Code talker

Native speakers of the Assiniboine language served as code talkers during World War II to encrypt communications.[10] One of these code talkers was Gilbert Horn Sr., who grew up in the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation of Montana and became a tribal judge and politician.[10]

In November 1952, Euzko Deya magazine[11] reported that in May of that year, upon meeting a large number of US Marines of Basque ancestry in a San Francisco camp, Captain Frank D. Carranza had thought of using the Basque language for codes.[12][13][14] His superiors were concerned about risk, as there were known settlements of Basque people in the Pacific region, including: 35 Basque Jesuits in Hiroshima, led by Pedro Arrupe; a colony of Basque jai alai players in China and the Philippines; and Basque supporters of Falange in Asia. Consequently, the US Basque code talkers were not deployed in these theaters, instead being used initially in tests and in transmitting logistics information for Hawaii and Australia.

According to Euzko Deya, on August 1, 1942, Lieutenants Nemesio Aguirre, Fernández Bakaicoa, and Juanana received a Basque-coded message from San Diego for Admiral Chester Nimitz. The message warned Nimitz of Operation Apple to remove the Japanese from the Solomon Islands. They also translated the start date, August 7, for the attack on Guadalcanal. As the war extended over the Pacific, there was a shortage of Basque speakers, and the US military came to prefer the parallel program based on the use of Navajo speakers.

In 2017, Pedro Oiarzabal and Guillermo Tabernilla published a paper refuting Euzko Deya's article.[15] According to Oiarzabal and Tabernilla, they could not find Carranza, Aguirre, Fernández Bakaicoa, or Juanana in the National Archives and Records Administration or US Army archives. They did find a small number of US Marines with Basque surnames, but none of them worked in transmissions. They suggest that Carranza's story was an Office of Strategic Services operation to raise sympathy for US intelligence among Basque nationalists.

The first known use of code talkers in the US military was during World War I. Cherokee soldiers of the US 30th Infantry Division fluent in the Cherokee language were assigned to transmit messages while under fire during the Second Battle of the Somme. According to the Division Signal Officer, this took place in September 1918 when their unit was under British command.[16][17]

During World War I, company commander Captain Lawrence of the US Army overheard Solomon Louis and Mitchell Bobb having a conversation in Choctaw. Upon further investigation, he found that eight Choctaw men served in the battalion. The Choctaw men in the Army's 36th Infantry Division were trained to use their language in code and helped the American Expeditionary Forces in several battles of the Meuse-Argonne Offensive. On October 26, 1918, the code talkers were pressed into service and the "tide of battle turned within 24 hours ... and within 72 hours the Allies were on full attack."[18][19]

Comanche code talkers of the 4th Signal Company

German authorities knew about the use of code talkers during World War I. Germans sent a team of thirty anthropologists to the United States to learn Native American languages before the outbreak of World War II.[20] However, the task proved too difficult because of the large array of Indigenous languages and dialects. Nonetheless, after learning of the Nazi effort, the US Army opted not to implement a large-scale code talker program in the European theater.

Initially, 17 code talkers were enlisted but three were unable to make the trip across the Atlantic when the unit was finally deployed.[21] A total of 14 code talkers using the Comanche language took part in the Invasion of Normandy and served in the 4th Infantry Division in Europe.[22] Comanche soldiers of the 4th Signal Company compiled a vocabulary of 250 code terms using words and phrases in their own language.[23] Using a substitution method similar to that of the Navajo, the code talkers used descriptive words from the Comanche language for things that did not have translations. For example, the Comanche language code term for tank was turtle, bomber was pregnant bird, machine gun was sewing machine, and Adolf Hitler was crazy white man.[24][25]

Two Comanche code talkers were assigned to each regiment, and the remainder were assigned to the 4th Infantry Division headquarters. Shortly after landing on Utah Beach on June 6, 1944, the Comanche began transmitting messages. Some were wounded but none killed.[24]

In 1989, the French government awarded the Comanche code talkers the Chevalier of the National Order of Merit. On November 30, 1999, the United States Department of Defense presented Charles Chibitty with the Knowlton Award, in recognition of his outstanding intelligence work.[24][26]

