National Navajo Code Talkers Day is celebrated on Aug. 14, the day World War II ended in 1945. The day is not only to commemorate the contributions of Native American code talkers, but also Alaska Natives, who served in the U.S. military during World Wars I and II. There are two Tlingít code talkers from Southeast Alaska buried in the Haines Cemetery at Jones Point – Robert “Jeff” David Sr and George Lewis.
The Chilkat Valley News’ Francisco Martínezcuello set out to better understand their roles and sat down with William C. Meadows, a Professor of Anthropology and Native American Studies at the Missouri State University in Springfield. Meadows has written six books including two about code talkers.
This conversation has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Martínezcuello: I am familiar with the Navajo code talkers as a Marine but I was unaware of the way the Army used different types of Native Americans, as well as the Alaska Natives as code talkers. Can you tell me about that program?
Meadows: World War I is where the code talking starts, and there’s no existing program or plan or anything. There were multiple situations in which Germans could intercept and break or overhear U.S. Army units communicating. The whole thing was an experiment, to be really honest.
Author William C. Meadows. (Courtesy photo)
For example, [Army units] had telephone lines between companies, and then back to battalion, regiment, or division. German [soldiers] would go and clip onto the line. It’s just like a party line, you know, at any point you could just clip in and listen. Germans also had listening devices that could work anywhere between three to five kilometers, and it works on a type of a magnetic coil where you don’t even have to be close to the messenger, but it pulls the signal in with a magnetic coil, and then again, you can just overhear and listen to it.
So what came out of this is when the Americans realize their communications are compromised, they’re trying to think of a way they can send messages and be secure, but also fast, and so in more than one different division, where they have Native Americans they get the idea, well, let’s put some of them on the line and let them send the messages in their language, and then it won’t matter whether anybody overhears it or not. They won’t know what it is. They won’t be able to break it. And so it really was in World War I, it’s all really just experimental in the field method to solve existing problems. And then as we move into World War II, the Army doesn’t forget this.
There’s actually a handful of groups which were recruited between late 1939 and January of 1941. Some Native American groups were recruited specifically to go through basic training, job school training and then to learn how to send messages by phone or different methods, and to actually develop coded vocabulary. The Navajos were the largest group of course, the best documented, but they’re the last, really one of the very last groups that’s formed, with the Marine Corps.
What is your knowledge of the Alaska Native code talkers?
It’s very little and I have not been able to come up with any primary sources. A couple of newspaper clippings and things where [Tlingít are mentioned]. I think it’s six or seven different Tlingít people who served. But to the best of my knowledge, I do not see where they were recruited and formally trained, as much as they were just used in pairs here and there on the phone. And in my research, I made a distinction between a Type 1 code talker and Type 2 code talker, and the difference is the presence or absence of formal training and coded vocabulary. So a Type 1 code talker is using the native language, which is unknown to the enemy, but it also has a significant list of special military vocabulary that they created terms for that only [the pair] are going to know, and then inserted into that language. The Type Two code talker are just natives speaking their everyday vernacular language to each other.
Were the Tlingít soldiers Type 1?
No Type 2.
I guess this is why we need more documentation. It’s important for us to document and talk to the family members to keep the heritage going. What are your thoughts on that?
Definitely. [But there’s] a lot of cases where people never mentioned doing this to their families or their tribes. And there’s a popular myth that all these code talkers were sworn to secrecy. [Although there] was a great effort to keep it secret, the only case where that actually occurs is with the Navajo. They were actually required to not talk about the code and everything. But by the end of the war, the Marine Corps had already run two or three articles about the Navajo code talkers in their own magazine, the Leatherneck. Also, code talkers were getting discharged at different points through the war, so many of them were already back home by the end of the war. So I think what really happened was those orders were there, but when the war ended, it wasn’t being practiced anymore.
Tlingít code talker George Lewis’s grave at the Jones Point Cemetery. (Francisco Martínezcuello / Chilkat Valley News)
But the Marine Corps did not call up all the code talkers and say ‘Oh, by the way, you can talk about this now’, you know? And so the the actual code books remained under lock and key and were classified until 1968 but I even come across an interview of one of the Navajo code talkers basically explaining the whole system even in 1943 so you’ve got 100 people that know about this, and it’s it’s difficult to ensure that everybody followed it to the letter. With other tribes, both in World War I and World War II, there’s numerous, I have dozens of newspaper clippings where they’re talking about, when they’re recruiting these guys when they’re training, saying specifically, they’re from this tribe, they’re training to do a code in their language, it’s going to be used when we get in the war, etc.
So again, it’s kind of an urban myth, if you will, but when you say code, you assume it has to be secret, because otherwise the code doesn’t work. But in this case, there’s a handful of factors why this is still doable, even if other people know about it. And here’s the list, basically: One, these are unknown languages from a European perspective, right?
Right.
Even those non-Native Americans, you know, white Americans, they’re not going to be able to tell these languages, one from the other, or be familiar. So they’re obscure languages from a European point of view. They’re not from the Indo-European language family. So they’re not really comparable to a Romance language. If it’s a Romance language, you’re going to figure it out pretty quick, because of all the cognates, like between French and English or Spanish and Italian. But these have different grammar. They have different syntax. And so they’re also not very well documented.
