific Fleet, and his staff to convince them of the Navajo language's value as code. One estimate indicates that less than 30 non-Navajos, none of them Japanese, could understand the language at the outbreak of World War II.Įarly in 1942, Johnston met with Major General Clayton B. It has no alphabet or symbols, and is spoken only on the Navajo lands of the American Southwest. Its syntax and tonal qualities, not to mention dialects, make it unintelligible to anyone without extensive exposure and training. Johnston believed Navajo answered the military requirement for an undecipherable code because Navajo is an unwritten language of extreme complexity. He also knew that Native American languages notably Choctaw had been used in World War I to encode messages. 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. 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.
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. Marines conducted in the Pacific from 1942 to 1945. Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Peleliu, Iwo Jima: the Navajo code talkers took part in every assault the U.S.
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