The more you know...

This month of November is Indigenous Peoples Month, and in the spirit of learning more about and celebrating a culture that is not my own, I learned a very interesting story about the Navajo people that is one to be proud of. Early in World War II, the Japanese army was alarmingly adept at deciphering the codes American forces were using in the Pacific theater. Their ability to anticipate American military actions, as well as to transmit false orders to American troops, was causing massive confusion and giving the Japanese the upper hand in the war.

The U.S. army responded by developing ever more complex codes, but these became burdensome and made effective communication almost impossible; generals complained that some messages took up to two hours to encode, transmit, and then decode. 

The Navajo people had the answer. Led by Philip Johnston, the son of a white missionary to the Navajo reservation, they made a presentation to the military, using the Navajo language as a military code. The Navajos were able to transmit in twenty seconds a coded message that was taking the military coding machines thirty minutes to handle. And so, the Navajo code talkers program was born.

Navajo code talkers transmitted messages during every major American campaign in the Pacific arena from that time forward, and the Japanese were never able to decipher their code. At the famous battle of Iwo Jima specifically, six Navajo code talkers transmitted more than 800 messages over the course of two days, all without a single error. Major Howard Connor, 5th Marine Division signal officer, declared, “Were it not for the Navajos, the Marines would never have taken Iwo Jima.”

It’s scary to imagine what might have happened in World War II as a whole without the Navajo code talkers. They were courageous soldiers—and a key part of America’s victory—who used their language to save thousands of American lives and win the war. (I find it particularly ironic that it was through their language that the Navajos came to the aid of America, since the U.S. government has tried hard to take the Navajo language away from them through the boarding school system. It’s a good thing, on so many levels, that those efforts failed.)

The more you know…

 Grace and peace,

Anita Sorenson

Pastor for Spiritual Formation