In the first months of 1942, American military codes were dying almost as fast as they were born. Japanese cryptographers were dismantling the communication ciphers of the United States nearly as quickly as those ciphers entered service, and the men using them knew it. Battle plans reached the enemy while they were still plans. The fastest secure coding device owned by the Marine Corps required about half an hour to transform three lines of English into cipher and back again.
Quicker hand ciphers existed in the field, but the quick ones were exactly the ones the Japanese tended to read first. By the time an order was safe to send, the moment it described had sometimes passed. Speed and secrecy had become enemies; a commander could have one but could not count on both. An order the enemy could read was worse than an order never sent.
The officer forced to live with that arithmetic was Clayton Vogel, a 59-year-old Marine who ran the amphibious corps, Pacific Fleet, out of Camp Elliott near San Diego. His career had been built in forgotten small wars: the legation guard at Peking, jungle duty in Nicaragua and Haiti, river patrols on the Yangtze. He had helped construct amphibious doctrine from nearly nothing, and he understood the trade he had been handed. Every order his corps sent in combat would either move too slowly to matter or fast enough to be read by the people it was meant to kill.
He had no answer of his own. What he had was a deadline. The answer walked in wearing no uniform. Philip Johnston was a civil engineer in Los Angeles in his early fifties, a veteran of the last war and the son of a Protestant missionary.
He had been raised on the Navajo reservation and had spent the better part of twenty-four years among the Diné, making him one of perhaps thirty outsiders alive who could follow the language. A newspaper item about Army maneuvers using Native American signalmen had set an idea loose in his head. Navajo was unwritten. There was no alphabet for an enemy to capture, no dictionary to steal, and its grammar bent meaning through tone in ways that locked out anyone who had not learned it as a small child.
Johnston carried the idea to the naval district office in Los Angeles, where someone thought it promising and pushed him up the chain to Camp Elliott. The idea was not new, only neglected. In the last war, Choctaw soldiers had passed American orders over field telephones in their own language, and German listeners had gotten nowhere. The Army had even revived the notion in 1940, recruiting from tribes in Oklahoma.
What Johnston added was the choice of language: not any tongue the enemy happened not to speak, but the one tongue no outside scholar had ever been allowed to set down on paper. He put it in front of the area signal officer at Camp Elliott, a man named James Jones. Jones was not impressed; a civilian promising an unbreakable code sounded like one more salesman. Johnston spoke a few sentences of Navajo across the desk.
Jones, who could not place a single sound of it, gave him two weeks to come back and prove the thing worked. On the 28th of February, 1942, Vogel ran the proof himself. He had a telephone line strung between two offices and wrote out six messages of the sort a unit sends under fire. Johnston had brought four Navajo speakers up from Los Angeles, none of them soldiers; he had pulled them off the city streets for the morning.
Two went into one room with the orders, two waited in the other with paper and pencils. The drill was plain. One man read an English order, turned it on the spot into Navajo, and spoke it down the wire. No codebook passed between them.
The man at the far end listened to a stream of an unwritten language and wrote the order back out in English word for word. Only one of those six messages survives in the published record. It read, “Enemy expected to make tank and dive bomber attack at dawn. ” It came back out of the second room as, “Enemy tank dive bomber expected to attack this morning.
” Close enough that a commander acting on it would have done the right thing. The whole exchange ran about twenty seconds. The coding machine in the next building would have needed half an hour for the same three lines. Vogel had just watched a problem with no good answer get solved by four civilians and a field telephone.
On the 6th of March, he sat down and wrote to the Commandant of the Marine Corps, Thomas Holcomb. He laid out the demonstration, the speed, the accuracy that had come back almost verbatim, and made his request: enlist two hundred Navajos as Marine signalmen. He added a reason that sounds strange now. German researchers, he wrote, had spent twenty years working through the native languages of the Southwest under the cover of field work, posing as students and collectors, and the Navajo were the one people they had never gotten into.
Vogel wanted a code no foreign scholar had already cracked open, and he believed he had found the last such language on the map. What came back was less than he asked for. Headquarters approved the idea as an experiment, not a program. Two hundred became twenty-nine.
