When people die, the Navajo say they “walk on.” And so it was Dec. 14 for Teddy Draper Sr. of Chinle, Arizona. He was 96. He was also one of the 421 Navajo warriors who were recruited by the U.S. Marines in 1942 to create a code to give Japanese intelligence officers headaches as they tried to monitor the movements of Americans who were seeking to dislodge them from the occupied islands of the Japanese Empire in the Pacific during World War II.
All the original 29 Navajo Code Talkers have walked on now, the last one dying in 2011. Most of the 392 who followed those first volunteers have also walked on.
Draper was born in 1921 deep in Canyon de Chelly at a place known as Big Cave. It was not far from where Kit Carson, once a great friend of the Navajo who became their greatest betrayer, ended his scorched-earth attacks on them and accepted their surrender in 1864. Eight thousand of them, starving and beaten, began a grueling trek at gunpoint, what the Navajo still call “The Long Walk,” to Bosque Redondo reservation in eastern New Mexico. At least 200 would die on the three-week journey. Four years later, unlike most forcibly removed tribes, the Navajo were allowed to return to the original boundaries of their lands. For instance, a small band of their Chiricahua Apache linguistic cousins fought on for nearly 20 more years before surrendering, and most never saw their homeland again.
Today’s descendants of those Navajo might seem like the last people who would want to join the U.S. military. But, in fact, they—like other American Indians—have for a century had a high rate of enlistment in various military branches.
Without the Navajo Code Talkers, their commanders and other officers have said, American casualties in battles for Japanese-held islands would have been far more ghastly than they were.
Even after the war, those 29 and all the other Code Talkers were sworn to secrecy in case the code had to be used again. It was, in Korea and Vietnam. It was never broken. In 1968, the code and the story of its crucial role were declassified, freeing those who invented and used it to tell their experiences.
Since then, more than 500 books have been written, several documentaries have been produced, Hollywood made a version called Windtalkers, a film that spends more of its time following Nick Cage around than it does Adam Beach (of the Saulteaux people), who for his role spent six months learning Diné bizaad, the Navajo language. Famed sculptor Oreland Joe (Navajo-Ute) created the Navajo Code Talker Memorial at the Navajo Tribal Park & Veterans Memorial at Window Rock, Ariz. Oral histories were taken.
Yet, although President Ronald Reagan declared Aug. 14, 1982, National Navajo Code Talkers Day, it wasn't until Dec. 21, 2000, 56 years after they first saw action, that the five surviving original Code Talkers and relatives of the other 24 received Congressional Gold Medals for their innovativeness and heroism. The other Code Talkers were awarded Congressional Silver Medals. The belated awards contained a deep irony. Many of these men who had saved untold numbers of American lives by using their native language had been punished for speaking that same language as children in boarding schools.
It may come as a surprise to many who are acquainted with the story of the Code Talkers that the Navajos weren't the only Indians used for code work during World War II. And they weren't the first. The Army even used eight Choctaw speakers to confuse German troops in 1918, and Cherokees also performed in this way. In the the next war, the Army in Europe and Marines in the Pacific used Lakota speakers, Oneidas, Chippewas, Pimas, Meswakis, Assiniboines, Hopis, Choctaws, Sac and Fox and Comanches.
But those Indians simply talked to one another in their Native language. The first 29 Navajo Code Talkers developed a real code. That could not even be understood by other speakers of Navajo, a difficult language that it’s estimated only 30 non-Navajo spoke at the time.
The Marines had never used Indians for this purpose. But Philip Johnston, a white man who had grown up on the lands of the Navajo Nation, approached the Corps in mid-February with an idea. Why not use Navajos and members of other large tribes for military communications? Show us, the Marines said. So Johnston brought four Navajos with him to Camp Elliott, Calif., for a demonstration. They were given some military messages. They substituted some Navajo words and then, in pairs, went into separate rooms and communicated by radio. Gen. Clayton Vogel witnessed the success: the decoded messages were accurate renditions of their English originals. He recommended to his superiors that 200 Navajos be recruited.
It took some high-level meetings before a decision was made. But, in April, a pilot program was initiated and in May, 29 of the 30 Navajos recruited showed up at Camp Pendleton near Oceanside, California, for seven weeks of basic training. They came from Chinle and places like Kayenta, Blue Canyon and Kaibeto. Many had never before been off the reservation.
Initially, the Navajo code comprised about 200 assigned words, but by the end of the war, there were 800. Here is a small sample from the many to be found at the Official Website of the Navajo Code Talkers:
Dive Bomber — Gini — Sparrow Hawk
Torpedo Plane — Tas-chizzie — Swallow
Observation Plane — ine-ahs-jah — Owl
Fighter Plane — Da-he-tih-hi — Hummingbird
Bomber Plane — Jav-sho — Buzzard
Patrol Plane — Ga- gih — Crow
Transport Plane — Astah — Eagle
The code was more complicated than mere word substitutions. The fear was that some sharp Japanese linguist might catch on to that soon enough. So words also could be spelled out using Navajo words representing individual letters of the alphabet. The Navajo words "wol-la-chee" (ant), "be-la-sana" (apple) and "tse-nill" (axe) all stood for the letter "a." To say "Navy" in Navajo Code, they could say "tsah (needle) wol-la-chee (ant) ah-keh-di-glini (victor) tsah-ah-dzoh (yucca)." Thus, using assigned words or the alphabet code, they could encrypt anything.
Navajo Code Talkers were on the ground with their fellow Marines in every major action in the Pacific from 1942 to 1945. They proved their value at Guadalcanal, at Tarawa and at the 36-day siege on Iwo Jima. After that immensely bloody battle, Major Howard Connor, a 5th Marine Division signal officer, said: "Were it not for the Navajos, the Marines would never have taken Iwo Jima.”
Their participation went unsung for decades because of the secrecy. The world they returned to was not unlike the one they left. Federal policies which had improved somewhat during the New Deal era again focused on assimilation and terminating reservations. Many returning veterans were denied the right to vote even though they had supposedly been made full citizens by the Snyder Act in 1924.
For more than a decade, advocates have sought to have a Code Talkers museum built at Window Rock, Arizona, the Navajo capital. Although architects have produced a design for the museum, funding of the project has yet to be obtained.