Like Cherokee and Choctaw are both used and they have writing by this time, they’ve had writing for quite a while, but most of the things that are published in that system are things like Bibles or hymn books or local newspapers. So it’s not the kind of documentary things you could pull up out of like the Berlin museum or something. So they simply don’t know what languages they’re dealing with, what their structures are, how or who to compare them to. And then also they’re complete languages, so it’s not like a code or a cipher, where you’re just using replacement patterns. And these are complete, fully spoken languages. So this combination of things made it ideal.
So you could send the languages open air, and you didn’t really care whether people listened. We know that they recorded some of these, but they weren’t able to break it and they didn’t have the time either.
Anything else that you think is important? Or anything else I didn’t ask that you want folks to know about Alaska Native code talkers, or any code talkers in general?
Yeah, in World War I, they were used in the last very few weeks of the war. [It was a] very late development. So these [Native American soldiers] were very small units. Where they were used, though, I mean, obviously they didn’t turn the tide of the whole war or anything, but where they were used, they did have significant impacts in those individual units.
There’s [documentation of] captured German officers that inquired about them. They said: ‘We’ve never heard anything like this. We don’t know what languages these are. Will you please tell us?’ And of course, the joke was, they just said, ‘Well, it’s American, of course.’ And didn’t tell them what [language they were using].
There was a meeting between the Army, Navy and Marine Corps in 1943 and 44. This is a series of meetings, where the army decided not to expand the small units that it already had trained and recruited. The Navy had tested them, and [decided they] didn’t really need them. And the Marines kept silent about it. Now, the Marines, of course, by this time, already had their own program going, but they were trying to keep it secret so they didn’t even share some of this with other branches. So you find they’re actually more code talkers in World War II in the army that were just Type 2.
When an officer and I have many cases, people I interviewed, and other cases I documented where, when they just found that they had two or more Natives who spoke the same language, a lot of times, they just made radio men out of them. And you could have Point A and Point B, but you had a faster, more secure means of communication. And the whole advantage of this is that it’s as quick as I talking to you right now, and you just turn around and put it back into the other language, whereas when you had to, when you had to code the cipher messages, that took a lot of time to send them and then they have to be decoded. So some messages could take an hour and a half to three or four hours to completely go through, whereas with the code talkers, like, I say, it’s a matter of 30-seconds to a minute and a half and that’s a great advantage in a combat situation.
Do you address or kind of talk about in any of your papers or books or anything like that, how code talkers were used and then how they were treated, for example, when they reintegrated. Do you touch on that?
Yes, I’ve got some material. I called it, I think I called it — it’s like the greatest accommodationist irony ever. The vast majority of these gentlemen, in both wars, were products of Indian boarding schools. And I didn’t get to interview the World War I guys, of course, but a lot of World War II and there’s also a lot of misunderstanding about boarding schools too. If you went to a local boarding school where you went home at Christmas or summer and you saw your family. Those individuals mostly did not lose their language and everything. Now, if you were sent away fairly young, to one of those really distant ones like Phoenix Boarding School or Carlisle or others, yeah, the younger you were, the better chance you lost your language and everything. But most of the World War II guys that I worked with, they never lost their language or anything. They were fully bilingual, but they didn’t hesitate a bit when asked to do it.
I’ve never heard of any case of somebody not doing it. I know several cases with Comanches that I interviewed, they decided they wanted to go because they knew it was something to do with the language. They didn’t know exactly what it was, but they wanted, they wanted physically fit men, no non-married, no dependents, and a fluent speaker of your language. Well, why else would a fluent speaker of your language matter? Unless you’re going to send some kind of messages? And that was something that they took a lot of pride in, in joining, because, as a couple of them said, ‘What we came to realize is that we had a tool unlike anybody else, in that of course, we all passed the physical. We can all carry a rifle in basic training, but we have the weapon of our language.’
So by knowing that they can send messages faster and more secure and also in a culturally familiar way. They took great pride in that and felt that they were making a unique contribution.
How were they kind of treated when they got back and after they were discharged?
It depended on where they were. There’s some Navajo code talkers I interviewed that experienced a lot of racism when they got back home from California, all the way back to New Mexico and Arizona. There were some in Oklahoma, there was still some racism around, obviously. There were some places [and businesses] that still wouldn’t serve Natives alcohol and so they said “We’ll go to the VFW, the American Legion,” because they didn’t care there since they were veterans.
But the one thing I will say is that the veterans I’ve talked to – both code talk or non-code talkers – they didn’t experience much racism while in the military. There was a classic stereotypical nicknaming but most of the people that [I’ve interviewed] didn’t really have, what they would call racism in service, it was outside of service. Now there was what’s called the Indian Scout syndrome. There were times where Native Americans were thought to have enhanced military abilities just biologically, because of those Native stereotypes. These ideas that you’re naturally better at soldiering, and all these innate physical, natural characteristics that put Natives a lot of times in more precarious assignments. So you do see Natives used more often for scouting, for point men, you know, for things of that nature. And what that’s going to do is put you in a situation in which contact with the enemy is more frequent, more common, and it’s going to result in more wounded and killed in action. In some of the campaigns, there are higher, higher ratios, not total numbers, obviously, but in terms of the ethnic population, like in World War I, there are more Natives that are casualties than whites.
• This article was originally published by the Chilkat Valley News.
