Madison
County Genealogical Society
Minutes of the Meeting - January 14, 2016
The January 2016 meeting of the Madison
County Genealogical Society was held at the Edwardsville Public Library on
Thursday, January 14, at 7:00 pm.
President, Robert Ridenour, called the
meeting to order.
GIFT
MEMBERSHIPS AVAILABLE
Do you have a family member that is
interested in (or even obsessed with) genealogy? A membership in the Madison
County Genealogical Society would be a very thoughtful gift. A gift card will
be sent to the recipient of any gift membership.
The following memberships are available:
Individual/Family Annual Membership $20.00
Patron Annual Membership $30.00
Life Membership $250.00
Contact our Secretary, Petie Hunter, at petie8135@att.net,
about a gift membership.
January
Meeting
On January 14, 2016, Lola DeGroff
presented a program titled Navajo
Code Talkers. Lola retired from the Department of Defense following
more than 20 years of government service. She is the past regent of the Silver
Creek DAR Chapter, past State Recording Secretary of the Illinois DAR, past
State President of the Illinois Society US Daughters of 1812, treasurer Shawnee
Chapter Colonial Dames of the XVII Century, and a member of several other
lineage organizations.
American Indians have participated with distinction in the United States
military for more than 200 years. Their courage, determination, and fighting
ability were recognized by American military leaders as early as the 18th
century. "I think they [the American Indians] should be made of excellent
use as scouts and light troops." said General George Washington in 1778.
To better appreciate the Navajo code talkers and their remarkable contributions
during World War II, we really need to go back to 1860. General James Carelton,
the manager of the New Mexico Territory, firmly believed in using reservations
to "civilize" the Indians. He ordered Kit Carson to invade the
Navajos' final stronghold in December 1863. Carson burned their crops and the
Navajo people eventually surrendered. Several thousand Navajos were force
marched 300 miles and interned at Fort Sumner, south of Santa Fe, where they
endured a scarcity of water, firewood, and food for four years. At the end of
that time, a new treaty with the United States Government was signed and they
were allowed to return to their homelandbut with concessions the Navajos had to
send their children to government-funded schools.
Moving forward to the 1900s, Peter McDonald was a Navajo Indian. Growing up,
the trading post was his only idea of the outside world. The Navajo tribe
believed that they came from four sacred mountains. McDonald said that all of
their prayers and legends mentioned those four sacred mountains. As children,
they were told a story and they had to repeat it  exactly using the same words
and in the same manner. When they succeeded in telling that story, they would
graduate to another story. The stories got longer and longer and longer. This
was Peter McDonald's and other Navajos' early education. When Peter enlisted in
the United States Marine Corps, he came home with a whole new idea of the
outside world  a world that included people with blond hair and blue eyes.
The Navajo language was not a written language and it was believed to be a
spiritual gift from holy people. At the boarding schools, the Navajos were not
permitted to talk in their native language. One of the original Navajo code
talkers, Corporal Chester Nez, said his mouth was washed out with soap for speaking
Navajo. Another code talker, Carl Gorman, recalled being locked in chains in
the school basement when he was a young boy because he refused to speak English
instead of Navajo. Nez was in the tenth grade when a Marine recruiter came
looking for young Navajos who were fluent in Navajo and English. Nez jumped at
the chance. One of the reasons was that he liked the pretty dress uniforms.
Many Navajos served in World War II, but not all of them were code talkers.
Altogether, there were about 400 Marine code talkers who knew and could
understand the Navajo language. Other Navajos served in other capacities during
the war.
The idea to use Navajo language for secure communications during World War II
came from Phillip Johnson. He was the son of a missionary to the Navajo.
