For the first time, they weren’t punished for speaking their own language.
August 7, 1942: The Navajo Code Talkers conducted their first major operation, landing with the 1st Marine Division at Guadalcanal.
Fifteen Navajo Marines came ashore that day among roughly 11,000 troops, carrying a code built entirely from their own language. Within months, it would become the only code in modern military history that was never broken. Not long before, that same language had gotten children punished for speaking it.
Chester Nez was eight years old in 1929 when he was sent from his home in Chi Chil Tah, New Mexico, to the Fort Defiance School in Arizona. His hair was cut off. His clothing was taken. The school’s matrons disciplined the children harshly, and when Nez was caught speaking Diné, his own language, one of them brushed his teeth with bitter soap.
He wasn’t alone. Between 1869 and the 1960s, hundreds of thousands of Native children across the country were sent to government-run boarding schools with the same explicit goal: erase their languages, their hair, their names, their culture, and replace all of it with something the government considered acceptably American. Soap in the mouth for a Navajo word was common enough to be almost routine.
Building the Unbreakable Code
Thirteen years later, Chester Nez was one of the first 29 Navajo Marines recruited to build a code the enemy could never crack. He built it out of the exact language he’d once been punished for speaking.
The idea came from Philip Johnston, the son of a missionary who’d grown up on the Navajo reservation and was one of the few non-Navajo speakers fluent in the language. He knew what the Marine Corps needed: a code that couldn’t be broken by an enemy who had already cracked nearly everything else the U.S. had thrown at them. He also knew Navajo was almost uniquely suited for it. It was an unwritten language of extreme complexity, spoken fluently by almost no one outside the Navajo Nation itself.
In May 1942, the first 29 Navajo recruits arrived at Camp Elliott, then moved to Camp Pendleton, where they built the code from scratch. They assigned Navajo words to represent letters and military terms, memorized all of it, and refused to write any of it down.
Guadalcanal, and Everything After
A Navajo speaker who wasn’t one of the trained Code Talkers still couldn’t have deciphered it. The code wasn’t just a translation. It was a second, invented language layered on top of the first one.
On August 7, 1942, fifteen of those Code Talkers landed with the 1st Marine Division at Guadalcanal, Tulagi, and the Florida Islands, the first American land offensive against Japan in the Pacific. It was their first real test in combat, three months after they’d first been sworn in at Fort Wingate, New Mexico.
The code held. Over the next three years, Navajo Code Talkers served in every major Marine assault across the Pacific: Tarawa, Peleliu, Iwo Jima. By the end of the war, roughly 400 Navajo Marines had served as Code Talkers, and 13 had been killed in action. Japanese cryptographers, who had broken nearly every other Allied code they’d encountered, never broke this one. A Marine signal officer would later say the Marines would have never have taken Iwo Jima without them.
What the Silence Cost
The Code Talkers kept their work classified for over two decades after the war ended. It wasn’t declassified until 1968. Many of them went home to reservations that still didn’t have running water or electricity, service unrecognized, back into communities where their own children were often still being sent to the same kind of boarding schools that had once punished them.
It wasn’t until July 2001, nearly sixty years after Guadalcanal, that the original 29 Code Talkers were awarded the Congressional Gold Medal, with dozens more receiving the Congressional Silver Medal. By then, most of them, including Chester Nez, were the last of their generation left to receive it.
The same government that once tried to erase a language ended up owing its Pacific campaign, in part, to the men who never let it go.