Native Americans in World War II | Code Talkers Documentary

Native Americans in World War II | Code Talkers Documentary For three years across the Pacific, Japanese cryptographers recorded every sound of it and never read a single message. The code was a language: Navajo, spoken into field telephones by Marines who had been raised on a reservation where the government once punished children for speaking it. It starts on a stalled 1918 battlefield in the Argonne, where Choctaw soldiers relayed orders the Germans could not write down, then follows Philip Johnston, a civil engineer who pitched the idea cold to Marine officers at Camp Elliott in 1942 and proved it in 20 seconds. Twenty-nine Navajo men enlisted, built 211 terms from tortoise and iron fish and buried a second layer, a letter substitution, underneath. They carried the whole dictionary in memory onto Guadalcanal, Saipan, Peleliu, and Iwo Jima, where six talkers handled more than 800 messages in 48 hours without a single error. The words stayed classified for 23 years, so the men came home as radiomen with nothing to tell their families. Recognition arrived in pieces, from a 1971 letter to Congressional Gold Medals in 2001, decades after most of the original 29 had died. As of 2025, two of the more than 400 who served are still alive.