Phillip had been raised on a Navajo reservation and lived among the Navajos for
24 years. He was one of the few non-Navajo that spoke the language fluently. He
was a World War I veteran and knew that Native American languages had been used
successfully during that war. He was sure that the syntax and the tonal quality
of the Navajo language made it unintelligible to anyone without extensive
exposure and training. The Navajo language has no alphabet or symbols. Johnson
had to argue that his proposal was different than just using the Navajo
language. He did not propose that they use the Navajo language to translate the
messages. His idea was using the Navajo language to code words. Johnson met
with the commanding general of the Pacific fleet and his staff. He convinced
them to use the Navajo language with the cooperation of four Navajos who
resided in Los Angeles and another who was on active naval service duty in San
Diego. Johnson staged tests under simulated combat conditions demonstrating that
the Navajos could encode, transmit, and decode a three line English message in
20 seconds. Machines at that time required 30 minutes to do the same job.
Obviously, when the general saw this, he was impressed. He recommended to the
Marine Corps Commandant that the Marines recruit 200 Navajos. In May 1942, the
first Navajo code talker recruits attended boot camp. These were the 29
original Navajo code talkers that created the Navajo code by developing a
dictionary and numerous words for military terms.
The original code consisted of translations for 211 English words  the ones
most frequently used in military confrontations such as terms for officers,
airplanes, and months. All this had to be memorized during their training. In
his letter to the Commandant of the Marine Corps, dated December 12, 1942,
several months after the demonstration, Phillip Johnson wrote, "I desire
enlistment in the Marine Corps Reserve, Class 5B, Specialist, to serve in a
capacity of training and direction of Navajo Indians for communications and to
perform duty with them both inside and outside the limits of the Continental
United States." He was a World War I veteran and here he is volunteering
to go back in World War II.
Once the code talkers completed their training, they were sent to a Marine unit
in the Pacific. From what I have learned during extensive research putting this
program together, of all the places where U.S. troops fought during the Second
World War, Guadalcanal and the Papuan Peninsula may have been the worst. These
two locations were similarly unhealthy in terrain and climate. The weather in
these places is perpetually hot and wet. Rainfall may exceed 200 inches a year;
and during the rainy season, 8-10 inches a day might occur. Temperatures, even
in December, reach the high 80s. The terrain and vegetation are equally
foreboding  dark, humid, jungle-covered mountains inland, and evil smelling
swamps along the coast. Of course, there were lots of insects. The troops
serving there were never dry. Most fought battles while racked with chills and
fever. For every two troops lost in battle, five were lost to disease Â
especially malaria, dengue fever, dysentery, or scrub typhus. Almost all troops
suffered jungle rot, which was a skin disease caused by being continually wet.
The Navajos might have been a little better suited for that environment than
many of the others because they were used to being in the hot sun and using
nature to help themselves. This environment is where the code talkers were
assigned. Their primary job was to talk, transmit information on tactics and
troop movements, orders, and other vital battlefield communications over
telephones and radios.
When a code talker received a message, what he heard was a string of seemingly
unrelated Navajo words. First he had to translate each Navajo word into an
English equivalent. Then using only the first letter of that English
equivalent, he would spell an English word. Thus the Navajo word wol-la-chee
which means "ant," be-la-sana which means "apple," and tse-nill which means "axe,"
all stood for the letter A. Most letters had more than one Navajo word
representing them. For example, da-he-tih-hi meant "hummingbird" and
that meant fighter planes. The code talkers used four basic rules when they
created a code word: 1. The code word had to have some logical connection to
the actual word; 2. In order to make memorization easier, the code word had to
be unusually descriptive and creative; 3. The code word had to be short; and 4.
They had to avoid words that could be confused with other words because of the
radio static. Many of the terms they used were pretty obvious  airplanes were
given bird names, ships were given fish names, and different Marine units were
given different Navajo clan names. The code for bombs was eggs, because
airplanes delivered the bombs and airplanes were birds. The Navajo word for
"turtle" meant tanks and the word for "dive bomber" was
chicken hawk. The Navajo code was essentially a code within a code. After the
code was developed, it was tested on some of the Navajo marines who were not
code talkers. They said it sounded like gurgling.
