NovelHistorical Fiction

But when the Marines turned to its Navajo recruits to develop and implement a secret military language, they created the only unbroken code in modern warfare—and helped assure victory for the United States over Japan in the South Pacific. The first and only memoir by one of the original Navajo code talkers of WWII.

Code Talker is about the importance of courage. In this book, Chester and the code talkers represent the courage and heroism of the troops who fought to defend America during World War II.

Joseph Bruchac

More than 400 Navajo men were recruited as Code Talkers. Only four are still alive — Thomas H. Begay, John Kinsel Jr., Samuel Sandoval and Peter MacDonald Sr.

Code Talker is a novel narrated by a man named Ned Begay, describing the story behind the metals he received during World War II. Ned joined the military and the war effort at a very young age. He convinced a recruiter to enlist him while he was still in high school.

One day, a code talker named Charlie Begay is found gravely wounded, apparently dead. Ned and Wilsie sadly follow protocol by placing Charlie’s dog tag in his mouth (so his identification will not get lost) and covering his body with leaves and bark for the graves registration people to collect later.

Twenty-six days after D-Day, Iwo Jima is officially won. As they sail back toward Guam, the last thing Ned sees is the American flag waving on the top of Mount Suribachi. He tells his grandchildren that they have probably seen the famous picture of the six marines raising that flag.

The main conflict of the book is that the white men at boarding school think that the Navajo language was useless. Ned had to forget about Navajo, and learn English. Later on, the white men changed their opinion on the Navajo. They later developed a secret code to help win the war.

The climax of Code Talkers is when Ned joins the Marines and is asked to enlist in the code talker program in which he will be trained to decipher and send coded messages in his native Najavo language.

The Japanese are the big antagonists in this novel. They’re the enemy that Chester and his code-talking buddies are fighting. They’re ruthless fighters and they threaten the lives of our hero, Chester, and all American soldiers.

Most people have heard of the famous Navajo (or Diné) code talkers who used their traditional language to transmit secret Allied messages in the Pacific theater of combat during World War II.

The Japanese cracked every American combat code until an elite team of Marines joined the fight. One veteran tells the story of creating the Navajo code and proving its worth on Guadalcanal. It was our second day at Camp Elliott, near San Diego, our home for the next 13 weeks.

Marine Corps leadership selected 29 Navajo men, the Navajo Code Talkers, who created a code based on the complex, unwritten Navajo language. The code primarily used word association by assigning a Navajo word to key phrases and military tactics.

Of the roughly 400 code talkers who served during World War II, 13 were killed in action.

During World War II, the US Army trained eight Meskwaki men to use their native Fox language as code talkers. They were assigned to North Africa. The eight were awarded the Congressional Gold Medal in 2013; unfortunately all were deceased.

Update: Navajo Code Talker Joe Vandever Sr. died Jan. 31, 2020, at the age of 96. In 1942, during the depths of World War II, the United States Marine Corps recruited 29 Navajo men to develop an unbreakable code that would be used across the Pacific during the war.

In North Africa, eight Soldiers from the Meskwaki tribe in Iowa served as code talkers in the 168th Infantry Regiment, 34th Division. In Europe, the 4th Signal Company, 4th Infantry Division, was assigned 17 Comanche code talkers.

Beginning in 1940, the army recruited Comanche, Meskwaki, Chippewa, Oneida, and later, Hopi, people to transmit messages in code during World War II. Then in 1941 and 1942, the Marine Corps recruited Navajo Code Talkers.

The original 29 Code Talkers have all died, and the total number of Navajo Code Talkers that served in the U.S. Marines is not known. It is estimated between 350 to 420.

Choctaw Indians

The Cherokee “code talkers” were the first known use of Native Americans in the American military to transmit messages under fire, and they continued to serve in this unique capacity for rest of World War I. Their success was part of the inspiration for the better-known use of Navajo code talkers during World War II.

A number of them returned in the 1890s and early 1900s. In the 21st century, the Comanche Nation has 17,000 members, around 7,000 of whom reside in tribal jurisdictional areas around Lawton, Fort Sill, and the surrounding areas of southwestern Oklahoma.

Code Talkers — heroes of both World Wars. FORT HUACHUCA, Ariz. They used this code to communicate on the battlefields during the wars, with the advantage of speed and security. Their code is said to be the most ingenious and successful, being the only code in military history that is unbroken.

Why couldn’t Japan crack the Navajo Code in WW2 when they captured a Navajo native speaker? The problem for the Japanese was that the Navajo Code wasn’t only the language knowledge from that captured Navajo soldier. . That Navajo soldier was not a trained Navajo Code Talker.

33 different tribes

The one unbreakable code turned out to be a natural language whose phonetic and grammatical structure was so different from the languages familiar to the enemy that it was almost impossible to transcribe much less translate. The unbreakable code was coded Navajo spoken by native speakers of Navajo.

Yá’át’ééh. Hello (General greeting)

Many aspects make the Navajo language especially difficult for English speakers. One of them being that sentences are Subject-Object-Verb which can be irregular and contradictory to English sentence structures. Languages with these structures are typically more difficult for English speakers to learn.

Each Navajo recruit underwent basic boot camp training at the Marine Corps Recruit Depot, San Diego before assignment to the Field Signal Battalion, Training Center at Camp Pendleton. Once the code talkers completed training in the States, they were sent to the Pacific for assignment to the Marine combat divisions.