Analysis: Letter Recommending Navajo Enlistment
The analysis of the letter recommending Navajo enlistment highlights a significant initiative during World War II aimed at enhancing military communications. As the United States faced challenges with Japanese cryptographers decoding their messages, Major General Clayton B. Vogel proposed enlisting Navajo speakers into the Marine Corps to serve as signalmen. This idea stemmed from the unique characteristics of the Navajo language, which was largely unknown to those outside the Navajo community and thus deemed a secure means of communication.
Philip Johnston, a veteran and fluent Navajo speaker, played a crucial role in promoting this concept, demonstrating the language's efficacy for military purposes to military officials. The analysis outlines the strategic advantages of using Navajo, including its complex meanings and lack of written form, which contributed to its security as a code. This program ultimately led to the recruitment of Navajo Marines, who would go on to play a vital role in the U.S. military’s efforts during the war, showcasing the intersection of culture and warfare. The initiative illustrates both the ingenuity of military strategy and the contributions of Indigenous peoples in American history.
Analysis: Letter Recommending Navajo Enlistment
Date: March 6, 1942
Author: Clayton B. Vogel
Genre: letter
Summary Overview
After the United States entered World War II in late 1941, American military commanders discovered that Japanese cryptographers were decoding many of their communication codes almost as soon as they were created. With the American Pacific Fleet heavily damaged by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the fact that the Japanese were uncovering American battle plans in advance did not bode well for the long-term success of the US war effort. After hearing about the potential of a code based on the language spoken by the Navajo Indians of the Southwest and seeing a demonstration in early 1942, US Marine Major General Clayton B. Vogel recommended to the commandant of the US Marine Corps, Thomas Holcomb, that Navajos be enlisted into the Marine Corps for the express purpose of becoming signalmen responsible for transmitting messages in a way that the Axis powers could not understand or decode.
Defining Moment
As the conflict between the United States and Japan began to take shape in the early stages of World War II, the problem of transmitting secure messages became an urgent issue for American military commanders, as many of the Japanese cryptographers who were working to break American codes had been educated in the United States and were able to quickly decipher many of the codes that were being devised. As a result, new codes were constantly being devised, a cumbersome activity and one that made the logistics of communication difficult, as radio operators were constantly having to learn new codes just to be able to perform their duties.
Philip Johnston was the child of a missionary to the Navajos and, as a result, had lived much of his life on the Navajo reservation and spoke the language fluently. He was also a veteran of World War I, having fought in France before returning home to the Southwest. He was employed as a civil service engineer in Los Angeles when World War II broke out. At that point, he was too old to serve in another war but still wanted to contribute to the American war effort. In response to a newspaper story about the problem of effectively encoding military communications, Johnston contacted the Naval Office in Los Angeles with the idea of using the Navajo language as a military code, as the Navajo language was largely unknown outside of the tribe's reservation in the American Southwest. Johnston was aware that the Choctaw language had been used to encode messages during World War I, and he was convinced that the Navajo language would prove impervious to all efforts of the Japanese to understand it.
In February 1942, Johnston took his idea to Lieutenant James E. Jones at Camp Elliott in San Diego and demonstrated the specific reasons that the Navajo language would make an excellent code. The Navajo language contains numerous words that have many different meanings depending on the inflection used by the speaker. It was not a written language at the time, meaning that very few people outside of the reservation either spoke it or even had any knowledge of it. In late February, Johnston brought four Navajo speakers to Camp Elliott to demonstrate the use of the language. The language proved completely incomprehensible to the observers and yet the messages were transferred with complete accuracy. Among the observers was Major General Clayton B. Vogel, who was in charge of the Amphibious Corps of the Pacific Fleet. Vogel wrote a letter describing the demonstration that Johnston had staged to the commandant of the Marine Corps, asking that two hundred Navajos be recruited to serve as communications specialists.
Author Biography
Major General Clayton Barney Vogel was born on September 18, 1882, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He was the son of a Civil War veteran and joined the Marine Corps in 1904 after graduating from Rutgers University. Vogel had a wide-ranging career, serving in China, Nicaragua, the Philippines, aboard the USS Nebraska, and at the White House. In 1941, Vogel was promoted to major general and took command of the Second Marine Division and the Second Joint Training Force, renamed the Amphibious Corps, Pacific Fleet. Because of his high-profile position and connections, Vogel was the perfect person to hear Johnston's idea of using the Navajo language as an encryption code for military communication. Vogel was keenly aware of the issues faced by the Marine Corps in transmitting orders and of the problems those issues were likely to cause when his Amphibious Corps went into combat the following year. Vogel retired from the Marine Corps in 1946 and died in Philadelphia on November 26, 1964.
Document Analysis
In early 1942, after being convinced by World War I veteran and Navajo speaker Philip Johnston of the efficacy of the Navajo language as an encryption code, Major General Clayton B. Vogel wrote a letter to the commandant of the United States Marine Corps, Thomas Holcomb, in order to convince him that Navajo speakers could be a solution to the problems the US military was facing with having their codes broken by Japanese cryptographers. Vogel recommends a program to recruit Navajo speakers to the Marine Corps as signalmen, as their messages could be transmitted and deciphered quickly and “almost verbatim.”
Vogel begins his letter by stating the circumstances that led him to his recommendations. He describes in terse prose Johnston's offer to demonstrate the usage of the Navajo language to transmit coded information and the efficacy of the demonstration in accurately translating and sending messages. Vogel notes how the Navajos in the demonstration had to invent some words for specific military terms, as there were no Navajo words to directly convey terms such as “dive-bombing” and “antitank gun.”
Vogel cites Johnston as having offered another rationale for the use of the Navajo language—the fact that the Navajos were “the only tribe in the United States that has not been infested with German students during the past twenty years.” After the successful use of the Choctaw language in World War I, many German scholars had come to the United States to study tribal languages. However, as Johnston had spent much of his life living on the Navajo reservation, he could accurately report that no Germans had shown up to study the Navajo. Had they done so and learned the language, its usefulness as a military encoding cipher would have been limited. Johnston estimated that no more than twenty-eight non-Navajo Americans had knowledge of the language, thus making it assuredly unknown to the Axis powers.
Vogel reports Johnston's assurances that he could locate approximately one thousand Navajos who would have the combination of the knowledge of the Navajo language and fluency in English to serve as Marine communication specialists and asserts that Navajo would be “admirably suited for rapid, secure communication.”
Bibliography and Additional Reading
Durrett, Deanne. Unsung Heroes of World War II: The Story of the Navajo Code Talkers. Rev. ed. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2009. Print.
Kawano, Kenji. Warriors: Navajo Code Talkers. Flagstaff: Northland, 1990. Print.
McCoy, Ron. “Navajo Code Talkers of World War II: Indian Marines Befuddled the Enemy.” American West 18.6 (1981): 67–75. Print.
Nez, Chester, and Judith Schiess Avila. Code Talker: The First and Only Memoir by One of the Original Navajo Code Talkers of WWII. New York: Berkley Caliber, 2011. Print.