Indigenous · History Classes · Grades 7–9
The Code Talkers: The Languages That Won Battles
History Class · Level band: Grades 7–9
English edition — the language editions of the history classes are outstanding and will follow the site’s translation pattern; none is fabricated here.
The Code Talkers — The Languages That Won Battles (Grades 7–9)
Status: Researched draft — cultural review pending
How to read this entry: Documented fact = the fact stands in a named source — government and museum records, the nations' own published histories, the men's testimony. Tradition — the people's own account = what the nations and the men's families teach. Debated / Claim = a disputed point, labelled where it stands. This is the Grades 7–9 telling of the entry; the full entry stands in the senior band.
Documented Fact. In the First and Second World Wars, the United States military faced a problem: the enemy kept breaking its codes. German and Japanese codebreakers could read the cipher machines. Radio messages that were supposed to be secret were not secret. The answer came from the first peoples of the continent: soldiers who could transmit messages in their own Indigenous languages — languages the enemy had never studied, with no dictionaries, no grammar books, and almost no speakers outside their own nations.
Documented Fact. There were two kinds of code talking. Sometimes the language itself was the code — plain conversation the enemy simply could not understand. Sometimes the soldiers built a secret code inside the language: chosen words stood for things the language had never needed words for, like tanks and submarines and fighter planes, and other words stood for the letters of the alphabet so any name could be spelled. Even someone who found a speaker of the language could not understand the messages, because the messages were not plain speech. The code talkers memorised everything. Nothing was written down where it could be captured. A coded message that took a machine about thirty minutes to send took the talkers about twenty seconds.
Documented Fact — the first code talkers, 1918. In October 1918, during the Meuse-Argonne offensive in France, German forces were tapping American telephone lines and breaking American codes. An officer heard two Choctaw soldiers talking and realised what their language could do. Choctaw soldiers were posted along the lines as "Telephone Squads," passing orders in Choctaw. Their language had no word for a machine gun, so they made one: "little gun shoot fast." Their messages helped win the battles of St. Étienne and Forest Ferme in the war's last weeks, and the enemy never read them. The first squad had eight men; in all, nineteen Choctaw code talkers are counted — the first organised code talkers in history.
Documented Fact — the Navajo code talkers, 1942–1945. In the Second World War, the Marine Corps built the largest programme. A veteran named Philip Johnston, who had grown up on the Navajo Reservation and spoke the language, proposed Navajo (Diné Bizaad), and in May 1942 the first twenty-nine Navajo recruits — the original 29 — built the code at Camp Pendleton. A submarine was besh-lo, "iron fish." A fighter plane was da-he-tih-hi, "hummingbird." Grenades were ni-ma-si, "potatoes." America was Ne-he-mah, "Our Mother." In all, about four hundred Navajo code talkers served across the Pacific. Thirteen were killed. At the battle of Iwo Jima, six code talkers sent and received over eight hundred messages in the first two days without a single error, and their commanding signal officer, Major Howard Connor, said afterwards: "Were it not for the Navajos, the Marines would never have taken Iwo Jima." Japan's own intelligence chief admitted after the war that his codebreakers had broken American Army codes but never the Marines'. The Navajo code was never broken — not once, in the whole war.
Documented Fact — the other nations. The Navajo were not alone. Fourteen Comanche code talkers landed in Normandy on D-Day, 6 June 1944, and began transmitting in Comanche from Utah Beach; they had built a code of about 250 words, in which a tank was wakaree'e, "turtle," and Hitler was "Crazy White Man." Meskwaki talkers served in North Africa, Hopi talkers in the Pacific, Cherokee and Choctaw talkers again, and men of many more nations — and in Canada, a Métis soldier named Charles "Checker" Tomkins translated secret radio messages into Cree. Germany had even sent scientists to America before the war to try to learn Indigenous languages for exactly this purpose. They failed.
Documented Fact — the secret, and the honour that came late. The code talkers' work was classified secret. When they came home, they were not allowed to tell anyone — not even their families — what they had done. The Navajo code stayed secret until 1968. Only after that could the honour begin, and it came slowly: a Navajo Code Talkers Day in 1982; gold medals from Congress for the original 29 in 2001 — by which time only five of the twenty-nine were still alive; and in 2013, a ceremony in Washington honouring thirty-three Native nations whose men had served as code talkers. By then almost all the men were gone, and the medals were received by their families and their nations. One Second World War code talker from the Army's programmes, Edmund Harjo of the Seminole Nation, aged ninety-six, was able to be there himself.
The thing to hold onto. These men transmitted in languages that, in those same years, children were being punished for speaking in government schools. The governments tried to take the languages away — and in two world wars, those same languages were the one code the enemy could never break. The languages they tried to remove were the languages that could not be broken.
Companion classes in this band: They Signed On — The Long Service · The Nations in the War Over Slavery. The full code-talkers entry, with the suppression record whole, stands in the senior band.