Episode 18: Code Talkers

Known Choctaw Code Talkers:
 
 

1. Albert Billy (October 8, 1885– May 29, 1959). Billy, a full blood Choctaw
2. Mitchell Bobb (January 7, 1895-December 1921)
3. Victor Brown (1896–1966)
4. Ben Carterby (December 11, 1891 – February 6, 1953). Carterby was a full blood Choctaw roll number 2045
5. Benjamin Franklin Colbert (September 15, 1900 - January 1964. He was the youngest Code Talker.
6. George Edwin Davenport (April 28, 1887 - April 17, 1950). George was the half brother to Joseph Davenport.
7. Joseph Harvey Davenport  (Feb 22, 1892 - April 23, 1923)
8. Jonas Durant (1886-1925)
9. James (Jimpson) Morrison Edwards (October 6, 1898 – October 13, 1962)
10. Tobias William Frazier (August 7, 1892– November 22, 1975). A full blood Choctaw roll number 1823
11. Benjamin Wilburn Hampton (May 31, 1892 - unknown) A full blood Choctaw roll number 10617
12. Noel Johnson  (August 25, 1894, killed in France.
13. Otis Wilson Leader (March 6, 1882 - March 26, 1961) A Choctaw by blood roll number 13606
14. Solomon Bond Louis (April 22, 1898 – February 15, 1972). Louis, a full blood Choctaw
15. Pete Maytubby (September 26, 1892 - 1964) A full blood Chickasaw roll number 4685
16. Joseph Oklahombi (May 1, 1895 – April 13, 1960). 
17. Robert Taylor (January 13, 1894 - unknown) A full blood Choctaw roll number 916)
18. Charles Walter Veach (May 18, 1884 – October 13, 1966). Choctaw by Blood roll #10021 
19. Calvin Wilson Calvin (June 25, 1894 - unknown)
20. Jeff Wilson (1896 - unknown)

