Philip Johnston, the son of a Protestant missionary who had grown up on the Navajo reservation and was one of the few non-Navajo who spoke the language fluently, proposed the idea to the Marine Corps in early 1942: use the Navajo language as a military code. It was unwritten, had no alphabet, was tonal (meaning the same word said with different pitch had different meanings), and was spoken by fewer than 30 non-Navajo people worldwide.

The Marines recruited 29 Navajo men as the first code talkers. They developed a dual-layer code: first translating military terms into Navajo words (a tank was "tortoise," a bomber was "buzzard," a submarine was "iron fish"), then encrypting the remaining words by using the Navajo word for letter substitution. The result was a code that was not simply a translation — even a native Navajo speaker who hadn't been trained would not understand the transmissions.

In the Pacific

The code talkers served in every major Pacific campaign from Guadalcanal to Okinawa. At Iwo Jima, six Navajo code talkers transmitted over 800 messages during the first 48 hours of the battle — all without error. Major Howard Connor, the signal officer for the 5th Marine Division, later declared: "Were it not for the Navajo Code Talkers, the Marines would never have taken Iwo Jima."

The Japanese, who had broken every other American code, were completely baffled. They captured a Navajo soldier — Joe Kieyoomia, who was not a code talker — and forced him to listen to intercepted transmissions. Kieyoomia, though fluent in Navajo, could not make sense of the coded messages and was tortured for his failure to translate.

Secrecy and Recognition

The Code Talker program was classified until 1968. The men who served were told not to speak about their contribution. Many returned to reservations where they faced continued discrimination and poverty, unable to explain to anyone what they had done. It was not until 2001 that the original 29 code talkers were awarded the Congressional Gold Medal.

By that time, only five of the original 29 were still alive to accept the honor.