Happy National Navajo Code Talkers Day! Militaries have long used codes to transmit information in ways their enemies don’t understand. But where there’s a code, there’s a code breaker. The best way to furtively share important war secrets, then, is to have a code the other side can’t crack. In World War I, Germans easily decoded the messages of U.S. troops, which were based on European languages or mathematical patterns. Native American languages are structurally very different. So, when a commanding officer overheard some of his soldiers speaking Choctaw, he realized its potential to outsmart the enemy. The strategy resulted in battlefield wins.
The most famous use of Native American code talkers came during World War II in the Pacific theater against Japanese troops. Members of several tribes helped share the secret messages during the war, including the Comanche, Hopi, Meskwaki, and Chippewa-Oneida. But it was the Navajo Marines who had the most complex code and the largest group of code talkers, and who became most famous when their work was declassified in 1968.
The 1982 presidential proclamation establishing the day of recognition referred to all of the tribes that participated, despite its name focusing on the Navajo specifically. But it wasn’t until the 21st century that the Navajo code talkers received congressional medals. It would take some years more for Hopi, Choctaw, and other code talkers to gain similar acknowledgment for their service in World War II.
