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NAVAJO CODE TALKERS
The NAVAJO CODE TALKERS took part in every assault the U.S. Marines conducted in the Pacific from 1942 to 1945. They served in all the six Marine divisions, Marine Raider battalions and Marine parachute units, transmitting message by telephone and radio in their native language – a code that the Japanese never broke.
The idea to use Navajo for secure communications came from Philip Johnston, the son of a missionary to the Navajos and one of the few non-Navajos who spoke their language fluently. Johnston believed Navajo answered the military requirement for an undecipherable code because Navajo is an unwritten language of extreme complexity. Its syntax and tonal qualities, not to mention dialects, make it unintelligible to anyone without extensive exposure and training. It has no alphabet or symbols, and is spoken only on the Navajo lands of the American Southwest. One estimate indicates that less than 30 non-Navajos, none of them Japanese, could understand the language at the outbreak of World War II.
The given coordinates are for one of the parking places. You need to change only the last two digits – SO
N32 32.7 A B W114 06.2 C D
A = CHUO, TLO-CHIN, SHI-DA, NES-TSA
B = AH-NAH, A-CHI, KLIZZIE, CHA, D-AH
C = MA-E, TKIN, A-KEH-DI-GLINI, DZEH
D = TSAH, YEH-HES, A-CHIN, AH-JAH
Just use the first letter of each translated English word for your numbers
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The “Navajo code talkers dictionary” was declassified in 1968 so now the Japanese know the secret.
Navajo code talker shares his story on
January 22, 2011 at the Yuma Quartermasters Park
Article from the Yuma Sun paper
A surviving Navajo code talker who served in the Pacific theater of World War II was in Yuma Saturday to share his story during the Spirit of Yuma Military Festival.
Bill Toledo granted the Yuma Sun an interview and told the tale of his time with the elite Native American code talkers.
During the early months of the war, Japanese intelligence had broken every code the U.S. had devised, giving them a great advantage in military strategy.
“We were in bad shape, so the Marines decided to look for another code,” Toledo said.
That is when civilian Philip Johnston realized the Navajo language could be turned into an unbreakable code.
Twenty-nine Navajo code talkers, referred to as the “First 29,” were then recruited to develop the code in early 1942.
By war’s end, the code included 600 phrases that could do in 20 seconds what coding machines took 30 minutes to do.
Toledo joined the Marines about 6 months after the First 29. Toledo, his cousin Preston and his uncle Frank, along with two others who were unrelated, all enlisted together in Oct. 1942.
After passing a physical fitness exam and being sworn in, Toledo was off to San Diego for boot camp.
“It was rough,” he said. “The first thing was getting a hair cut. This barber said, ‘Chief, how do you like your haircut?’ And I just told him to give me a little light trim, you know. The next thing all my hair went off. It was shocking.”
After boot camp, the five men were trained for code talking and were split up into different Marine divisions.
Toledo was assigned to the Third Marine Division, 9th Marine Regiment, 3rd Battalion. The unit was deployed overseas in January 1943 from San Diego on a troop ship called the Mount Vernon.
“We didn’t go very far and everybody was hanging over the rails throwing up everything we had eaten,” he said with a laugh.
Toledo got his first taste of combat as part of the Bougainville invasion force in November 1943.
“A lot of the landing craft got stuck on the beach,” he said. “They were shooting at us. I was scared.”
After landing, the Marines headed into the jungle.
“It rained a lot,” Toledo said. “When we dug a foxhole and it rained at night — it was a lot of water, like laying in a bath tub.”
While on the island, Toledo was mistaken as a member of the Japanese forces and taken prisoner by a fellow Marine.
“A rifleman was walking with us and must’ve thought I looked like a Japanese. He poked me with a rifle in my back and told me to raise my hands. I did, and he turned me into our commander. The commander was mad. He told him to let me go.”
As a result, the commander assigned Toledo a personal bodyguard, Richard Bonham, for the remainder of the war.
“We were together all the time. He’s still alive. He calls me once in a while to check on me.”
After a brief respite, Toledo was sent to invade Guam with the rest of his unit in December 1943.
Toledo was almost killed three times during the battle for Guam.
The first near-death experience came before he had even landed on the beach.
He had gone topside to the deck of the boat he was on after dinner and was standing in some shade beneath a .50-caliber machine gun.
“I had good eyes and was looking around. Then I spotted something. There was a spot on the horizon moving towards us. There was a plane coming, an enemy torpedo plane.”
All of the other ships in the convoy began shooting at the plane but couldn’t hit it.
“Then (the plane) dropped a torpedo, and you could see the wake of the torpedo propeller coming towards us, but we couldn’t do nothing — just stand there and watch. It missed us (by feet) and hit another little ship. Boom. I could see two of them in the plane looking down at us.”
During the invasion, Japanese artillery sank 20 landing craft, killed 619 Marines and wounded 3,007.
“Our commander got shot the first day,” Toledo said.
When Toledo got to the beach, he had a second close encounter with death.
He had unknowingly wandered into a mine field.
“Somebody hollered at me, ‘Freeze!’ So I froze. They told me to go back and follow my steps, so I turned around and walked back.”
His third close encounter with the grim reaper came as he brought a message to the front line on foot.
A nighttime banzai attack had destroyed the unit’s radio and telephone communications, so Toledo had to relay messages the old-fashioned way.
As he approached the front, he came across several Marines hunkered down behind a hill. Thinking nothing of it, he ran out into the open. He didn’t know the Marines were hiding from a Japanese sniper who then took a shot at him.
“I didn’t get hit, but it put a little hole in my dungaree jacket,” Toledo said.
The island was secured in August, and by February, Toledo was on Iwo Jima dodging bullets in volcanic sand.
“They figured we would take the island in about one week. It was 36 days of hell. There was quite a battle and we lost a lot of marines there. I was really lucky I didn’t get hit.”
Toledo’s uncle Frank was also on the island with the 5th Marine Division. One day, Toledo got permission to go visit him.
“I walked over there into his foxhole with all that shooting going on,” he said. “We had a little get-together. We always talked about home.”
That was when Frank told Toledo he was almost chosen as one of the men made famous for raising the second American flag on top of Mount Suribachi.
“He said he was ordered to help raise the flag. Then there was a code message for him he had to tend to, so they had to assign that to Ira Hayes, who took his place.”
Hayes, a Pima, also served in the 5th Marines.
After the war, Toledo returned home and now travels the country telling his story of the war.
Additional Hints
(Decrypt)
Ybbx sbe gur nagraan