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.
The following is the Treasurer's report for the month of November:
The following is the Treasurer's report for the month of December:
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 [email protected],
about a gift membership.
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 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.