Army Sergeant Joe Kieyoomia, a Navajo, was captured after the fall of the
Philippines in 1942 and spent 43 months in Japanese prison camps. He told of
living on meager meals of rice laden with weevils. He said his captors
initially tortured him because they thought he was Japanese-American. The
blue-eyed soldier told them he was Navajo. "They didn't believe me,"
he said. "The only thing they understood about Americans was black or
white. I guess they didn't know about Indians." Joe said that one day, two
Japanese women visited him and wrote Navajo words in English and asked him what
they meant. So he told them, "This means bird, this means turtle, and this
means water." Joe's translations were useless to them because of the
Navajo code. One day, a guard marched Joe, stripped naked, from his tiny cell
onto the icy parade ground. They told him he could not return inside until he
revealed the Navajo code. That day it was 27 degrees outside. They made him
stand in six inches of snow for an hour and he was told, "If you move,
you're going to be shot." When he was finally given permission to return,
he could not walk. His feet were frozen to the ground. When the guard shoved
him, the skin on the bottom of his feet tore, basically leaving Joe's soles on
the parade ground. Joe could not confess to what he did not understand. The
secret code made no sense not even to another Navajo. He said, "I never
figured out what you guys that got me into all that trouble were saying."
In addition to being unwritten, the Navajo language is extremely dependent on
pronunciation. To mispronounce a word in Navajo is to say a different word
altogether. For example, the Navajo words for "alcoholic" and
"believer" sound very much alike. The story goes that a new
missionary on a reservation got quite a laugh in church service when he
welcomed all the "alcoholics."
In the first 48 hours of the Iwo Jima invasion, Navajo units sent and received
more than 800 messages. Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Iwo Jima the Navajo code talkers
took part in every assault the United States Marines conducted in the Pacific
between 1942 and 1945. They served in all six Marine divisions. It was at
Guadalcanal that the code talkers' words first came. All radio units on the
island tried to jam the signal, thinking it was Japanese. After that, they were
told to precede a message by the words "New Mexico" or
"Arizona" to let the Americans know who was speaking. Too often,
their own comrades mistook the code talkers for Japanese soldiers. Many were
nearly shot. Some commanders even ordered a bodyguard for each code talker.
That bodyguard was also responsible for seeing that the Japanese did not
capture a Navajo code talker.
Each message read aloud by a code talker was immediately destroyed to preclude
it falling into enemy hands. The Marines were constantly on the move, from one
foxhole to another. Many of the top Japanese code breakers had been educated in
the United States. They were savvy to local references and slang that the
American forces tried to use to disguise their intentions. The Japanese,
however, were baffled by the Navajo language code. Major Howard Conners, the
5th Marine Division Signal Officer, declared, "Were it not for the
Navajos, the Marines would never have taken Iwo Jima."
When the code talkers returned to their reservation after the war, they were
barred from talking about what they had done. Their code was considered so
valuable that it was kept classified until 1968. Though the Japanese repeatedly
broke other American military codes, they never came close to cracking the
Navajo language code. It remains one of a handful of codes in military history
that was never deciphered.
In 1988, a Navajo code talker GI Joe doll was introduced. It speaks phrases in
Navajo and English. The Navajo code talkers of World War II were honored for
their contributions to our nation's security on September 17, 1992, at the
Pentagon where a Navajo code talker exhibit was dedicated. New Mexico Senator
Jeff Bingaman introduced a bill to honor the code talkers and it was signed
into law December 22, 2000. He said, "Their accomplishment was even more
heroic, given the cultural context in which they were operating. Subjected to alienation
in their own homeland and discouraged from speaking their own language, they
still stepped forward and developed the most significant and successful
military code of the time." On July 27, 2001, 56 years after their
accomplishments, President George W. Bush presented four of the five living
code talkers and relatives of 24 others with the Congressional Gold Medal in a
ceremony in the Capitol Rotunda. The Congressional Gold Medal is among the most
distinguished honors our Congress can bestow.
The famous picture of the flag being raised on Mount Suribachi on Iwo Jima
would not have occurred had it not been for the Navajo code talkers. Peter
McDonald and the rest of the Navajo code talkers represent a larger group of
Native Americans who have defended our country throughout its history. We owe
them, and all veterans, a great debt of gratitude.
This presentation was very well received and
provoked many questions and comments.