The Navajo Code Talkers were United States Marines who used their own language to send secret battlefield messages during World War II. Starting with 29 recruits in 1942, they built a spoken code inside Navajo that Japanese forces never deciphered, and it carried Marine communications across the Pacific until the war ended in 1945.
Their story has a twist that still surprises people: the code was not just “speaking Navajo.” It was a code within a language, full of whales, hummingbirds and potatoes, and the men who built it had to keep it secret for more than twenty years after they came home. Here is how it worked, and why it held. Explore our translation services services for details.
Key Takeaways
- The first 29 Navajo recruits joined the Marine Corps in May 1942 and created the code themselves.
- The code paired an alphabet of everyday Navajo words with a vocabulary of 211 military terms, later expanded to 411.
- At Iwo Jima, six Code Talkers handled more than 800 messages in the first two days of the battle.
- The program stayed classified until 1968, and the original 29 were awarded Congressional Gold Medals in 2001.
- The Navajo were not alone: Choctaw, Comanche, Hopi, Meskwaki and many other Native nations also served as code talkers.
Who Were the Navajo Code Talkers?
They were young Navajo men who served as Marine Corps radio operators in the Pacific. Their job was to turn orders, coordinates and reports into coded Navajo, speak them over field radios and telephones, and turn them back into English on the other end.
The National Archives estimates that between 375 and 420 Navajos served as code talkers by the end of the war. Official records place them at Guam, Palau, Okinawa and Iwo Jima. Thirteen were killed in action.
There is a hard irony in the story. Many Native Americans of that generation had attended government boarding schools that discouraged or punished the use of their home languages. The same language then became one of the most valuable tools the Marine Corps had.
Whose Idea Was It? Philip Johnston and the First 29
The proposal came from Philip Johnston, a World War I veteran and civil engineer. He was not Navajo, but he was the son of a missionary and had grown up on the Navajo reservation, where he learned the language as a child. Explore our language hidden within language for details.
Early in 1942, after reading that the Army was using Native American soldiers for communications, Johnston took his idea to the Marine Corps in California. On February 28, 1942, four Navajo volunteers gave a demonstration, sending six sample combat messages back and forth. One read, “Enemy expected to make tank and dive bomber attack at dawn,” and it came through the other end almost word for word.
The Marines were convinced. In May 1942 the first 29 Navajo recruits arrived at the Recruit Depot in San Diego for basic training. Then they were handed an unusual assignment: invent a code.
Credit matters here: Johnston suggested using the language, but the code itself was the work of the Navajo recruits.
How Did the Navajo Code Work?
The code had two layers, which is why even a fluent Navajo speaker without training would have heard a stream of unrelated words. Explore our how languages evolve over time for details.
Layer one: a spelling alphabet
To spell out a name or an unusual word, the Code Talkers used a Navajo word whose English translation began with the letter they needed. For the letter A they could say wol-la-chee, which means “ant.” The listener translated the word into English and kept only the first letter.
Common letters got several options so that repeated sounds would not give the pattern away. These examples come from the Navajo Code Talkers’ Dictionary published by the Naval History and Heritage Command, in the spellings the Marine Corps used in its 1945 revision.
| Letter | Code words (as written in the dictionary) | Meanings |
|---|---|---|
| A | wol-la-chee, be-la-sana, tse-nill | ant, apple, axe |
| B | na-hash-chid, shush, toish-jeh | badger, bear, barrel |
| C | moasi, tla-gin, ba-goshi | cat, coal, cow |
| D | be, chindi, lha-cha-eh | deer, devil, dog |
Layer two: a vocabulary of stand-in words
Spelling everything would have been far too slow in combat. Navajo also had no words for things like submarines and dive bombers. So the recruits assigned existing Navajo words to military terms, usually by picking something the object resembled. Ships became sea creatures. Aircraft became birds.
The first version of the code had 211 of these terms, and it grew to 411 during the war. Here are 15 of them, again taken from the Navy’s published dictionary. Explore our accurate translation of critical messages for details.
| Military term | Code word | Literal meaning |
|---|---|---|
| Battleship | lo-tso | whale |
| Submarine | besh-lo | iron fish |
| Destroyer | ca-lo | shark |
| Aircraft carrier | tsidi-moffa-ye-hi | bird carrier |
| Mine sweeper | cha | beaver |
| Transport | atsah | eagle |
| Fighter plane | da-he-tih-hi | hummingbird |
| Dive bomber | gini | chicken hawk |
| Bomber plane | jay-sho | buzzard |
| Torpedo plane | tas-chizzie | swallow |
| Observation plane | ne-as-jah | owl |
| Britain | toh-ta | between waters |
| Grenade | ni-ma-si | potatoes |
| Bomb | a-ye-shi | eggs |
| America | ne-he-mah | our mother |
So a message about a bomber dropping bombs near a battleship would sound, to an outsider who somehow understood Navajo, like a buzzard laying eggs beside a whale. The Code Talkers memorized every term, so there was no codebook to capture.
