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    "headline": "Navajo Code Talkers sent 800 error-free messages at Iwo Jima with a World War II code that was never broken",
    "description": "The Navajo Code Talkers built a World War II code from their language that was never broken; six of them sent 800 error-free messages at Iwo Jima.",
    "datePublished": "2026-11-11T22:00:00+00:00",
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    "keywords": "Battle of Iwo Jima, Navajo Code Talkers, Navajo Nation, Veterans Day, World War II",
    "articleBody": "Six Navajo Marines sent and received more than 800 messages in the first two days at Iwo Jima in 1945, working around the clock, and not one contained an error. Their code, built on the Navajo language, was never broken. It is the only spoken military code known to have gone undeciphered. On Veterans Day, the story of the Navajo Code Talkers is a reminder that a language with almost no written form in 1942 became a tool no enemy cryptographer could crack. How the idea started The plan came from Philip Johnston, a Los Angeles civil engineer and World War I veteran who had grown up on the Navajo reservation as the son of missionaries. Early in 1942 he arranged a test for Major General Clayton B. Vogel. Under simulated combat conditions, Navajo men encoded, sent and decoded a three-line message in 20 seconds. The cipher machines of the day needed about 30 minutes. That is a speed-up of roughly 90 times, worked out simply: 30 minutes is 1,800 seconds, and 1,800 divided by 20 is 90. Vogel asked for 200 recruits. The Marines approved one platoon as a trial. On May 4, 1942, 29 Navajo men were sworn in at Fort Wingate, New Mexico, and became Platoon 382. History remembers them as the First Twenty-Nine. The youngest, William Dean Yazzie, was just 15; the oldest, Carl Gorman, was 35 and later became a celebrated artist. Why the code worked Navajo was still mostly unwritten in 1942, rich in dialects and hard for outsiders to learn. By one estimate, fewer than 30 people outside the Navajo Nation could understand it at the time. But the Marines did not simply speak Navajo on the radio. The First Twenty-Nine built a true code at Camp Pendleton on top of it. Letters: each English letter got a Navajo word, so names and places could be spelled out. Military terms: new words were coined from everyday Navajo. A destroyer was a shark. A bomber was a buzzard. A submarine was “iron fish”. Ranks: a lieutenant colonel became “silver oak leaf”. A Navajo speaker without the training heard only a string of unrelated nouns and verbs. The codebook stayed in the classroom; in the field, everything was memorized. Maj. Howard Connor, signal officer of the 5th Marine Division, later summed up their role at Iwo Jima: “Were it not for the Navajos, the Marines would never have taken Iwo Jima.” Decades of silence About 400 to 500 Native Americans served as Marine Corps code talkers in World War II, and roughly 300 qualified in the Navajo code. Yet the program stayed classified until 1968, so the men came home unable to talk about it. 1942: Platoon 382 sworn in and the code created. 1968: the code is declassified. 1982: August 14 is named Navajo Code Talkers Day. 2000: Congress awards the Congressional Gold Medal to the original 29 and silver medals to the other qualified code talkers. 2001: four surviving original code talkers receive their medals in the Capitol Rotunda. The Navajo were not the first. Choctaw and Cherokee soldiers used their languages for US forces in World War I, the same war that produced the Harlem Hellfighters, who spent 191 days in the trenches. Comanche code talkers landed at Utah Beach on D-Day. Badiyaa also looked at why the 1918 Armistice was signed near 5 a.m. but took effect at 11 a.m., the hour Veterans Day still marks. The code stayed secret for 23 years after the war ended. Navajo Code Talkers Day falls on August 14 each year. Further reading Wikipedia: Code talker Image: U.S. Air Force photo/Airman 1st Class Grace Lee, Public domain via Wikimedia Commons This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. How we work.",
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