The young Navajo Marines, using secret Navajo language-encrypted military terms, helped the United States prevail at Iwo Jima and other World War II Pacific battles, serving in every Marine assault in the South Pacific between 1942 and 1945. Military commanders said the code, transmitted verbally by radio, helped save countless American lives and bring a speedier end to the war in the Pacific theater.
They were sworn to secrecy about their code, so complex that even other Navajo Marines couldn’t decipher it. Used to transmit secret tactical messages via radio or telephone, the code remained unbroken and classified for decades because of its potential postwar use.
“We were never told that our code was never decoded’’ or given identities of the original 29 Navajos who created it, said Keith Little, 85, who joined the Marines at 17 and remembers crouching in a bomb crater amid heavy fire on Iwo Jima.
“It was all covered by secrecy. We were constantly told not to talk about it,’’ Little said. The Code Talkers felt compelled to honor their secrecy orders, even after the code was declassified in 1968.
The oldest of the 13 Code Talkers who came for today’s parade is 92, and the group includes one of the original 29.
“The code did a lot of damage to the enemy,’’ said Samuel Tom Holiday, 85, of Kayenta, Ariz., who also is joining the parade. He was 20 when he and two other Marines went behind enemy lines on Iwo Jima to locate a Japanese artillery unit advancing on American forces.
Once the unit was located, Holiday transmitted a coded message to Marine artillery, which fired a big shell at the Japanese. Holiday messaged “Right on Target’’ to a Navajo Code Talker in Marine artillery.
Today “there’s a certain elation about’’ knowing how much their work affected the outcome of the war, said Little, who runs a family ranch in Crystal, N.M., on the Navajo Nation.
Before the code, the Japanese intercepted and sabotaged US military communications at an alarming rate because they had expert English translators.
