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The infinite creativity of the human brain means that there are endless possibilities for secret encoding. However, one of the most successful codes, one that was never broken, was borrowed from an ancient and venerable culture.

In search of a code that would withstand all attempts to decipher it, the military was intrigued with a proposal made by Philip Johnston. Johnston, the son of a missionary, had grown up in a Navajo village and was one of a very small number of non-Navajos who spoke their language fluently.

Philip Johnston knew that Navajo is spoken only on the lands of the American Southwest and is very complicated. Navajo is an unwritten language with no alphabet or symbols and therefore can only be learned in the presence of Navajo speakers. For all these reasons there were only about 30 non-Navajos in the whole world that could understand Navajo and it is important for this story to know that none of them were Japanese. Philip Johnston proposed using the Navajo language as a code to protect secret communications.

In May 1942, impressed with Johnston’s reports, the Marine Corps assembled 200 Navajo Indian recruits. This first group of Navajo recruits worked together to create a Navajo dictionary. They also had to formulate new code words for military terms like submarine or airplane that did not exist in their language. Then the recruits had to memorize the dictionary and all the code words! They even developed cipher codes to further encode their language. They were fast; they could encode, transmit and decode a 3-line English message in 20 seconds while the machines of that time took 30 minutes to perform the same job!

When their training was complete, Navajo Code Talkers were sent to Marine units that served in the Pacific theater of the war. Their job was to talk, transmitting vital battlefield information over telephones and radios. Even though the Japanese were highly skilled code breakers, they were baffled by the Navajo language!

The Navajo Code Talkers were vital to the Marine efforts throughout the war. They played a decisive role in the fierce battle to capture the strategically important Japanese Island of Iwo Jima. Major Howard Connor declared, “Were it not for the Navajos, the Marines would never have taken Iwo Jima.” Major Connor had 6 Navajo Code Talkers who worked straight through the first two days of the battle without a break. Those 6 sent and received more than 800 secret messages, all without error!

The skill and courage of the Navajo Code Talkers of World War II helped win battles and saved American lives. They were honored for their contributions in 1992 and you can see an exhibit at the Pentagon displaying photographs, equipment, and the original code, along with an explanation of how the code worked.