February 4, 2009 • 12 mins
During World War II, Axis and Allied powers struggled to discover the enemies' information while hiding their own. Tune in to this HowStuffWorks podcast to learn how the Navajo code talkers turned the tide of World War II.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm editor Kandiskip Sunshine by staff writer Jane Gray. We
got an email from one of our favorite listeners named Shiro,
(00:21):
and he is just full of so many wonderful ideas
for the podcast, and one of the ideas he suggested
to us was the Navajo code talkers. And I got
really excited about Sharew's idea, and as as did Jane,
and so we thought, well, that's it, We're going to
do it. So you could very well be the next
lucky person whose idea gets podcasted about. So email us
(00:42):
at podcast at how stuff works dot com and now
on with the Navajos. That's right, And to give you
the context, we have the idea that codes in war
are very important because the Japanese and World War Two
were able to um basically tap into communications between the
Allied forces and intercept these communications. They are sometimes able
(01:03):
to take issue false commands even and like organize ambushes
on Allied troops. And so obviously the Allies had to
come up with codes that were inevitably broken by the
Japanese and Japanese were so good at code breaking, uh
that they would break every code that the Allies came
up with. And this is so frustrating. The Japanese had
even sent some of their men to the United States
(01:25):
to study the language. Then you English perfectly, they could
imitate the accent and the Germans, who the Navajo code
talkers didn't really have to interact with, but we're still
a major force. In World War Two. They sent some
of their men over to Native American reservations and the
United States to pose as art dealers and other, you know,
anthropologists that they could pick up on Native American languages
(01:46):
because the United States was known to have used Choctaw
and other as many as I think eighteen different tribes
influences from their languages and World War One. So and
that's one thing I hadn't heard about was the use
of the American Indian languages in World War One. And
it's interesting that I believe it was Hitler who had
had these anthropologists go over that he had the foresight
to at least try to understand these languages to break
(02:09):
any codes that the Americans would come up with. And
so it was a monumental task. And because World War
two was conducted over a span of islands that were
thousands of miles apart, and some instances the United States
had to have a way of sending messages that the
Japanese would not interpret, and it was really sort of
a lost cause until Philip Johnston, who was raised on
(02:31):
a Navajo reservation with his missionary parents, went to enable
station in Los Angeles and said, I've got this idea. Uh,
the Navajo language is virtually unknown to any more than
like forty non Navajos. It's almost impossible to understand. It's
completely oral, it's never been written down. I think that
this might really work. That's right. And it also was
(02:53):
a great advantage because it was so fast to to
use as a code. Codes Before that it took hours
to send INDEC a message sent through among Allied troops
and the machines at the very least would take thirty minutes,
and compared this to about twenty seconds that it took
Navajos to code and decode a message. When Philip Johnston
(03:13):
had them demonstrated, it was just whild the celerity with
which they worked, and not just the speed, but the
accuracy too. And Johnston really was advocating for the Navajos
language to be used because the Navajos had been educated
in American schools. And let me give you guys a
little bit of background on this. Uh, the Navajos were
pretty much isolated in the southwest United States. They they
(03:36):
had their home between what they called the Four Sacred Mountains,
and so their language is very much consolidated within this area,
and language is essential to their culture. They believe that
the universe and language were sort of created in tandem,
the first four words being light, earth, water, and air.
And it's a very precise language too, and different inflections
and different tonalities convey entirely different meanings. So the Navajos
(04:01):
were within this this corner of the United States, within
the Four Sacred Mountains, and gradually they began to be
pushed out, first by Spanish invaders and then by the
United States. And General Sherman of Civil War fame is
very well known for discussing what he called the Navajo
problem and beginning the process of eradication. And he was
(04:21):
even quoted as saying that their attempts at civilization are ridiculous.
And so the Navajos were pushed out of their reservation
and they were. They were made to go live in
New Mexico until eighteen sixty eight when a leader named
Barbon Scudo negotiated for the Navajo to return to their
land and in exchange, their children would be raised in
US schools and completely give up their culture. And it
(04:41):
got to a point where children who even spoke the
Navajo language and were overheard were um, we're beaten or
punished on their mouths, were washed out. So essentially the
Navajo culture had been somewhat annihilated and completely brushed aside,
and then it rose back up into question again. That's right,
and thank goodness that it wasn't I hated completely because
it ended up saving battle, saving lives in World War Two.
