Navajo Code Talkers Essay

829 Words2 Pages

Navajo Weapon - The Navajo Code Talkers, by Sally McClain

This story takes place at 1942-1945, taking place in the following; Arizona/New Mexico Navajo reservations,, Navajo boot camp and Code Talker school at Fort Wingate, Japanese battle such as Saipan, Iwo Jima, and Guadalcanal.

Main Characters
In Navajo Weapon - The Navajo Code Talkers, there are some very important people such as General Clayton B. Vogel, and Commandant Thomas Holcomb.These two people are responsible for inventing the idea, The Navajo Pilot Project, which would be a vital part of winning the war between America and Japan. Vogel and Holcomb invented this language as sort a kind of alternate translatable language for the span of the 400 Navajo code talkers who volunteered.
He was also a Translator for the code and enlisted into the US 319th Engineer Regiment. After the Imperial Japanese attack on Pearl harbor, he decided to put his code talker ideas into first action. Around the time then, he started to talk with the USMC, or the United States Marine Corps and presented his idea. The USMC accepted his idea and then they started to put it into action. Johnston first started his own actions by recruiting his own 4 Navajo Shipyard workers and demonstrated the code talker idea with them. General Vogel then heard into this idea and tagged along with it, which also majorly fueled the idea of the Code talker operation. The Navajos did not understand some things such as Submarine, or Aircraft Carrier, so Johnston came up with idea of using vowel based conveying of those kinds of words. This is why Philip Johnston is important character in this book. Another interesting character would be Major Howard Connor, a minor, but important code talker of World War II. He served in the Pacific Theater as a 5th Marine Division Radio Signal Officer. He was also a decoder of the Navajo code and was probably one of the most loyal code talker of his time. He too, spoke Navajo and English to cope with the ideas and so he can interact with the English people, such as enlisting into the

Show More
Related

  • Dreaming Of Sheep In Navajo Country Summary

    778 Words  | 2 Pages

    Weisiger begins by discussing the debate about the Stock Reduction Program from 1933-1934. She goes on then to detail the importance of livestock to Navajo cultural identity and way of life. Weisiger writes, “Dine knew nature not only through their connections with the physical environment but also To begin, it ties into a popular belief of Michael Pollans, that we “Should eat more like our Great-Grandmothers”. This belief ties into Dreaming of Sheep in Navajo Country because both books have an understanding that we should eat from scratch and have some sort of self-sufficiency when preparing our meals. Another study that this books falls into is the importance of agricultural knowledge.

    Read More

  • Native American Code Talkers and the American Public

    2094 Words  | 5 Pages

    The service of the code talkers was not declassified until 1969, after which public attention grew. The purpose of this investigation is to assess what factors led to differences in the amount of public attention given to the Navajo code talkers and their Comanche counterparts after the declassification. Factors possibly affecting the fame of both tribes’ code talkers will be examined to gain an understanding of why the Navajo received more public attention. These factors include circumstances surrounding their training prior to their service, their performance during the war, and their situation after the war. Due to the limited number of works regarding the Comanche co...

    Read More

  • Perseverance In Code Talker

    472 Words  | 1 Pages

    He was seen as wanted and needed in the Marines, because he was in order to send coded messages to the allied forces. Ned explains, “For so many years I had been in schools where I was told never to speak our sacred language. I had to listen to the words of bilaga’anaa teachers who had no respect at all for our old ways, and who told us that the best thing we could do would be to forget everything that made us Navajos. Now practically overnight, that had all changed.”(Burchac 81) As Ned explains, for the Navajos they were told to stop being Navajo, but now as they become Code Talkers that all changes.

    Read More

  • Hmong Culture Essay

    425 Words  | 1 Pages

    What are the most important aspects of Hmong culture? What do the Hmong consider their most important duties and obligations? How did they affect the Hmong’s transition to the United States?

    Read More

  • the navaho code talkers

    931 Words  | 2 Pages

    of young Navajo men were enlisted under a TOP SECRET project to train them as Marine

    Read More

  • Code Talker Themes

    1640 Words  | 4 Pages

    One expressive event that demonstrates this theme was within chapters one to four. Within these chapters, the narrator describes his experiences in Navajo mission school and high school. Ned Begay, originally known as Kii Yázhí, was forced into the Navajo mission school led by bilagáanaas for one solitary purpose: to keep his tribe’s sacred land. The mission school’s substantial goal was to make the children stop speaking in their Navajo language and get accustomed to English. “‘Tradition is the enemy of progress.’ That was written in large letters on the big wooden sign in front of the mission school. It was the first thing we were taught to read” (Bruchac

    Read More

  • The Navajo Code Talkers

    3339 Words  | 7 Pages

    Although this idea had been successfully implemented during World War I using the Choctaw Indian's language, history generally credits Philip Johnston for the idea to use Navajos to transmit code across enemy lines. Philip recognized that people brought up without hearing Navajo spoken had no chance at all to decipher this unwritten, strangely syntactical, and guttural language (Navajo). Fortunately, Johnston was capable of developing this idea because his missionary father had raised him on the Navajo reservation. As a child, Johnston learned the Navajo language as he grew up along side his many Navajo friends (Lagerquist 19). With this knowledge of the language, Johnston was able to expand upon the idea of Native Americans transmitting messages in their own language in order to fool enemies who were monitoring transmissions. Not only did the Code Talkers transmit messages in Navajo, but the messages were also spoken in a code that Navajos themselves could not understand (Paul 7).

