THE NAVAJO CODE TALKERS

A SECRET WORLD WAR II MEMORANDUM MAINTAINING SECRECY, particularly during wartime, is vital to the national security of every country. Accomplishing this on the homefront during World War II was one objective of the Office of War Information. The office created propaganda posters that alerted American citizens to the presence of enemy spies and saboteurs lurking below the surface of American society. On the battlefield, maintaining military secrecy went far beyond poster campaigns because secrecy was essential for victory, and breaking enemy codes was necessary to gain the advantage and shorten the war. The ability to send and receive codes without the risk of the enemy deciphering the transmission was the most desirable end result of military secrecy. This ability, however, often required hours of encrypting and decrypting the to ensure the highest security of the message. During Word War II, the U.S. Marine Corps, in an effort to find quicker and more secure ways to send and receive code, enlisted Navajos as code talkers. Philip Johnston was the initiator of the Marine Corps' program to enlist and train Navajos as messengers. Although Johnston was not a Navajo, he grew up on a Navajo reservation as the son of a missionary and became familiar with the people and their language. Johnston was also a Word War I veteran and knew about the military's desire to send and receive messages in an unbreakable code. According to a 1970 interview with Johnston and a paper he wrote titled Indian Jargon Won Our Battles, he hit upon the idea of enlisting Navajos as signalmen early in 1942 when he read a newspaper story about the Army's use of several Native Americans during training maneuvers with an armored division in Louisiana. The article stated that the Army included Native Americans during these maneuvers on the basis of the experiences of the Canadian Army in World War I, when the Native Americans acted as signalmen against the Germans to send secure messages about shortages of supplies or ammunition. The Army's program, however, was never given the priority that the U.S. Marine Corps assigned to Johnston's idea in 1942. According to Johnston, the day after he read the article, he went to the Naval Office in Los Angeles, California, and told them the story. Believing it had possibilities, the office sent Johnston to the headquarters of the Eleventh Naval District in San Diego, which was convinced that if Johnston's idea could be accomplished, it would be a marvelous thing, and which sent Johnston on to Camp Elliot in San Diego to meet Major James E. Jones. It took Johnston some time to convince Major Jones about the potential for using a Native American code, but after Johnston spoke a few Navajo words to the baffled major, Jones decided to give Johnston's idea a trial run with actual Navajos. Within two weeks, Johnston assembled four Navajos in the Los Angeles area and arranged to meet Major Jones back at Camp Elliot on February 27, 1942, with the demonstration to occur the next day. Prior to this return to Camp Elliot, Johnston sent a preliminary report to Major Jones and Major General Clayton B. Vogel, the commanding general of the Amphibious Corps, Pacific Fleet, that explained the many reasons he believed that the Navajo offered the best possibility for recruitment as signalmen. Included in the report was a description of Johnston's own knowledge of the Navajo gained through his childhood experiences, general background information on the status of Native American tribes that gave population statistics, and a specific explanation of the potential of the Navajo language as a military code. It stressed the complexity of the Navajo language and the fact that it remained mostly `unwritten' because an alphabet or other symbols of purely native origin did not exist, with the exception of adaptations by American scholars, anthropologists, and Franciscan Fathers, who compiled a Navajo dictionary. …

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