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hey everybody, I'm Shannon, and welcome to the They Hid What Podcast. On this podcast, I explore parts of history that have been kept hidden or swept under the rug. In this week's episode, I will be discussing code talkers. Let's get into it. The first 29, as they were known, was the first class of Navajo men that completed training in the United States Marine Corps in 1942. However, they were not the first code talkers. That title goes to the Choctaw Telephone Squad, who were employed by the United States Army during World War I. So let's start at the beginning. In an article on the National World War II Museum of New Orleans, a code talker is defined as American Indians who use their tribal language to send secret communications on the battlefield. As I said before, the first group of code talkers came from the Choctaw tribe of Oklahoma. An American colonel, Alfred Wainwright Blur, had noticed that there were a number of American Indians serving with him in France. An American soldier can understand French, and a German soldier can understand English, but not even an American soldier can understand the Choctaw tongue. Even better, there was no way for the enemy to learn the language since it was never written. Colonel Blur decided to put this to the test on October 26, 1918. There was a Choctaw Indian in each company, and the message to withdraw two companies from Chuffaly to Chardonnay. These two Choctaw men could speak freely over the radio in their native tongue with no worry of anyone understanding what they were saying. Later, a captured German officer said that they were, quote, completely confused by the Indian language and gained no benefit whatsoever. One drawback of relying on the Choctaw language is that the Choctaw Indians didn't have words for every military phrase or term. For example, there wasn't a Choctaw word for machine gun, so the Choctaw soldiers used their words for big gun to mean artillery and little gun shoot fast for machine gun. With the success of the Choctaw Code Talkers during World War I, Philip Johnson suggested the use of the Navajo tribe during World War II. Philip Johnson was a veteran of World War I and saw how the code talkers worked. The Japanese already had success decoding messages sent from the United States. So, the U.S. military made a specific policy to recruit American Indian speakers. The United States Army was the first military branch to recruit code talkers in 1940. The Army recruited members from the Comanche, Miskawaki, Chippewa, Oneida, and Hoppy tribes to transmit messages in code. These speakers were used intermittently as they would need enough speakers from the same tribe to divide amongst the units. The United States Navy and Marine Corps soon followed suit. Some of the code talkers enlisted, but more often than not, they were drafted. Many of these young men were underage, some as young as 15, and had to lie about their ages in order to be enlisted. The Navajo Code Talkers came into play in 1942. The Marine Corps recruited 29 Navajo men to be the first class of code talkers. These first 29 were sent to Camp Elliott in California and were tasked with taking commonly used military terms and assigning them a Navajo word. Since the Navajo language, like all American Indian languages, wasn't written down, the men couldn't take notes or write anything down while coming up with the code. In the end, they had to memorize 411 terms. The code talkers had said that since they had a long history of storytelling and oral histories, it was easy for them to remember all the data. The code talkers decided there would be two types of words. Type 1 was to be specialized based on the tribe's language, and type 2, which was more informal, and was a literal word-for-word translation. Under the Type 1 umbrella, twenty-six Navajo terms were created. Also, each letter of the English alphabet was assigned at least one code word. An example would be the Navajo word for ant is Wolachi. Wolache was used for the letter A. Type II had words directly translated from English to Navajo. As the Choctaw experienced in World War I, some words didn't exist in the Navajo language. Navajo code talkers then developed a dictionary of 211 terms for military words and names that didn't exist yet. The word submarine didn't exist in Navajo. The code talkers used the term Bishlo, which meant iron fish to mean submarine. Charles Chibity, a Comanche code talker, said, Well, when they first got us there for code talkers, we had to work that out among our own selves. So we didn't have a word for tank. And then one said, It's just like a turtle, you know? It has a hard shell and it moves, and so we called it a wackery, a turtle. Now, the Marine Corps did recruit these Navajo men for the sole purpose of being a code talker. However, they also needed to be trained as Marines. When these men were not sending code, they were used for general correspondence and as riflemen. If a message needed to be sent in code, it would be called a Arizona or New Mexico message. By the Battle of Iwo Jima in 1945, Marine officers heavily relied on the code talkers and deemed them invaluable. Major Howard Connor, who was the 5th Marine Division's communications officer during the fight for Iwo Jima, stated, the entire operation was directed by Navajo Code. During the first 48 hours, while we were landing and consolidating our shore positions, I had six Navajo radio nets operating around the clock. In that period alone, they sent and received over 800 messages without an error. Code talkers were assigned to units in pairs. One would operate the portable radio, while the second would relay the messages in the native language and translate responses to English. Once the Japanese caught on to this, the code talkers became targets. The irony of the American military using Indians specifically for their language shouldn't be lost on any of us. For those of you not familiar, residential schools were in effect in the United States, and many code talkers had been forced to attend these schools. A residential school, also known as Federal Indian Boarding Schools, were funded by the government and run by Christian organizations. Indigenous children would be abducted and placed in one of these facilities far from their home, where their language and culture would be forced out of them. U.S. military officer Captain Richard Henry Pratt said in 1892, a great general has said that the only good Indian is a dead one, and that high sanction of his destruction has been an enormous factor in promoting Indian massacres. In a sense, I agree with the sentiment, but only in this that all the Indian there is in race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him and save the man. So it seems the United States thought, let's do away with these nasty natives, unless, of course, we can use them to our benefit. Also, something that doesn't make sense no matter what way you look at it, the Snyder Act of 1924. It granted US citizenship to all Native Americans born in the US. Duh. What else would they be? Don't act like you were doing these people some great service by bestowing upon them something they already had. The discrimination didn't stop here either. The Navajos were denied the right to vote in Arizona until 1948, in New Mexico until 1943, and in Utah until 1957. You couldn't be an American Marine if you weren't an American citizen. And what comes with that is the right to vote. So what the hell? Also, after World War I, there was no way for code talkers to use veteran benefits on their reservations. And the code talker program was considered top secret. So code talkers weren't allowed to talk about what they did or their work with the code. That wasn't until 1968 when new encryption methods were created, making the Navajo code obsolete. Now the Code Talker program became declassified and they could finally talk about it. Okay. It's 1968, and all the tribal men can now talk about being code talkers. Everyone knows about them, right? Well, not really. In 1971, President Richard Nixon sent a letter of appreciation and congratulations to the Navajo Tribunal Council. In the 1976 bicentennial parade in Washington, D.C., code talker veterans walked in front of the procession. In 1982, President Ronald Reagan declared August 14th as national Navajo Code Talkers Day. And in 2000, Senator Jeff Brighaman of New Mexico introduced honoring the Navajo Code Talkers Act in Congress. The act authorized the President of the United States to award a gold medal on behalf of the Congress to each of the original 29 Navajo Code Talkers, as well as a silver medal to each man who later qualified as a code talker. Have you noticed a trend? It's only the Navajo tribe that's getting the recognition and spotlight. This is not to say they're undeserving. This is to say that they were not the only ones. There were more than 20 tribes that used their languages as code talkers. And it was the Choctaw tribe that started it all. Some of the other tribes were the Assiniboine, Basque, Cherokee, Chinea, Chippewa, Comanche, Cree, Kochunks, Hoppy, Miskowaki, Mohawk, Muskogee, Oneda, Osage, Sue, and Tingit. I'm going to list all of the names of some of the original Choctaw code talkers in the description of the episode. Some of them had changed their names, so we couldn't really confirm that they were an original one, so I'm just gonna include a few that I could find. That's all for this story. Come back next week to learn what else has been hidden.