(05:05):
And some Navajos recount that when they heard the music
Pearl Harbor, there were as many as a hundred men
who went to enable station to report for duty, and
they even brought their own weapons in some cases, because
Navaja cultures very much rooted and the idea of protecting
the homeland, even the homeland that had spurned them for
so long. Right and um, not all Navajos were code talkers,
(05:28):
but many of them were. It's estimated between three and
about four twenty Navajos served as code talkers, and it's
interesting to note how the code actually worked because the
language itself was very complex. Only about thirty non Navajos
actually spoke the language in the world like on the planet.
But they added an extra twist to the code that
(05:49):
made it even more difficult. And that was even if
you translated all these Navajos a Navajo words into English correctly,
it was still sound like a random chain of words.
And that was because what you're supposed to do when
you got the message was only take the first letter
of the English translation and put those together to make
an understandable message. And what made it so unique was
(06:09):
that there were plenty of military terms that the Navajos
didn't have words for it all. So something like hummingbird
would refer to a fighter plane, and a dive bomber
would be a chicken hawk. So there was this added
layer of mystery. And even when they thought that the
enemy might be getting too close to figuring out what
the words stood for, they would take the letter A
(06:29):
and come up with three different English words that could
be derived from it. That's right, So they mixed it
up and like as you say, not all over. Its
had to be UM spilled out letter by litter. They
had those code words that UM were still shrouded in
a level of mystery. So the high point of the
Navajo code came after the demonstration that Johnston conducted for
General Clayton B. Vogel, and that's when Jane mentioned. He
(06:51):
demonstrated that a message that could take as much as
thirty minutes to transmit via a cryptograph or other machine
took twenty seconds for the Navajos. And the three hundred
eighty second Platoon Coding Unit was formed and recruiters from
the Marines went to different reservations to get Navajos and UM.
They had an outpouring of response, and some of the
men lied on their applications because they were too young
(07:13):
to go, and at least one lied because he was
too old to go. And they went to boot camp
just like any other recruit and then they were taken
to Camp Elliott to develop their code and it was
never ever ever written down, and it evolved from two
hundred eleven to four hundred eleven words, and the Navaja
were given a lot of creative freedom and developing the
code on their own. That's right, and to go back
(07:34):
to how complex the code was, even when Navajo soldier
who was actually not trained in the code. This this
soldier was not trained, but he understood the Navaho language.
When he was captured in Baton by the access troops,
they ordered him to try to translate it, and he
never understood what the message was. Because of the added
complexity of the code. That sort of gave rise to
(07:54):
the premise on which the Nicholas Cage maybe wind Talkers
is based. And that's the idea that for every Navajo
co talker in the field there was a secret bodyguard
who followed him and was supposed to kill him if
he were captured, so that he couldn't show the code.
And we don't never for sure if that was actually
a component of the Navajo co talker equation. The military
(08:15):
is not confirming or denying it, but it's, you know,
it's sort of interesting to think about. It's an interesting
twist to the story, that's right. And one of the
great quotes that I found about their significance to the
war in general was from the Battle of the Regima.
There was a Major Howard Conner who was an officer
there and he had six Navjo code talkers are working
around the clock during the battle, and he said later on,
(08:37):
we're not for the Navajos, and Marines would have never
taken you Agima. Yeah, on Agia. It was amazing. We're
talking about almost a thirty six day long battle with
about forty eight straight hours of coding and translating and decoding.
About eight hundred messages were sent without a single mistake.
It is incredible. And the irony is that when the
(08:59):
Navajo co talk walkers, they were the first twenty nine
one of the thirty that were originally recruited UM dropped
out after after training. The first twenty nine two stayed
behind went over to the battlefields. UM. They weren't used
at first because people weren't sure that they could really
trust them in the thick of battle, and they thought
that troops might be too caught up in military maneuvers
(09:19):
to really need their codes, and so it took a
while to build trust for the Navajos to be used
for their intended purpose. At first, they were just used
for running messages. They were just runners, and others were
you know, handed weapons and and told to fight. But
little did they know, and the Marine raiders where the
group that really put them to the test, and they
proved themselves especially um it's Sapan. One group of allies
(09:41):
was being bombed by their own men and they didn't know,
and they kept trying to radio to say stop stop,
this is us, you know, And finally they were able
to say, have you got a Navaho code talker there?
