The Code Talkers have an almost mythical standing in American military history. Movies have been made, books have been written, and yet most of them miss a large part of the story. They focus on only the Diné (Navajo) in WWII.
Some have heard that the Choctaw were the first Code Talkers, but many have no awareness that indigenous people from different nations were a major turning point in WWI or the history of using indigenous language.
A Bit of Indigenous Military History
The perception of native people in the military has been riddled with stereotypes, misconceptions, glorification, and discouragement.
From the service of Charles F. Elmer, U.S. Army, Cook, Headquarters Company, 353rd Infantry, 89th Division.
Stories were told of indigenous service members as if they were inherently made for combat, claims that relied on the stereotypes of natives having a savage nature. Yet one aspect that was not shared with this is how many of the indian schools were structured intentionally with military service in mind. Children grew up with an intense regiment of drills and threats with the end goal to transition them directly into service.
Leaders in the field would often send reports up the chain of how their native soldiers were some of the most effective scouts and would often volunteer to go on their own. How our military would benefit from platoons constructed completely of indigenous members. (Though sometimes this was presented as the natives were incapable of being taught more traditional approaches in the same breath.) When this news reached the eyes and ears of those higher up in command, their response was to immediately shoot the idea down. Their reply was, as we paraphrase from multiple reports, that a priority above all else is to assimilate the native man. Giving them their own platoon would work against that goal, despite any clear positives they could bring to the war effort. Despite this, they still would often inflate reports to the media to make the indigenous soldiers appear super-human in their accomplishments against the Germans.
Reports that most indigenous service members were yet to be considered citizens was factually inaccurate as up to 2/3 of enlisted natives were citizens at the time! Even when looking through documentation, there’s different numbers of members with mixed or misspelled names depending on what commanding officer was doing the writing. It’s no wonder, with all these murky waters, that the history of how indigenous language was used in WWI and WWII is so obscured.
The First Use of Native Language as Code
Though often considered Code Talkers, this was not a code as many might think. At the time, the military was using codes more along the lines of cyphers. Messages that needed to be put into code, sent, received, and then taken to be decoded and the data passed on to its intended target. This often took a lot of time and code breakers on both sides were working hard to break the cyphers so they could understand the messages being passed.
Codes were basic during WWI, and there was solid evidence of Germans receiving every message we were sending. Bombs immediately followed messages of surviving troops. Secret strikes failed as they arrived to find areas evacuated before they even got close. We desperately needed a way to get messages through quickly and without the time it needed to decode.
The way letters written by commanding officers have documented the events, they read as a last ditch effort of hope in using indigenous members with the first being noted as two Hochunk men. Two Hochunk members were confirmed to be on either end of the communication lines so they were asked to just use their language to transmit orders. When the mission in question was successful without any signs the enemy understood the orders? There was the slightest inkling that they were onto something.
The next group to be asked if they could do the same that we know of was a group of Eastern Bank Cherokee. A squad of Choctaw were next and eventually they were asked to create an official code. Up to this point, they just wiggled regular language around to compensate for words that didn’t exist in indigenous language. For example, artillery was big gun and ammunition was arrows. While the Choctaw created a code, the war was over before it was incorporated in any functional capacity.
We now know that there were many instances of this kind of dynamic, where indigenous men were asked to hop on a communication line just to speak the language they were told was previously forbidden to help us make progress and eventually win the war.
Why Don’t We Know More and Why Is It So Unclear?
This was not secret information, and in fact many European publications freely printed the fact we were using indigenous language to frustrate the Germans. So why don’t we know more about it?
Unfortunately, it’s a mix of things. As briefly discussed before, many of the higher up’s in the military did not want to encourage feelings of success among native populations. Their main goal was to push for the assimilation of the indigenous man into “white culture”. This effort was so profound that it is common for tribes to be unaware of the impact of other tribal members as it was not shared with them.
Even the officially issued code talker medals are inconsistent in their labeling of tribes involved in both WWI and WWII and their own documentation.
On a less malicious note…it’s hard to properly document everything while you’re in the middle of a war! Even people with the best of intentions might screw up names, locations, dates, details, or plain forget and leave out important aspects. Not every lack of communication was intentional.
If you’d like to dive deeper into the details of this subject we recommend The First Code Talkers by William C. Meadows. By following THIS LINK you can even support an indigenous book store at the same time!
Have a WWI story of Code Talkers you want to share?
Drop us a line via our Facebook page or by using the contact tab here to send us a message!
Get a Puzzle with Code Talker Medals!
Get our unique puzzle featuring a photo taken by staff member, Amber Roth, that shows a collection of medals awarded by Congress to the tribes and nations that were acknowledged as part of the Code Talker effort.
Our Code Talker Puzzle comes in 4 different options with 96, 252, 500, and 1000 pieces! So whether you like large pieces or a challenge, this is a one of a kind opportunity to have this special product shipped straight to you. This is an online product ONLY.
Want to see more content like this?
Subscribe below and have our updates come directly to your inbox!