GROTON, Conn. - Heritage Month, a time of reflection at the contributions made by Native Americans to the United States. One small group who made one of the greatest contributions to the country was the Navajo Code Talkers. They were a small band of warriors who created an unbreakable code from the ancient language of their people and changed the course of modern history.
During the early months of WWII, Japanese intelligence experts broke every code the U.S. forces devised. They were able to anticipate American actions at an alarming rate. With plenty of fluent English speakers at their disposal, they sabotaged messages and issued false commands to ambush Allied troops. To combat this, increasingly complex codes were initiated. At Guadalcanal, military leaders finally complained that sending and receiving these codes required hours of encryption and decryption - up to two and a half hours for a single message. They rightly argued the military needed a better way to communicate.
Phillip Johnston, a son of a protestant missionary who grew up on a Navajo reservation was fluent in the language of the Navajo people and realized the potential it had as a military code.
In 1942 the first 29 Navajo recruits began their training at Camp Pendleton and started with a 200-word code that would expand to 600 by war's end. They weren't able to write reference chart of the code for fear of it falling into enemy hands, so when they sent code it was all from memory. During the battle for Iwo Jima, in the first 48 hours alone, they coded over 800 transmissions with perfect accuracy. Their heroism is widely acknowledged as the lynchpin of victory in the pivotal conflict.
In all, nearly 450 Navajo men served as code talkers during WWII, none of them were drafted.
These heroes who saved countless American lives came home as heroes, with no heroes welcome. The code had been so successful that it was considered too valuable to divulge its existence. The code was not declassified for over two decades, and the brave Native Americans who answered the call when their country needed them most didn't receive the recognition they so richly deserved until July 26, 2001.The first group of Navajo Code Talkers (the original 29), who developed and initiated the secret Navajo code, were given the Gold Congressional Medal of Honor at the Capitol Rotunda in Washington, DC. Only five were alive and only four were able to attend. On Nov. 24, 2001, the other approximately 400 Navajo Code Talkers were given the Silver Congressional Medal of Honor at Nakai Hall, Navajo Nation Fairgrounds, in Window Rock, AZ. Few Navajo Code Talkers were alive to attend, so many family members of deceased Navajo Code Talkers accepted their medals.
A monument in the code talkers' honor was dedicated Feb. 28, 2008, at the Arizona State Capital in Phoenix, and the Navajo Code Talkers Museum in New Mexico is set to open sometime in late 2011 or early 2012.