And as soon as the Navajo code talker sent the
message that these were friendly troops that they're firing on,
the firing immediately ceased. So the power that they how
it was just immeasurable. And what's sad is that after
(10:04):
Irrigima was taken and after you know, the bombs were
dropped on Japan and and the war was in assence over,
the Navajo co talkers were discharged and they couldn't really
talk about what their contribution to the war how no
matter how great it was, um, because it's still the
the Marines wanted to keep a hold on it to
(10:25):
use in future battles or what have you, and so
it actually remained classified until at least nineteen which is
just you can think of, like, think of what contribution
you made to the country that you know has betrayed
your people. In the past and you've done so much
great work and you come home and you can't talk
about it. It made it difficult for the co talkers
(10:45):
who returned to the reservation and those who went out
to seek jobs, because they couldn't account for what they've
been doing with the past couple of years of their lives,
and they couldn't say what they've been doing. They you know,
had to either fabricate stories or keep silent. And we
know today there are plenty of soldiers who are coming
home and you know they they have these dreams and
awful memories and psychological uh reckonings that they're they're dealing
(11:09):
with after all that they witnessed in war and I
Regima especially, we're talking about a volcano where the Japanese
were lucky enough to have dug trenches, but the Americans
were fighting on top, covered and volcanic dust, being slaughtered
all the Japanese had orders to kill at least ten Americans,
and the Navajo has had to come home and have
these memories and they couldn't talk about them, and they
couldn't share them. They had no way to really get
(11:30):
help for dealing with the after effects of war and
so when the information was declassified and they were finally
honored for their service, we we see that, you know,
these things are still coming up. The Navajo co talkers
are still talking about the memories that they have, and
it is I mean, it's testament to how well it
worked that the Marines still wanted to use it, because
(11:52):
it's true the Japanese never broke it, and assessment to
how effective they were and how great soldiers they were.
And so finally we see that they were paid homage
back in two thousand one, uh four of the five
living original twenty nine were honored with Congressional Gold medals,
and others that went in succession after the first twenty
(12:14):
nine they were given Congressional Silver medals. Built on about time, definitely,
So if you want to read more about the Navajos
and about how code breakers work, be sure to check
out our articles on how stuff works dot com for
more on this and thousands of other topics. Isn't how
stuff works dot Com
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm editor Kandiskip Sunshine by staff writer Jane Gray. We
got an email from one of our favorite listeners named Shiro,
(00:21):
and he is just full of so many wonderful ideas
for the podcast, and one of the ideas he suggested
to us was the Navajo code talkers. And I got
really excited about Sharew's idea, and as as did Jane,
and so we thought, well, that's it, We're going to
do it. So you could very well be the next
lucky person whose idea gets podcasted about. So email us
(00:42):
at podcast at how stuff works dot com and now
on with the Navajos. That's right, And to give you
the context, we have the idea that codes in war
are very important because the Japanese and World War Two
were able to um basically tap into communications between the
Allied forces and intercept these communications. They are sometimes able
(01:03):
to take issue false commands even and like organize ambushes
on Allied troops. And so obviously the Allies had to
come up with codes that were inevitably broken by the
Japanese and Japanese were so good at code breaking, uh
that they would break every code that the Allies came
up with. And this is so frustrating. The Japanese had
even sent some of their men to the United States
(01:25):
to study the language. Then you English perfectly, they could
imitate the accent and the Germans, who the Navajo code
talkers didn't really have to interact with, but we're still
a major force. In World War Two. They sent some
of their men over to Native American reservations and the
United States to pose as art dealers and other, you know,
anthropologists that they could pick up on Native American languages
(01:46):
because the United States was known to have used Choctaw
and other as many as I think eighteen different tribes
influences from their languages and World War One. So and
that's one thing I hadn't heard about was the use
of the American Indian languages in World War One. And
it's interesting that I believe it was Hitler who had
had these anthropologists go over that he had the foresight
to at least try to understand these languages to break
(02:09):
any codes that the Americans would come up with. And
so it was a monumental task. And because World War
two was conducted over a span of islands that were
thousands of miles apart, and some instances the United States
had to have a way of sending messages that the
Japanese would not interpret, and it was really sort of
a lost cause until Philip Johnston, who was raised on
(02:31):
a Navajo reservation with his missionary parents, went to enable
station in Los Angeles and said, I've got this idea. Uh,
the Navajo language is virtually unknown to any more than
like forty non Navajos. It's almost impossible to understand. It's
completely oral, it's never been written down. I think that
this might really work. That's right. And it also was
(02:53):
a great advantage because it was so fast to to
use as a code. Codes Before that it took hours
to send INDEC a message sent through among Allied troops
and the machines at the very least would take thirty minutes,
and compared this to about twenty seconds that it took
Navajos to code and decode a message. When Philip Johnston
(03:13):
had them demonstrated, it was just whild the celerity with
which they worked, and not just the speed, but the
accuracy too. And Johnston really was advocating for the Navajos
language to be used because the Navajos had been educated
in American schools. And let me give you guys a
little bit of background on this. Uh, the Navajos were
pretty much isolated in the southwest United States. They they
(03:36):
had their home between what they called the Four Sacred Mountains,
and so their language is very much consolidated within this area,
and language is essential to their culture. They believe that
the universe and language were sort of created in tandem,
the first four words being light, earth, water, and air.
