America’s veterans have given life and limb in the service of freedom. A dwindling band of World War II vets — honored this morning at New York’s Veterans Day parade — “gave” their language, too.
Some 400 members of the Navajo Indian tribe, serving as Marine communications specialists in the Pacific theater, baffled Japanese intelligence throughout the decisive years of the war with a code derived from their native language.
Indian languages had been used for military communications before — but the Navajo tongue’s complexity made the code practically impossible to break.
Indeed, the “code talkers,” as they were called, were sworn to secrecy for more than 20 years after the war ended; President Reagan first acknowledged their service in 1982.
Now, with fewer than 50 remaining, they’re raising funds for the Navajo Code Talkers Museum and Veterans Center, slated for construction in New Mexico.
It’d be a fitting tribute to a group of vets whose unique contribution was key for American victory.
These Marines’ precise impact of the code on the course of the war is impossible to measure; several historians think the US would have lost the crucial battle of Iwo Jima in early 1945 without it.
Even some code talkers dispute that claim — though there’s no question their role was key. Navajo Marines coded more than 800 messages in the first two days of the battle alone.
Code talker Bill Toledo remembers his battalion commander at Iwo Jima waiting more than an hour to transmit a routine advance-and-report order to a forward company while the message was being encrypted by traditional means — eventually abandoning the effort. Then-Pfc. Toledo, speaking with a code talker at the advance position, transmitted the message in minutes.
As it was, more than 20,000 Japanese troops mounted a ferocious, 36-day defense of the island, using a network of tunnels to frustrate Marine advances.
Clearly, the rapid-but-secure communication that only the Navajo code could provide was crucial.
It’s a matter of tribal pride, the code talkers say, that their language — “something that was very sacred to us” — played a role in the Allied victory. But their reasons for enlisting (most were volunteers) weren’t too different from those of the rest of their comrades.
Toledo says he joined the Marines after one of the Navajos who developed the code (as he learned later) visited his school on a recruiting mission. “I thought it would be a challenge,” he said. Code talker Keith Little spoke of wanting to get even and protect his family after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
Like all who served, the code talkers deserve a free nation’s thanks. jwilson@nypost.com