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Navajo Nation to celebrate Code Talkers Day

The Associated Press
Aug. 12, 2007 02:49 PM
WINDOW ROCK - The Navajo Nation will celebrate Code Talkers Day as a tribal holiday for the first time Tuesday.

"There are a lot of people on the reservation, and a lot of people off the (Navajo) Nation that want an opportunity to honor the Code Talkers in their own way," said Michael Smith, clerk at the Navajo Nation Supreme Court and the Window Rock liaison for the National Code Talkers Association.

"This day provides an opportunity for people to step forward and honor these men," said Smith, whose father, Samuel Jesse Smith, was a Code Talker.

The Code Talkers were an elite group of Navajo Marines who confounded the Japanese during World War II by transmitting messages in their native language.

Tuesday's events will start with a parade, followed by music from the Marine Corps band and local entertainment, then a speech by Navajo Nation President Joe Shirley Jr. Gourd dancing will wrap up the celebration.

There were 29 original Code Talkers, but several hundred Navajos served as Code Talkers during the war.

After the war, they were told to keep their work a secret. The information was declassified in 1968, but the Code Talkers were still reluctant to discuss or take credit for their deeds.

The Code Talkers' achievements have never been matched, Smith said.

"To use a native language to create a code and use that in battle and have it never broken or deciphered by an enemy is a remarkable achievement," he said. "Generals and commanders credit the code talkers for saving hundreds of lives."

The Navajo Nation Council voted 56-0 in favor of the Code Talker holiday last December.

Navajo Nation to celebrate Code Talkers Day (http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/0812codetalkers.html)

For those that don't know, here is a short history..............

Philip Johnston proposed the use of Navajo to the United States Marine Corps. The idea was accepted, and the Navajo code was formally developed and centered on the Joint Army/Navy Phonetic Alphabet that uses agreed-upon English words to represent letters. For each English letter in the phonetic alphabet system the code talkers were asked to generate several nouns and sometimes verbs in Navajo using the principle of letter and word substitution. Concurrently it was envisioned that phonetically spelling out all military terms letter by letter into words in combat can be time consuming, so some terms, concepts, tactics and instruments of modern warfare were given uniquely formal descriptive nomenclatures in Navajo. As the war progressed the baseline codes nouns, verbs, and descriptive nomenclatures were added on and incorporated program wide, and in other instances informal short cut code words were devised for a particular campaign and not disseminated beyond the area of operation. To ensure a consistent use of code terminologies throughout the Pacific Theater, representative code talkers of each of the U.S. Marine divisions met in Hawaii to discuss shortcomings in the code, incorporate new terms into the system, and update their codebooks. These representatives in turn would train the other code talkers who could not attend the meeting.

The Navajo spoken code is not very complex by cryptographic standards and would likely have been broken if a native speaker and trained cryptographers worked together effectively. The Japanese had an opportunity to attempt this when they captured Joe Kieyoomia in the Philippines in 1942 during the Bataan Death March. Kieyoomia, a Navajo Sergeant in the U.S. Army, was ordered to interpret the radio messages later in the war. However, since Kieyoomia had not participated in the code training, the messages made no sense to him. When he reported that he could not understand the messages, his captors tortured him. Given the simplicity of the alphabet code involved, it is probable that the code could have been broken easily if Kieyoomia's knowledge of the language had been exploited more effectively by Japanese cryptographers.

For classroom purposes, a codebook was developed to teach the many relevant words and concepts to new initiates and was never to be taken into the field. The code talker was supposed to memorize all the English/Navajo and Navajo/English word associations in the codebook. To an ordinary Navajo speaker, the entire code talking "conversation" would have been quite incomprehensible because the nouns and verbs were not used in the contextual sequence of conveying meaning within a Navajo sentence structure. What the uninitiated would hear are truncated, unrelated and disjointed strings of individual unrelated nouns and verbs. The codetalkers memorized all these variations and practiced their rapid use under stressful conditions.

The Navajo Code Talkers, have been credited with saving countless lives and hastening the end of the war. The Code Talker's served in all six Marine divisions from 1942 to 1945.

The Navajo code talkers were also deployed in the Korean War; the use of code talkers ended shortly into the Vietnam War.

The Navajo Code Talker's primary job was to talk and transmit information on tactics, troop movements, orders and other vital battlefield information via telegraphs and radios in their native dialect.  A major advantage of the code talker system was its speed. The method of using Morse code often took hours where as, the Navajos handled a message in minutes.   It has been said that if was not for the Navajo Code Talker's, the Marines would have never taken Iwo Jima.   

The Navajo's unwritten language was understood by fewer than 30 non-Navajo's at the time of WWII.  The size and complexity of the language made the code extremely difficult to comprehend, much less decipher.  It was not until 1968 that the code became declassified by the US Government.   

The code talkers received no recognition until the declassification of the operation in 1968. In 1982, the code talkers were given a Certificate of Recognition by President Ronald Reagan, who also named August 14 "National Code Talkers Day."

There was also a movie, made about the Navajo Code Talkers.