And it's a very precise language too, and different inflections
and different tonalities convey entirely different meanings. So the Navajos
(04:01):
were within this this corner of the United States, within
the Four Sacred Mountains, and gradually they began to be
pushed out, first by Spanish invaders and then by the
United States. And General Sherman of Civil War fame is
very well known for discussing what he called the Navajo
problem and beginning the process of eradication. And he was
(04:21):
even quoted as saying that their attempts at civilization are ridiculous.
And so the Navajos were pushed out of their reservation
and they were. They were made to go live in
New Mexico until eighteen sixty eight when a leader named
Barbon Scudo negotiated for the Navajo to return to their
land and in exchange, their children would be raised in
US schools and completely give up their culture. And it
(04:41):
got to a point where children who even spoke the
Navajo language and were overheard were um, we're beaten or
punished on their mouths, were washed out. So essentially the
Navajo culture had been somewhat annihilated and completely brushed aside,
and then it rose back up into question again. That's right,
and thank goodness that it wasn't I hated completely because
it ended up saving battle, saving lives in World War Two.
(05:05):
And some Navajos recount that when they heard the music
Pearl Harbor, there were as many as a hundred men
who went to enable station to report for duty, and
they even brought their own weapons in some cases, because
Navaja cultures very much rooted and the idea of protecting
the homeland, even the homeland that had spurned them for
so long. Right and um, not all Navajos were code talkers,
(05:28):
but many of them were. It's estimated between three and
about four twenty Navajos served as code talkers, and it's
interesting to note how the code actually worked because the
language itself was very complex. Only about thirty non Navajos
actually spoke the language in the world like on the planet.
But they added an extra twist to the code that
(05:49):
made it even more difficult. And that was even if
you translated all these Navajos a Navajo words into English correctly,
it was still sound like a random chain of words.
And that was because what you're supposed to do when
you got the message was only take the first letter
of the English translation and put those together to make
an understandable message. And what made it so unique was
(06:09):
that there were plenty of military terms that the Navajos
didn't have words for it all. So something like hummingbird
would refer to a fighter plane, and a dive bomber
would be a chicken hawk. So there was this added
layer of mystery. And even when they thought that the
enemy might be getting too close to figuring out what
the words stood for, they would take the letter A
(06:29):
and come up with three different English words that could
be derived from it. That's right, So they mixed it
up and like as you say, not all over. Its
had to be UM spilled out letter by litter. They
had those code words that UM were still shrouded in
a level of mystery. So the high point of the
Navajo code came after the demonstration that Johnston conducted for
General Clayton B. Vogel, and that's when Jane mentioned. He
(06:51):
demonstrated that a message that could take as much as
thirty minutes to transmit via a cryptograph or other machine
took twenty seconds for the Navajos. And the three hundred
eighty second Platoon Coding Unit was formed and recruiters from
the Marines went to different reservations to get Navajos and UM.
They had an outpouring of response, and some of the
men lied on their applications because they were too young
(07:13):
to go, and at least one lied because he was
too old to go. And they went to boot camp
just like any other recruit and then they were taken
to Camp Elliott to develop their code and it was
never ever ever written down, and it evolved from two
hundred eleven to four hundred eleven words, and the Navaja
were given a lot of creative freedom and developing the
code on their own. That's right, and to go back
(07:34):
to how complex the code was, even when Navajo soldier
who was actually not trained in the code. This this
soldier was not trained, but he understood the Navaho language.