There were conditions: every recruit had to meet the regular standard for a Marine and be fluent in both Navajo and English, narrowing the field at a time when many on the reservation had little formal schooling. The first group was drawn from a high school in Tuba City and a scatter of other places across Arizona and New Mexico, some of them still teenagers when they signed. They went through the same boot camp as everyone else before anyone handed them the problem that was theirs alone. The twenty-nine reported to San Diego in May and set about building a code inside a language.
Navajo carried no military vocabulary, so they made one from the world in front of them. A dive bomber became a chicken hawk. A battleship, a whale. The word they chose for an observation plane meant owl.
For the letters they had to spell out, they assigned Navajo words and layered in alternates, so the same English letter would not always come across the air as the same sound, shutting the door on an enemy trying to count repetitions and work backward. Each man carried the whole apparatus in his head, primary terms and alternates together, with nothing on paper that could be lifted off a dead body. It was a code built twice over, once in a language almost no outsider knew, then again inside that language, so that even a Navajo who happened to be listening would hear nonsense. In August 1942, the first code talkers waded ashore at Guadalcanal, and the bet Vogel had placed held.
Orders that once took half an hour to encrypt now went out in seconds in a language the listening Japanese could not climb into. By the end of that year, the talkers had become something a Marine commander would not land without. They went in with the first waves and came off with the last, because a unit that could not talk to its own guns and ships was fighting half blind. The same code carried the Marines through Tarawa, Peleliu, and Iwo Jima, across three years of island fighting, and the enemy never broke it.
It nearly got the talkers killed, though not by the Japanese. Their own side kept mistaking the strange syllables coming over the radio for enemy speech, and more than one code talker came close to being shot by the Marines he was there to serve. Some units took to assigning each man a bodyguard, half to guard the code and half to keep a nervous rifleman from solving the wrong problem. At Iwo Jima, six talkers worked two days straight and passed more than 800 messages, every one of them clean.
The signal officer of their division, Major Howard Connor, said it plainer than anyone since: “Without the Navajos, the island would not have fallen. ”
The sharpest verdict came from the other side of the line after the shooting stopped. Japan’s wartime chief of intelligence, Lieutenant General Seizo Arisue, was asked what his code breakers had managed against the Americans. They had read the army’s traffic, he said, and the Army Air Force’s traffic, too.
The Marine Corps code had beaten them. They never broke it. A Tokyo newspaper put the loss into a single sentence after the war, guessing that had its cryptographers cracked the Navajo messages, the Pacific war might have come out a different way. In 1942, there were about 50,000 Navajo in the country.
A few hundred of their young men became Marines, and a few hundred of those became talkers. What they did stayed secret for a generation after the war. The code was still thought useful, so the corps classified it and ordered the men to say nothing, even at home. They went back to the reservation and held the silence for twenty-three years, until the program was opened to the public in 1968.
Some of them were in the ground before the country was told what they had done. Vogel did not stay to watch any of it. In October 1942, he shipped for the South Pacific, and the program he had vouched for ran on in his absence. The next spring, asked by Halsey to study a landing in the New Georgia group, his staff handed back hard, pessimistic estimates of what the ground would cost, and the meeting did not go well for them.
He had a habit of being right in rooms that wanted to hear something easier. He had asked for 200 men and been given 29, and those 29 had handed the Marines the one channel the enemy could not enter. He finished the war in posts that drew little notice, and his name is not the one most people attached to the story. One man came to know the code from inside a prison cell.
Joe Kieyoomia was Navajo, a soldier of the army, taken when the Philippines fell, driven through the Bataan Death March, and held as a prisoner until the war ended. He spoke the language the Marines had built their code from. When his captors worked that out, they brought him intercepted transmissions and ordered him to translate. He had survived the March that killed thousands and three years of captivity, and now he was being punished for the one thing he could not do.
He listened to his own tongue come over the radio as strings of common words, horse and owl and chicken hawk, and could find no order under any of it. They beat him for the failure. He kept telling them the plain truth that the sounds were Navajo and carried nothing he could follow, and his captors heard only a man who would not talk.
The code had been built out of everything he was, and it shut him out exactly as it shut out everyone else.
