The Navajo code talkers were a group of approximately 461 Navajo Marines who used their native language to transmit secret military messages during World War II. Serving in the Pacific Theater, they developed and operated a coded communication system based on the Navajo language that the Japanese military never broke. Their work remained classified for more than two decades after the war ended, meaning most Americans had no idea what these men had accomplished until 1968.
How the Program Began
The idea came from Philip Johnston, a non-Navajo man who had grown up on a Navajo reservation as the son of a missionary. Johnston was also a World War I veteran who understood the military’s need for secure battlefield communications. In early 1942, he read a newspaper article about the Army using Native Americans during training exercises in Louisiana, and the concept clicked: the Navajo language could serve as the foundation for an unbreakable code.
Johnston pitched the idea to Marine Corps leadership at Camp Elliott in California, laying out why Navajo was uniquely suited for the job. The language was extraordinarily complex, had no written alphabet of native origin, and was spoken almost exclusively by the Navajo people themselves. Johnston argued that fluency could only be achieved by someone already highly educated in English who then devoted years to studying both spoken and written Navajo. He claimed that, aside from himself, very few non-Navajo people in the world could understand the language. The Marine Corps arranged a demonstration, and the results were convincing enough that recruiters signed up twenty-nine Navajo men within two weeks.
The Original 29 and the Code They Built
Those first twenty-nine recruits did more than just speak Navajo over the radio. They engineered an entire coded system within their language, creating what became known as a Type One Code. This was a critical distinction: rather than simply translating English messages into Navajo (which a fluent listener could potentially follow), the code talkers built a layer of substitution on top of the language itself.
The system worked on two levels. First, they assigned an English word to each letter of the alphabet, choosing familiar things they could memorize easily, then translated those words into Navajo. The letter “C” became “moasi,” the Navajo word for cat. “D” became “lha-cha-eh” for dog. “E” was “dzeh” for elk, “R” was “gah” for rabbit, and so on. To spell out “code,” a talker would transmit “moasi, ne-ahs-jah, lha-cha-eh, dzeh,” which a Navajo listener would hear as “cat, owl, dog, elk” and decode by taking the first letter of each English word.
Second, they created a vocabulary of roughly 450 terms for common military words, using vivid Navajo descriptions as stand-ins. A submarine was “besh-lo,” meaning iron fish. A battleship was “lo-tso,” or whale. A cruiser was “lo-tso-yazzie,” small whale. A destroyer was “ca-lo,” shark. Fighter planes became “da-he-tih-hi” (hummingbird), dive bombers were “gini” (chicken hawk), and torpedo planes were “tas-chizzie” (swallow). A minesweeper was “cha,” the word for beaver. Every term had to be memorized perfectly before deployment, since nothing could be written down.
Where They Fought
Navajo code talkers served across the major campaigns of the Pacific Theater, transmitting tactical messages by radio and telephone in the heat of combat. Their most famous contribution came at Iwo Jima in 1945, where six Navajo code talkers attached to the 5th Marine Division sent and received more than 800 messages without a single error. Major Howard Connor, the division’s signal officer, later said: “Were it not for the Navajos, the Marines would never have taken Iwo Jima.”
By the war’s end, approximately 461 Navajo men had served as code talkers, with 13 killed in action. The Japanese, who had cracked other American codes, never deciphered the Navajo-based system. Its speed was another advantage: a coded Navajo message could be transmitted and decoded in seconds, while machine encryption could take thirty minutes or more for the same message.
A Broader Tradition of Code Talking
The Navajo program was the largest and most well-known, but it was not the first. During World War I, members of the Choctaw, Cherokee, Comanche, Osage, Lakota, and Cheyenne nations used their languages to relay messages on European battlefields. In World War II, the practice expanded significantly. Comanche, Lakota, Muscogee, Mohawk, Meskwaki, Tlingit, Hopi, Cree, Crow, and Choctaw code talkers served in the European Theater with the Army, while the Navajo program operated in the Pacific with the Marine Corps. A 2008 law, the Code Talker Recognition Act, formally recognized approximately 50 Native American tribes whose members served as code talkers across both world wars.
Decades of Secrecy
When the war ended, the Navajo code talkers were told not to talk about what they had done. The military kept the program classified because officials believed the code could be useful again in future conflicts. That secrecy lasted until 1968, meaning the code talkers spent more than twenty years unable to share their service with family, friends, or employers. Many returned to the reservation and lived quiet lives, their wartime contributions completely unknown to the public.
Recognition and Legacy
Public acknowledgment came slowly. In 1982, President Ronald Reagan established Navajo Code Talkers Day on August 14, a holiday that now honors all tribes associated with wartime code talking. The larger milestone came in 2000, when Congress passed legislation awarding Congressional Gold Medals to the original twenty-nine code talkers who developed the system, and Congressional Silver Medals to all who served in the program afterward.
Most of the code talkers have since passed away. John Kinsel Sr. died in October 2024 at age 107. As of that date, only two Navajo code talkers were still living: Peter MacDonald, a former Navajo Nation chairman, and Thomas H. Begay. A dedicated Navajo Code Talkers museum has been proposed near the existing memorial at Window Rock, Arizona, though the project still needs roughly $40 million in funding.