Code Talkers: Choctaw Radios in 1918 to Navajo's Error-Free Iwo Jima

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The U.S. military's first documented use of Native American languages for secure communication came on the Western Front in 1918, when Cherokee soldiers of the 30th Infantry Division sent messages during the Second Battle of the Somme. A month later, in the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, Captain Lawrence of the 36th Infantry Division overheard Solomon Louis and Mitchell Bobb speaking Choctaw and put eight Choctaw men on the field radios; within 72 hours the Allies were on the offensive. Two systems took shape: Type 1 codes assigned a Native word to each English letter, while Type 2 codes translated directly, so Comanche speakers called a tank a turtle, a bomber a pregnant bird and a machine gun a sewing machine. In early 1942 Philip Johnston, a Los Angeles civil engineer raised on the Navajo reservation, showed Major General Clayton B. Vogel that Navajo men could encode, send and decode a three-line message in 20 seconds, a job cipher machines took 30 minutes to do.

The first 29 Navajo recruits of Platoon 382, ranging from 15-year-old William Dean Yazzie to 35-year-old Carl Gorman, built a code that had to be memorized because codebooks were banned from combat. Germany had sent about 30 anthropologists to the United States between the wars to study Native languages, which kept the Army cautious in Europe, though 14 Comanche code talkers landed on Utah Beach. The tactic spread worldwide, from Cree speakers in the Canadian forces to Nubian speakers for Egypt in 1973 and reported Hungarian use by Ukraine in 2022. The Navajo code stayed classified until 1968, and recognition followed slowly through Navajo Code Talkers Day in 1982, Congressional Gold Medals in 2001 and the Code Talkers Recognition Act of 2008.

• At Iwo Jima, six Navajo code talkers under Major Howard Connor sent and received more than 800 messages in 48 hours without an error.
• Some code talkers were mistaken for Japanese by fellow Americans and were assigned bodyguards.
• Bill Toledo described orders for those bodyguards to shoot a code talker rather than let him be captured, an order the records show was never carried out.
• A 1952 claim that Basque American Marines transmitted the start date of Guadalcanal was refuted in 2017 and likely traced to an OSS operation.
• In March 2025, Axios reported at least 10 articles on Native American code talkers were removed from Army and Defense Department websites under a directive targeting DEI content.