In World War II, the Canadian Armed Forces employed First Nations soldiers who spoke the Cree language as code talkers. Owing to oaths of secrecy and official classification through 1963, the role of Cree code talkers were less well-known than their US counterparts and went unacknowledged by the Canadian government.[27] A 2016 documentary, Cree Code Talkers, tells the story of one such Métis individual, Charles "Checker" Tomkins. Tomkins died in 2003, but was interviewed shortly before his death by the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian. While he identified some other Cree code talkers, "Tomkins may have been the last of his comrades to know anything of this secret operation."[28][29]

In 2022 during the Russo-Ukrainian War, the Hungarian language is reported to be used by the Ukrainian army to relay operational military information and orders to circumvent being understood by the invading Russian army without the need to encrypt and decipher the messages.[30][31] Ukraine has a sizeable Hungarian population of over 150,000 people, who live mainly in the Kárpátalja (in Hungarian) or Zakarpatska Oblast (in Ukrainian) division of the Ukraine, adjacent to Hungary. As Ukrainian nationals, men of enlistment age are also subject to military service, hence the Ukrainian army has a Hungarian-speaking capability. It's one of the most spoken and official languages of this region in present-day Ukraine. The Hungarian language is a non-Indo-European language unlike the Slavic Ukrainian or Russian, but a Ugric language. For this reason it is distinct and incomprehensible for Russian speakers.

A group of 27 Meskwaki enlisted in the US Army together in January 1941; they comprised 16 percent of Iowa's Meskwaki population. During World War II, the US Army trained eight Meskwaki men to use their native Fox language as code talkers. They were assigned to North Africa. The eight were posthumously awarded the Congressional Gold Medal in 2013; the government gave the awards to representatives of the Meskwaki community.[32][33]

Mohawk language code talkers were used during World War II by the United States Army in the Pacific theater. Levi Oakes, a Mohawk code talker born in Canada, was deployed to protect messages being sent by Allied Forces using Kanien'kéha, a Mohawk sub-set language. Oakes died in May 2019; he was the last of the Mohawk code talkers.[34]

The Muscogee language was used as type two code (informal) during World War II by enlisted Seminole and Creek people in the US Army.[35] Tony Palmer, Leslie Richard, Edmund Harjo, and Thomas MacIntosh from the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma and Muscogee (Creek) Nation were recognized under the Code Talkers Recognition Act of 2008.[36] The last survivor of these code talkers, Edmond Harjo of the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma, died on March 31, 2014, at the age of 96. His biography was recounted at the Congressional Gold Medal ceremony honoring Harjo and other code talkers at the US Capitol on November 20, 2013.[37][38][39]

Navajo code talkers, Saipan, June 1944

Philip Johnston, a civil engineer for the city of Los Angeles,[40] proposed the use of the Navajo language to the United States Marine Corps at the beginning of World War II. Johnston, a World War I veteran, was raised on the Navajo reservation as the son of missionaries to the Navajo. He was able to converse in what is called "Trader's Navajo" - a pidgin language. He was among a few non-Navajo who had enough exposure to it to understand some of its nuances. Many Navajo men enlisted shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor and eagerly contributed to the war effort.

Because Navajo has a complex grammar, it is not mutually intelligible with even its closest relatives within the Na-Dene family to provide meaningful information. At the time, it was still an unwritten language, and Johnston believed Navajo could satisfy the military requirement for an undecipherable code. Its complex syntax and phonology, not to mention its numerous dialects, made it unintelligible to anyone without extensive exposure and training. One estimate indicates that at the outbreak of World War II, fewer than 30 non-Navajo could understand the language.[41]

In early 1942, Johnston met with the commanding general of the Amphibious Corps, Major General Clayton B. Vogel, and his staff. Johnston staged simulated combat conditions which demonstrated that Navajo men could transmit and decode a three-line message in 20 seconds, compared to the 30 minutes it took the machines of the time.[42] The idea of using Navajo speakers as code talkers was accepted; Vogel recommended that the Marines recruit 200 Navajo. However, that recommendation was cut to one-platoon to use as a pilot project to develop and test the feasibility of a code. On May 4, 1942, twenty-nine Navajo men were sworn-into service at an old US Army Fort that had been converted into a BIA Boarding School: Fort Wingate. They were organized as platoon 382. The first 29 Navajo recruits attended boot camp in May 1942. This first group created the Navajo code at Camp Pendleton.[43]

One of the key differences between the Navajo Code Talkers and the Army Code Talkers is that the Navajo Code Talkers employed a coded version of their language. Other Navajos who were not trained in the Navajo Code could not decipher the messages being sent.

