In early 1942, American field codes in the Pacific were lasting roughly twenty-four hours before Japanese cryptographers broke them open. Battle plans sent over the air reached the enemy while they were still plans. The fastest secure coding machine the Marine Corps owned needed thirty minutes to encrypt three lines of text — too slow for a war moving island to island at the pace the Pacific demanded.
The officer responsible for the men who would carry those codes onto beaches was Major General Clayton B. Vogel, commanding general of the Amphibious Corps, Pacific Fleet, at Camp Elliott outside San Diego. Vogel had built his career in the small wars: the legation guard at Peking, the jungles of Nicaragua and Haiti, river patrol duty on the Yangtze. He understood the problem in front of him exactly. Every order his corps sent in combat would either move too slow to matter or move fast enough to be read by the enemy it was aimed at.
On February 28, 1942, a civilian engineer named Philip Johnston walked into Camp Elliott with a solution. Johnston was the son of a Protestant missionary, raised on the Navajo reservation, one of perhaps thirty outsiders in the country who could follow the Navajo language. The language was unwritten — no alphabet, no dictionary, a grammar that bent meaning through tone in ways that locked out anyone who had not learned it as a child. Johnston strung a telephone line between two offices and handed Vogel six combat messages. Four Navajo speakers, pulled off the streets of Los Angeles for the morning, encoded and decoded all six.
The whole demonstration ran in under twenty seconds per message.
A week later, on March 6, 1942, Vogel wrote to Marine Corps Commandant Thomas Holcomb and requested 200 Navajo recruits. Holcomb approved 29 as a pilot program.
Those 29 men built a code inside a language. A dive bomber was a chicken hawk. A battleship was a whale. An observation plane was me-as-jah — Navajo for owl. For English letters, they created primary and alternate terms, so the same letter never hit the air with the same sound twice. The entire system had to be memorized. Nothing was written down that could be captured.
The first code talkers waded ashore at Guadalcanal in August 1942. The code traveled to Tarawa, Peleliu, and Iwo Jima. At Iwo Jima, six talkers worked forty-eight hours straight and passed more than eight hundred messages without an error. Major Howard Connor, the division signal officer, later said without the Navajos the island would not have fallen.
After the war, Japan's chief of intelligence, Lieutenant General Seizo Arisue, admitted that while his codebreakers had read U.S. Army and Army Air Forces traffic, the Marine Corps code had defeated them. They never broke it. A Tokyo newspaper speculated that if they had, the Pacific war might have ended differently.
The program was classified until 1968. Some of the men who built it were dead before the country was told what they had done.
───────────────────────────────────────
SOURCES & FURTHER READING
Jevec, Adam. "Semper Fidelis, Code Talkers." Prologue: Quarterly of the National Archives, Vol. 33, No. 4 (Winter 2001).
"Navajo Code Talkers: World War II Fact Sheet." Naval History and Heritage Command.
"Clayton Barney Vogel — Major General, United States Marine Corps." Arlington National Cemetery.
"Analysis: Letter Recommending Navajo Enlistment." EBSCO Research Starters.
"Marine Corps Navajo Code Talkers." BLT 3/5 Marines.
───────────────────────────────────────
#WW2 #NavyHistory #CodeTalkers 
Comments (0)