When he was captured in Baton by the access troops,
they ordered him to try to translate it, and he
never understood what the message was. Because of the added
complexity of the code. That sort of gave rise to
(07:54):
the premise on which the Nicholas Cage maybe wind Talkers
is based. And that's the idea that for every Navajo
co talker in the field there was a secret bodyguard
who followed him and was supposed to kill him if
he were captured, so that he couldn't show the code.
And we don't never for sure if that was actually
a component of the Navajo co talker equation. The military
(08:15):
is not confirming or denying it, but it's, you know,
it's sort of interesting to think about. It's an interesting
twist to the story, that's right. And one of the
great quotes that I found about their significance to the
war in general was from the Battle of the Regima.
There was a Major Howard Conner who was an officer
there and he had six Navjo code talkers are working
around the clock during the battle, and he said later on,
(08:37):
we're not for the Navajos, and Marines would have never
taken you Agima. Yeah, on Agia. It was amazing. We're
talking about almost a thirty six day long battle with
about forty eight straight hours of coding and translating and decoding.
About eight hundred messages were sent without a single mistake.
It is incredible. And the irony is that when the
(08:59):
Navajo co talk walkers, they were the first twenty nine
one of the thirty that were originally recruited UM dropped
out after after training. The first twenty nine two stayed
behind went over to the battlefields. UM. They weren't used
at first because people weren't sure that they could really
trust them in the thick of battle, and they thought
that troops might be too caught up in military maneuvers
(09:19):
to really need their codes, and so it took a
while to build trust for the Navajos to be used
for their intended purpose. At first, they were just used
for running messages. They were just runners, and others were
you know, handed weapons and and told to fight. But
little did they know, and the Marine raiders where the
group that really put them to the test, and they
proved themselves especially um it's Sapan. One group of allies
(09:41):
was being bombed by their own men and they didn't know,
and they kept trying to radio to say stop stop,
this is us, you know, And finally they were able
to say, have you got a Navaho code talker there?
And as soon as the Navajo code talker sent the
message that these were friendly troops that they're firing on,
the firing immediately ceased. So the power that they how
it was just immeasurable. And what's sad is that after
(10:04):
Irrigima was taken and after you know, the bombs were
dropped on Japan and and the war was in assence over,
the Navajo co talkers were discharged and they couldn't really
talk about what their contribution to the war how no
matter how great it was, um, because it's still the
the Marines wanted to keep a hold on it to
(10:25):
use in future battles or what have you, and so
it actually remained classified until at least nineteen which is
just you can think of, like, think of what contribution
you made to the country that you know has betrayed
your people. In the past and you've done so much
great work and you come home and you can't talk
about it. It made it difficult for the co talkers
(10:45):
who returned to the reservation and those who went out
to seek jobs, because they couldn't account for what they've
been doing with the past couple of years of their lives,
and they couldn't say what they've been doing. They you know,
had to either fabricate stories or keep silent. And we
know today there are plenty of soldiers who are coming
home and you know they they have these dreams and
awful memories and psychological uh reckonings that they're they're dealing
(11:09):
with after all that they witnessed in war and I
Regima especially, we're talking about a volcano where the Japanese
were lucky enough to have dug trenches, but the Americans
were fighting on top, covered and volcanic dust, being slaughtered
all the Japanese had orders to kill at least ten Americans,
and the Navajo has had to come home and have
these memories and they couldn't talk about them, and they
couldn't share them. They had no way to really get
(11:30):
help for dealing with the after effects of war and
so when the information was declassified and they were finally
honored for their service, we we see that, you know,
these things are still coming up. The Navajo co talkers
are still talking about the memories that they have, and
it is I mean, it's testament to how well it
worked that the Marines still wanted to use it, because
(11:52):
it's true the Japanese never broke it, and assessment to
how effective they were and how great soldiers they were.
And so finally we see that they were paid homage
back in two thousand one, uh four of the five
living original twenty nine were honored with Congressional Gold medals,
and others that went in succession after the first twenty
(12:14):
nine they were given Congressional Silver medals. Built on about time, definitely,
So if you want to read more about the Navajos
and about how code breakers work, be sure to check
out our articles on how stuff works dot com for
more on this and thousands of other topics. Isn't how
stuff works dot Com
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