The Navajo code talkers were the people that made a very successful code for the army. By the Navajo code talkers exploring a new code, we won World War Two. This what they explored, encountered, and exchanged. Just after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941 the marines started to recruit the Navajo to be part of the Navy. This idea originated by a man by the name of Philip Johnston. He was a missionary's son on the Navajo’s land. He thought that their language would be a great language for a code. So he talked to the government and they sent a letter to the marines by Commander General Clayton B. Vogel to request that they allow and enlisted the Navajo people. The Navajo then sent a document titled Resolution CJ-1-42 where they say, “Whereas, …show more content…
the Navajo people stand ready to accept their responsibilities to their Government and its authorized leaders.” “With the approval of the Navajo Tribal Council, the Marines began recruiting young Navajo an at Window Rock, Arizona in May 1942” [Warriors Navajo Code Talkers]. As they were recruiting only 29 men signed up, becoming the original code talkers. They took these men to Fort Wingate, NM to be sworn into service like shown in the picture on the national archives website. “The first task for any new Marine is to complete basic training known as boot camp. In 1942, 29 Navajo recruits were sent to San Diego.” [Unsung Heroes of World War II: The Story of the Navajo Code Talkers] These men completed the boot camp but struggled with the things everyone else thought was easy. Now this is where these men started to explore new ways to make a code. These men were taken to an isolated room and were told of the Marines plan to use their language as a code. They stayed an extra ten days making the code when everyone else had left. “… a good way to begin was to select a word to represent each letter of the alphabet,” said Chester Nez in his memoir titled Code Talker. They made a code that had a letter translate into a word and then to a Navajo word of similar meaning. With the code made two Navajo’s stayed behind to train any new Navajo recruits that come into the Navy, while the other 27 left. Towards the end of that year they were sent off to marine ships that would send them to war.
These men were starting to encounter new things. As these men went to war they saw a many new things that weren’t on the reservation. They say the ocean and they encountered many navy equipment. Yet what is really important is that the navy encountered a new code and the Japanese encountered an unbreakable code. Like it says in ”Were it not for the Navajo code talkers, the Marines never would have taken Iwo Jima.” because they encountered this code. These men exchanged ideas between each other when making the code. Like Chester Nez says in It had to be done “They were showing at us, and we were talking to the 2nd marine Division, sending messages back and forth-thats all we did was send messages; messages coming in and out,” exchanging many messages. They also exchanged ideas with the us navy. Like I quoted earlier these men were sent to Iwo Jima and started to send messages. They were set up in pairs of two, one to dicier the messages and the other to send them, like another picture titled ”Photograph of Navajo Indian Code Talkers Henry Bake and George Kirk” on the national archives. This was one of the most severe battles on a heavily armed island. According to my sources the code talkers are the reason we won Iwo
Jima.
COL Freeman beloved by his men, finally left the RCT at noon on 15FEB1951 with tears forming in his eyes. He was devoted to his Soldiers and his ability to assess the situation and ultimately secured a successful mission in Chipyong-Ni. He would issue orders with a “handshake, a grin, and provided words of encouragement before dangerous missions.” Chipyong-Ni was that type of mission. He didn’t like the situation, but issued the order as if he thought of the idea. He set the climate that extended down to the lowest Private in the RCT, to be proud and be victorious.
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.
Oral History and Oral Tradition was incredibly important for both tribes. They passed legends and historical stories on through speech, each story holding its own important moral or message. For example,
of young Navajo men were enlisted under a TOP SECRET project to train them as Marine
passage: "The courage and resistance shown by the Navajos at Big Mountain, by Polish workers,
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).
COL Freeman took pride in communicating with his battalion commanders . This was extremely beneficial when it came to the day of 14 February 1951. On this day, COL Freeman called all his commanders in and briefed them on the mission ahead and gave them the warning that he believed the enemy would attack them at the weakest moment, at night. Included in his brief was information about the Chinese would attack their perimeter in overwhelming numbers as soon as night fell. The intelligence was beneficial for commanders so they could plan accordingly for the events of the evening . The Soldiers were even aware of the activities planned . One Soldier wrote “I have been told to keep my carbine on semi-automatic” which shows he knew the order and was awaiting to see the enemy to begin the engagement. The Soldiers knew the mission was to stand their ground and not waiver. When morning would come the air strikes would begin pushing back the Chinese and giving them time to
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
Initially, Japanese strategists assumed that the tiny island would be overwhelmed in a matter of hours. However, they underestimated the fighting spirit of the military personnel and civilians stationed on the island. For sixteen days these brave men fought against overwhelming odds, but demonstrated both to the Japanese and to their fellow Americans back at home that the Americans could and would put up a courageous fight.
Wheelwright, M. (1942). Navajo Creation Myth. Navajo Religion Series, Vol. 1. Santa Fe: Museum of Navajo Ceremonial Art.
Why is it significant that the Pueblo tradition of story telling makes no distinction between types of stories, such as historical, sacred, or just plain gossip?
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...
...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.
The novel Flags of Our Fathers by James Bradley is a book written to inform and entertain the audience with a story about the picture of the raising of the American flag on Iwo Jima, also known as Sulfur Island. It is written from the point of view of the son of John Henry “Doc” Bradley, one of the flag raisers. In this novel James Bradley attempts to explain his father’s and his father’s friends’ lives and acknowledge their bravery as Marines. As John “Doc” Bradley said, “The real heroes of Iwo Jima are the guys who didn’t come back” (Bradley 7).
From the Prairies, was a Native American group called the Pawnees, who were known for being bison hunters and farmers. The Pawnees were located in northern Kansas and south central Nebraska. The Pawnees would call themselves Chaticks-Si-Chaticks, this means “People of People,” or “Men of Men.” Pawnee is an unclear name that many people didn’t know what it meant. It seems to be a number of groups on central Plains. The Pawnees went through major struggle as they had to fight to live against disease, warfare, and the loss of their resources. Caddoan language, is the language that the Pawnees spoke. It was a large group that extended from the north to the south. Wichita and Caddo are also part of the Caddoan group. They spoke two major dialects