When Samuel first glimpsed the Pacific Island of Iwo Jima, he was confident the US marines would capture it within hours.
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| America's secret weapon: the Navajo Indians |
The island was tiny and the Japanese defenders seemed to have fled. As the marines landed, at precisely 8.59am on 19 February, 1945, they were met by an eerie silence.
In fact, the Japanese were in hiding. Not until many thousands of marines were ashore did they open fire with machine guns, inflicting devastating losses.
The ensuing battle was to last 35 days and resulted in almost 7,000 dead and 19,000 wounded. That Iwo Jima was captured at all is due, in large part, to Samuel Tso and his team of Navajo Code Talkers.
These Native American code talkers were the USA’s secret weapon in World War Two. Without them, the US marines’ battle for Japan’s heavily defended Pacific Islands would have proved infinitely more costly.
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| Iwo Jima: the Japanese were in for a surprise |
Tso and his men performed what seemed like a miracle: relaying battlefield communications in a code so complex that the Japanese were unable to decipher it. This would ultimately lead America to victory in the Pacific field of battle.
The idea to use the Native American Navajo language for battlefield communications came from Philip Johnston, a missionary’s son. He was one of the few non-Navajos in the world who spoke the language fluently.
Johnston knew that the military was desperately searching for a coded language that was impossible to decipher. He also knew that other Native American languages had been used, to great effect, in the First World War.
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| Fighting was fierce on the beaches |
Navajo was considered the perfect choice of language for an undecipherable code: its tortuous syntax and numerous dialects made it unintelligible to anyone who had not been exposed to it for years.
In the spring of 1942, the US army decided to test Johnston’s ingenious idea. The first Navajo recruits - 29 of them - created the special code.
It was of vital importance that they did not make mistakes. Thousands of lives were dependent on them being able to relay communications quickly and accurately.
There were six Navajo code talkers in Samuel Tso’s team at Iwo Jima. They worked around the clock during the first two days of the battle, sending and receiving 800 messages of vital importance to the battle’s eventual outcome.
When he and his comrades received a message, it arrived as a string of seemingly unrelated Navajo words. The code talker’s first task was to translate each Navajo word into its English equivalent.
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| Samuel Tso: one of the Navajo heroes |
Often, these bore no obvious relation to battlefield terms, because words like ‘machine gun’ and ‘battleship’ didn’t exist in Navajo. To get around this problem, they used specially designated Navajo words.
‘Battleship’ was represented by the Navajo word ‘whale’; ‘fighter plane’ was represented by ‘hummingbird’; ‘submarine’ by ‘iron fish.’
But the code was infinitely more complex than that: many different Navajo words were used to represent a single letter of the alphabet. For example, the Navajo words wollachee (ant), belasana (apple) and tsenill (axe) could each be used to represent the letter ‘a’. If the person trying to crack the code didn’t know the English equivalent of these words, he was completely lost.
One way to spell out the word ‘navy’ in Navajo code would be tsah (needle) wollachee (ant) ahkehdiglini (victor) tsahahdzoh (yucca). But that was only one way: ‘navy’ could also be represented by four completely different words.
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| Iconic image, but impossible without the Navajos |
‘It was hard to memorize,’ recalls Samuel Tso. ‘It was in our mind. We’d have to decode it into English and then spell it out in the English alphabet.’
Tso and his team transmitted information on tactics, troop movements and other vital battlefield communications. They were highly skilled and highly accurate. As the US marines fought their way up the heavily defended beaches of Iwo Jima, the code breakers proved their worth.
Major Howard Connor, 5th Marine Division signal officer, said that Tso’s team led the marines to victory: ‘Were it not for the Navajos, the Marines would never have taken Iwo Jima.’
The Japanese, who were amongst the most skilled code breakers in the world, remained baffled by the Navajo language. And they never managed to work out where the US marines were going to strike next.
The Japanese chief of intelligence, Lieutenant General Seizo Arisue, later said that while they were able to decipher the codes used by the U.S. Army and Army Air Corps - and thereby claim many lives - they never cracked the code used by the Marines.
All they heard was an earful of strange gurgling noises that meant nothing whatsoever to them.
Philip Johnston’s idea had proved truly inspired. And Samuel Tso and his team undertook their task with extraordinary bravery.
Without their unintelligible Navajo code, tens of thousands more lives would have been lost.
And Iwo Jima might never have been won.
And Iwo Jima might never have been won.