Platoon 382 was the Marine Corps' first "all-Indian, all-Navajo" Platoon. The members of this platoon would become known as The First Twenty-Nine. Most were recruited from near the Fort Wingate, NM area. The youngest was William Dean Yazzie (aka Dean Wilson) who was only 15 when he was recruited. The oldest was Carl N. Gorman—who with his son, R.C. Gorman, would go on to become an artist of great acclaim and who would design the Code Talkers' logo—at age 35.

The Navajo code was formally developed and modeled on the Joint Army/Navy Phonetic Alphabet that uses agreed-upon English words to represent letters. Since it was determined that phonetically spelling out all military terms letter by letter into words while in combat would be too time-consuming, some terms, concepts, tactics, and instruments of modern warfare were given uniquely formal descriptive nomenclatures in Navajo. For example, the word for shark referred to a destroyer, while silver oak leaf indicated the rank of lieutenant colonel.[45]

A codebook was developed to teach the many relevant words and concepts to new initiates. The text was for classroom purposes only and was never to be taken into the field. The code talkers memorized all these variations and practiced their rapid use under stressful conditions during training. Navajo speakers who had not been trained in the code work would have no idea what the code talkers' messages meant; they would hear only truncated and disjointed strings of individual, unrelated nouns and verbs.[46][47]

Code Talkers Monument Ocala, Florida Memorial Park

The Navajo code talkers were commended for the skill, speed, and accuracy they demonstrated throughout the war. At the Battle of Iwo Jima, Major Howard Connor, 5th Marine Division signal officer, had six Navajo code talkers working around the clock during the first two days of the battle. These six sent and received over 800 messages, all without error. Connor later said, "Were it not for the Navajos, the Marines would never have taken Iwo Jima."[43]

After incidents where Navajo code talkers were mistaken for ethnic Japanese and were captured by other American soldiers, several were assigned a personal bodyguard whose principal duty was to protect them from their own side. According to Bill Toledo, one of the second group after the original 29, they had a secret secondary duty: if their charge was at risk of being captured, they were to shoot him to protect the code. Fortunately, none was ever called upon to do so.[48][49]

To ensure a consistent use of code terminologies throughout the Pacific theater, representative code talkers of each of the US 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, trained other code talkers who could not attend the meeting. As the war progressed, additional code words were added and incorporated program-wide. In other instances, informal shortcut code words were devised for a particular campaign and not disseminated beyond the area of operation. Examples of code words include the Navajo word for buzzard, jeeshóóʼ, which was used for bomber, while the code word used for submarine, béésh łóóʼ, meant iron fish in Navajo.[50] The last of the original 29 Navajo code talkers who developed the code, Chester Nez, died on June 4, 2014.[51]

Four of the last nine Navajo code talkers used in the military died in 2019: Alfred K. Newman died on January 13, 2019, at the age of 94.[52] On May 10, 2019, Fleming Begaye Sr. died at the age of 97.[53] New Mexico State Senator John Pinto, elected in 1977, died in office on May 24, 2019.[54] William Tully Brown died in June 2019 aged 96.[55] Joe Vandever Sr. died at 96 on January 31, 2020.[56] Samuel Sandoval died on 29 July 2022, at the age of 98.[57][58] Only three remaining members are still living as of 2022, John Kinsel Sr., Thomas H. Begay, and Peter MacDonald.[59][60][61]

Some Code Talkers such as Chester Nez and William Dean Yazzie (aka Dean Wilson) continued to serve in the Marine Corps through the Korean War. Rumors of the deployment of the Navajo Code into the Korean War and after have never been proven. The Code remained classified until 1968. The Navajo code is the only spoken military code never to have been deciphered.[45]

In the 1973 Arab–Israeli War, Egypt employed Nubian-speaking Nubian people as code talkers.[62][63][64][65][66]

During World War II, American soldiers used their native Tlingit as a code against Japanese forces. Their actions remained unknown, even after the declassification of code talkers and the publication of the Navajo code talkers. The memory of five deceased Tlingit code talkers was honored by the Alaska legislature in March 2019.[67][68]

A system employing the Welsh language was used by British forces during World War II, but not to any great extent. In 1942, the Royal Air Force developed a plan to use Welsh for secret communications, but it was never implemented.[69] Welsh was used more recently in the Yugoslav Wars for non-vital messages.[70]

China used Wenzhounese-speaking people as code talkers during the 1979 Sino-Vietnamese War.[71][72]