Why Did Japan Never Break the Code?
The claim is not just a legend. The National Archives states plainly that the enemy never broke the code talkers’ code. Several things worked together to keep it that way:
- Almost no outside speakers. Navajo was spoken by very few people beyond the Navajo themselves, and study materials for outsiders were scarce.
- Two layers of secrecy. An eavesdropper needed to know Navajo and the memorized substitutions, and the second part existed only in the Code Talkers’ heads.
- Speed. Messages were spoken and understood in real time, while machine encryption of the day took far longer to encode and decode.
- Variation. Multiple words for common letters made the spelling alphabet harder to analyze.
What Did the Code Talkers Do at Iwo Jima?
The invasion of Iwo Jima began on February 19, 1945, and it became one of the bloodiest battles in Marine Corps history. According to the CIA’s history of the program, six Navajo Code Talkers worked around the clock during the first two days, sending and receiving more than 800 messages without an error.
Major Howard Connor, a signal officer with the 5th Marine Division, gave them the credit afterward: “Were it not for the Navajos, the Marines would never have taken Iwo Jima.”
Were the Navajo the Only Code Talkers?
No, and the others deserve to be remembered too. Code talking began in World War I, when Choctaw soldiers in France in 1918 relayed messages in their language over field telephones. The National Archives also lists Cheyenne, Comanche, Cherokee, Osage and Yankton Sioux among the World War I code talkers. Explore our professional document translation services for details.
In World War II, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian counts Comanche, Meskwaki, Chippewa, Oneida and Hopi soldiers among those who served alongside the Navajo. Seventeen Comanche men trained as code talkers for the Army, and Comanche code talkers landed at Utah Beach on D-Day. Their word for a tank was, fittingly, “turtle.”
Some groups, including the Navajo, Comanche, Hopi and Meskwaki, built special coded vocabularies. Others simply spoke their languages as they were, which was often secrecy enough.
A Secret for Decades: Recognition at Last
When the Code Talkers were discharged, they were told not to talk about what they had done, in case the code was needed again. They kept that promise for decades.
- 1968: The military declassified the program.
- 1982: President Ronald Reagan proclaimed August 14 as National Navajo Code Talkers Day.
- 2000: Congress approved gold medals for the original 29 and silver medals for the Navajo Code Talkers who followed them.
- 2001: On July 26, President George W. Bush presented the Congressional Gold Medals in the Capitol Rotunda.
- 2008: The Code Talkers Recognition Act extended national recognition to code talkers from other tribes in both world wars.
Chester Nez, the last surviving member of the original 29, died in 2014. Explore our Japanese translation services for details.
What the Code Talkers Teach Us About Language and Translation
Strip away the radios and the secrecy, and the Code Talkers were doing something translators do every day: carrying exact meaning between two languages, under pressure, where a single wrong word has real consequences.
Their story is also a reminder that no language is “small.” Today, families and organizations still need documents moved accurately between English and languages that software handles poorly, from Navajo to hundreds of others. That work takes people who know both languages deeply, which is why our language translation services rely on human translators. If you enjoy linguistic puzzles, our look at the hardest languages to learn is a good next read.
Frequently Asked Questions
Was the Navajo code ever broken?
No. According to the National Archives, the enemy never broke the code talkers’ code. Japanese forces intercepted the transmissions but could not make sense of them, because understanding a message required both fluent Navajo and knowledge of hundreds of memorized substitutions that were never written down in the field. The code stayed secure through the end of the war in 1945, and the program remained classified until 1968.
How many Navajo Code Talkers were there?
The program started with 29 recruits in May 1942, often called the First Twenty-Nine, who created the code. The National Archives estimates that between 375 and 420 Navajos served as code talkers by the end of World War II, and many sources round the figure to about 400. Thirteen were killed in action. Explore our expert business translation services for details.
Who came up with the idea for the Navajo Code Talkers?
Philip Johnston, a World War I veteran who had grown up on the Navajo reservation as the son of a missionary, proposed the idea to the Marine Corps early in 1942. He arranged a demonstration on February 28, 1942, that persuaded Marine officers to try it. Johnston suggested using the language, but the code itself was designed by the first 29 Navajo recruits.
When is National Navajo Code Talkers Day?
National Navajo Code Talkers Day is August 14. President Ronald Reagan first proclaimed it in 1982, at the request of Congress, to honor the Code Talkers and the wider contribution of Native Americans to the armed forces. Because the program stayed classified until 1968, the day was one of the first national honors the Code Talkers received.
Why was the Navajo language chosen for the code?
Navajo was spoken by very few people outside the Navajo community, and there was little published material an enemy could use to study it. Its sounds and grammar are also very different from English, Japanese and European languages, which made it hard for untrained listeners even to transcribe. Add a memorized code on top, and the result was fast, simple and secure.
Have Words That Need to Cross a Language Barrier?
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