As in every war, during WWI and WWII secret codes were created and used by our military commanders to deceive and confuse the enemy and send plans of attacks, formations and reconnaissance through Morse Code signals. Sometimes this worked well - at other times, the enemy had intelligent decoders on hand to decipher the codes and know where to send their troops to engage in combat and ambush our troops. The Morse code signals often took hours to relay messages.

Something had to be done to get the messages passed along in secret in order to help our troops win the battles. Our Military was in desperate search for some type of code that could foil all attempts at deciphering. An ingenious plan came from a man who was the son of a missionary to the Navajos. Philip Johnston, raised on the Navajo reservation and one of few non Navajos who knew and spoke their language and who was a veteran of WWI, knew that Native American languages, mostly Choctaw, were used in WWI for secret coding purposes. Johnston knew that the Navajo language was unwritten and therefore would fill the military requirement for encoded messages that would be undecipherable. It would take extensive exposure and months of training for anyone to understand its complexity. The syntax, tonal qualities and dialects would make it unintelligible to the enemy. The language had no alphabet or symbols and was spoken only on the Navajo lands of the Southwest United States. At that time, less than 30 non-Navajo Americans could understand the language.

In early 1942, Johnston met with Major General Clayton B. Vogel, Commanding General of Amphibious Corps in the Pacific Fleet and convinced him and his staff that the Navajo language would prove valuable as a code. By demonstrating with simulated combat conditions they found that the Navajos could encode, transmit and decode an English message of three lines in 20 seconds. The Morse code system took 30 minutes to do the same thing. Very impressed, Vogel made a recommendation to the Commandant of the Marine Corps and 200 Navajos were recruited. In May of that year, 29 Navajo recruits were sent to Camp Pendleton and created the Navajo code. They developed a dictionary and words for military terms. All this had to be memorized by these 29 men while in boot camp. They became full-fledged marines with a new and crucial purpose and were deployed to the Pacific theater. Their main priority was to talk and transmit vital information in the battlefield. Their success, skill, speed and accuracy brought them praise throughout the war. They were even credited for success at winning the battle of Iwo Jima due to only six men who sent over 800 messages without even one error.

The Japanese were never able to crack the codes, in spite of their high success in decoding all other messages used by other U.S. branches of the military. There were 540 Navajos out of approximately 50,000 tribal members who served in the Marines in 1942. Of those 540, as many as 420 were "code talkers". With the Navajo working in the Pacific theater and the Comanche code talkers working in the European theater, the Japanese and Germans could not decipher the encoded messages. Even after WWII they were valuable for code purposes. The movie, "WindTalkers", is about the Navajo Code Talkers and was very well received by the public.

The Comanche Code Talkers, fluent in the Comanche language, used their knowledge, along with the training they were given by the Army, to send critical messages that confused the enemy during World War II. After being trained in communications, fourteen were deployed to the European theater. They, too, helped to bring the end of the war on much sooner than anticipated and saved lives with their expertise. Author Dr. William C. Meadows published a book in 2002 titled "The Comanche Code Talkers of World War II" that tells their honorable story.

The use of code talkers was first put to use in WWI, using the Choctaw language. Charley Jones, a historian and teacher of information history of the Choctaw Nation, noted that a Choctaw Chief, Pushmataha, who died in 1827, had predicted the "Choctaw war cry" would be heard in a foreign land - and how very right he was! Native Americans of the Choctaw Nation were enlisted to use code talking in WWI. The military searched for a code that could not be broken and found it in the Choctaw language which was obsolete. Joseph Oklahombi was a Choctaw war hero and code talker who single handedly attacked and killed 79 German soldiers, the rest of the 250 in the troop surrendered to him. He was Oklahoma's greatest war hero of WWI - guess his war cry must have startled the Germans so bad they would rather surrender than die!

Counter attacks by the Germans in the battlefield stopped when codes in the Choctaw tongue started coming through. The wire taps the Germans had laid did them no good for they could not understand what the Choctaws were saying. They were completely baffled. Tribal members of the Cheyenne, Cherokee, Chippewa, Cree, Hopi, Kiowa, Menominee, Muskogee, Oneida, Osage, Pawnee, Sac and Fox tribes have been code talkers.

Native Americans have been very proud over the years of their elite "Code Talkers" and it is really a shame that these fine men were unable to receive the praise, glory and credit at the time of their critical work - however, because they were sworn to secrecy and honored that oath, they did not gain Government and public recognition until 1968, when the military finally declassified the missions and the codes. They were honored for their great deeds on September 17, 1992 at the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. A dedication of the Navajo Code Talker exhibit included photos, equipment they had used and their original codes along with the dictionary they had created. The exhibit is still a popular stop for tourists. The code system was so successful that the Code Talkers were credited with saving countless lives of American soldiers and with victories in battles.

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