    Read More

  • Native Americans In The 1940s

    892 Words  | 2 Pages

    During the first World War, the US military saw great benefits in relying on the Choctaw and Comanche languages to relay important messages in the battlefield (Bixler 37). When World War II began, it was the idea of an anglo-american called Philip Johnston who suggested to once again use Native American languages to send important messages during the war (Bixler 39). Philip Johnston was a World War I veteran who was born in 1892 to a missionary who lived in the Navajo Reservation. Growing up, Johnston was able to become a fluent speaker in the Navajo language and during World War II, he alongside 4 other Navajo Indians were the first to help develop the Navajo language as code for the war (Bixler 39). This turned out to be a great idea because according to a book title “Navajo Code Talkers” by Nathan Aaseng, in the year of 1940, there were “fewer than 30 people outside the Navajo tribe that knew their language (19). In addition, during the years prior to the start of WWII, Germany had sent out German students to study various Native American tribes, but they failed to connect and penetrate the Navajo tribe during those years(Aaseng 19). Thanks to this, the Navajo code talkers became one of the most well known and effective code units during and beyond the end of WWII. It is estimated that as many as 3,600 Navajo tribe members served overall during the years of WWII (Aaseng 10). Out of those 3,600 members, about 540 of them enlisted in the marine corps and about 420 became qualified as Navajo Code Talkers (Paul 117). These Code Talkers played a huge role in many of the biggest battles against Japan in the Pacific arena. A quote from communications officer Major Howard M. Conner of the fifth Marine Division states that if “Were it not for the Navajo, the Marines would have never taken Iwo Jima”(Davis

    Read More

  • The Importance of the Cat in Native Son

    1357 Words  | 3 Pages

    Tanner, Laura E.  "Uncovering the Magical Disguise of Language: The Narrative Presence in Richard Wright's Native Son."  Appiah 132-146.

    Read More

  • Kinaalda: A Girl's Puberty Ceremony

    2047 Words  | 5 Pages

    Wheelwright, M. (1942). Navajo Creation Myth. Navajo Religion Series, Vol. 1. Santa Fe: Museum of Navajo Ceremonial Art.

    Read More

  • Analysis Of Sherman Alexie's The School Days Of An Indian Girl By Zitkala

    1344 Words  | 3 Pages

    Culture has the power and ability to give someone spiritual and emotional distinction which shapes one's identity. Without culture, society would be less and less diverse. Culture is what gives this earth warmth and color that expands across miles and miles. The author of “The School Days of an Indian Girl”, Zitkala Sa, incorporates the ideals of Native American culture into her writing. Similarly, Sherman Alexie sheds light onto the hardships he struggled through growing up on the Spokane Indian Reservation in his book The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven in a chapter titled “Indian Education”.

    Read More

  • The Battle of Midway

    1041 Words  | 3 Pages

    Over the year and a half between Pearl Harbor and Midway the United States made headway with various technological and military advantages. One of the most important of which was the code breaking efforts of Commander Joseph J. Rochefort Jr. “Most of the U.S’s information [on Japan] came from Rochefort. R...

    Read More

  • History Of The Cheyenne Indians

    3318 Words  | 7 Pages

    ...op a Navajo code. The Navajo language seemed to be the perfect option as a code because it is not written and very few people who aren’t of Navajo origin can speak it. However, the Marine Corps took the code to the next level and made it virtually unbreakable by further encoding the language with word substitution. During the course of the war, about 400 Navajos participated in the code talker program. The navajo helped end the second world war.

    Read More

  • Hmong Customs Essay

    1082 Words  | 3 Pages

    After reading chapter 1, Birth, some of Hmong customs that stood out to me was when the parents had to bury the placenta after the child was born; depending on the gender the placenta was buries in a special place. I like the meaning that the placenta was a special garment that was first worn by the baby. Furthermore, another custom was when the mother had to satisfy any craving to prevent her baby from getting any type illness, and as well as having a special diet for the mothers after they give birth to help them cleans their body’s after the pregnancy. One custom that really stood out to me from the rest was “Lia’s hu plig” which was a party to appreciate a new child into the world and welcome the soul into a new body; they sacrificed chickens

    Read More

  • Native American Reservation System Essay

    1272 Words  | 3 Pages

    The Native American Reservation system was a complete failure. This paper focuses on the topics of relocation, Native American boarding schools, current conditions on today’s reservations, and what effects these have had on the Native American way of life.

    Read More

More about Navajo Code Talkers Essay

Open Document