Today's post is another by guest blogger Kiersti Plog, who enlightened us about Indian mission schools last month. Leave a comment at the end for the chance to win a special Christmas prize!
They were the quiet heroes of World War II.
Forbidden to speak of their mission for 23 years after the
war ended, even to their families and fellow Marines, they formed the lifeline
of Allied communications through every Pacific battle from Guadalcanal to
Okinawa. Under machine gun fire, shells exploding all around them, they cranked
their radios and spoke into their microphones, in a language they had been
punished for speaking as children.
They were the Navajo Code Talkers.
In 1942, the Japanese were cracking every American code the
United States could come up with. Philip Johnston, the son of missionaries on
the Navajo Reservation, suggested using the Navajo language. He knew from
experience the complexity of this yet unwritten language, almost impossible to
speak properly if not born to it.
Somewhat skeptical, the Marines recruited a few young Navajo
men fluent in both English and their native language. After Basic Training near
Camp Pendleton, California, the twenty-nine Navajo recruits were locked inside
a room to develop a code to confound the Japanese.
In childhood, many of these young men had been beaten or had
their mouths washed out with soap in government or mission boarding schools
simply for speaking Navajo. (see October post) Now the government asked them to use that very same language
to help America win the war. At this time, Native Americans were not even
allowed to vote, yet these young Navajo men cheerfully stepped up to the plate.
This country had been their home long before it became the United States. Of
course they would do everything they could to defend it.
So they set to work—developing the code, memorizing it until
they became living code machines. Even a native Navajo speaker, if not trained
in the code, could not decipher it. Each letter of the English alphabet was
assigned a Navajo word, with more common letters assigned up to three, switched
out to keep the enemy from picking up patterns. “A” could be wol-la-chee (ant), be-la-sana (apple), or tse-nill
(axe).
The code talkers also chose many individual words so they
wouldn’t have to spell everything out. A dive bomber was gini, “chicken hawk,” while a fighter plane was da-he-tih-hi, “humming bird.” A
battleship was a whale, lot-tso, a
destroyer a shark, besh-lo.
About 400 Navajos served as Code Talkers over the course of
the war, with the Code expanded to include hundreds of words. Messages that took
hours by code machine took a couple of minutes through the Navajo radiomen. On
Iwo Jima alone, the Code Talkers worked for 48 hours straight, sending over 800
error-free messages. Major Howard M. Connor wrote that without the Navajos, the
Marines would never have taken Iwo Jima. And their Code was never broken.
It’s hard to know what the outcome of World War II in the
Pacific would have been without these the Code Talkers. Yet after the war, they
went quietly back to the reservation. They still couldn’t vote. They were
refused service in most bars. Under strict orders not to mention the code, they
couldn’t even tell their families what they and their language had done.
In 1968, the military declassified the Navajo Code, but these
men didn’t receive official recognition until 1982, when President Ronald
Reagan established August 14 as National Code Talkers Day. In 2001, President
George W. Bush presented Congressional Medals of Honor to those Code Talkers
still living and able to travel.
Two summers ago, I shared dinner with a Navajo Code Talker
and his wife in Kirtland, New Mexico. What a privilege to sit beside this man with
bent shoulders and a Marine cap, rattling off dates and memories I tried to
capture on my laptop. With typical Navajo modesty, he brushed off any
attribution of expertise.
“It was just natural for me to talk Navajo,” he said.
And boy, they did.
Kiersti Plog holds a life-long love for history and historical fiction and lived with her family for five years in New Mexico near the Navajo Reservation. Her yet-unpublished novel Beneath a Turquoise Sky is set at a Navajo mission boarding school and received the ACFW Genesis Award for Historical Fiction in 2013. She writes stories that show the intersection of past and present, explore relationships that bridge cultural divides, and probe the healing Jesus can bring out of brokenness. A member of American Christian Fiction Writers, Kiersti loves learning and growing with other writers penning God’s story into theirs, as well as blogging at http://www.kierstiplog.com.
Leave a comment to be entered in a drawing for a two-book gift set of Guideposts books A Cup of Christmas Cheer! This collection of new fiction contains stories by some of our own CFHS authors Susan Page Davis and Marilyn Turk.
