Stuff You Should Know - How the Navajo Code Talkers Worked

Episode Date: November 27, 2018

In WWII the US Marines devised an unbreakable code-within-a-code made from Navajo, one of the most linguistically difficult languages in the world. A handful of Navajos sent messages on the frontlines in a language they’d been forbidden to speak as school kids. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey friends, when you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lisa in Manitoba, who got the idea to Airbnb the Backyard Guest House over childhood home. Now the extra income helps pay her mortgage. So yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too. Find out what your place could be earning at Airbnb.ca slash host. On the podcast, HeyDude the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, HeyDude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and

dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to HeyDude the 90s called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from House StuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Brian over there, and there's Jerry. So this is Stuff You Should Know. This is going to be a good one. This is a Grappster joint. Did you want to talk about soup first? Were you kidding? Yeah, I was kidding. Oh, I thought you were serious. Yeah, no. It was bad soup, but I mean, it wasn't that bad. Yeah, I mean, right before we started recording,

like this is how awesome things are around here. We were talking about how bad your French onion soup was. How do you mess up French onion soup? Yeah, that's what I was wondering. And you said, say that I want to talk about this, and I thought you were serious. Yeah, I was kidding. Well, and here we are. I was kidding. Yeah, and then we were talking about the soup anyway. How do you mess up French onion soup? It's like beef broth, salt, onions, cheese, bread. Yeah, they put too much in it. Melt it in a crock pot? Yes. The onions they use were way too sweet. I think they use like Vidalia onions dipped in sugar. It was just not good. Yeah. Not good. You can tell we shouldn't call them out publicly. No. No. That'd

be pretty mean. Sure. I mean, they just don't know what they're doing with soup. It's fine. They're a soup restaurant. There are a lot of soup restaurants. Yeah, I guess. Do you remember that dumb one? I think they're out of business now. Let us surprise you. There was nothing dumb about let us surprise you, buddy. Soup and salad place. I love that thing. That's out of business, right? Yeah, there's something called sweet tomatoes that's basically the same thing. Oh, I think I've heard of that. Yeah. Hey, I like a good soup and salad joint. Yeah, so what was wrong with let us surprise you? I don't know. I don't like cutesy names unless it's on the Simpsons. I think the teas were made of carrots. Yeah.

For sure. Well, that leads us right into Navajo Code Talkers. Exactly. Quite well. We should say right out of the gate that, like you just said, we're talking about Navajo Code Talkers. There were plenty of other Code Talkers from other Native American tribes. Yes. This episode is mostly about the Navajo Code Talkers because there were so many of them and so much is known about the codes that they made, but we'll also mention other tribes as well. Yes, and straight up respect to all of them. For sure. It always kind of stinks when one thing gets all the glory when there were many factions of that thing. So yeah. Right. But I think that's better than just naming this episode like how Code Talkers work, but only talking

about the Navajo Code Talkers. Agreed. I think we covered everything, right? Agreed. So if you have ever seen or are familiar with a movie called Wind Talkers, have you seen it? I didn't see it, but I did look it up today and it is widely regarded as not only a garbage movie, but a real disservice to do a movie about the Navajo Code Talkers, but it's really a movie about Nick Cage. Directed by John Woo. Yeah. It's a violent war movie that happened to be structured around a really interesting historical plot. Right. Let's take this really amazing story from history and let's morph it into a story about a white soldier. It's like dirty dancing to Havana nights, basically. It's funny. It is. Yeah. So Wind Talkers,

I do not endorse that film. I do not either and neither of us have seen it and we still don't endorse that film. No. I just need to see the reviews on that one. But the point of it was that there was a Native American, I don't know if he's a Navajo or not in that movie because again, I haven't seen it, but who was charged with speaking his native tongue to someone else on the other end of the line at the front lines of battle in the Pacific Theater during World War II to transmit messages in code in an unbreakable code and that actually happened. Like that part of the story happened and it was true that there were in World War II Native Americans in large part Navajo who were speaking to one another in Navajo like

on Guadalcanal or in the Marianas or the Marshall Islands or Okinawa who were there at all of these major massive battles in the Pacific Theater between the United States and Japan that actually eventually led to this island hopping process led to the atomic bombs being dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki from the Marianas. Yeah, code so well complex to our dumb ears to the Navajo, they were just like, this is just our language. True, but even if you're a linguist, you're like, this is an extraordinarily difficult language. Yeah, it's so complex that it confounded the Japanese who were really good at busting codes and they were like, I don't know what's going on here. Yeah, right. Yeah, this is I've never

heard anything like this, which was a huge reversal because prior to the institution of Navajo code talkers and I think 1942, like late 1942, the Japanese had our goat with our coded transmissions because for the number one, there were a number of Japanese people who had been educated in the US in between World War One and World War Two and had gone back to Japan prior to World War Two and they were totally fluent in English. Yeah. So they could speak English like up down and sideways. Yeah. Plus on top of that, they were really good at breaking our codes. So they knew basically everything we were going to do every step of the way. So the Navajo code talkers coming into the Pacific Theater was, it reversed

our fortunes. It's not an overstatement to say that they basically helped the US take the Pacific from Japan, not single-handedly, but through their code. Yeah, for sure. All right, so let's talk about the Navajo in general to begin with. A Native American tribe that inhabited the American Southeast or what, you know, now we know it as the American Southwest. Right. Back then it was known as the Southeast. Yeah, exactly. You're like, what? This isn't the coast? American Southwest. I wish everyone could see because Josh literally just pointed in the other direction. I wonder if you pointed west. You pointed that way. Is that west? I don't even know. Hold on. No, that's north. Okay. The American South. The American South

North. Right. The original peoples were, they believed from Asia, maybe ironically in the end when you see all the story goes, and settled in the Southwest around 1400 CE. In the 1600s, a lot of things changed. The next few hundred years were, they were warring with the Spanish, they were warring with other Native American tribes. And then that was all kind of leading up to the 1800s when the United States popped up and said, hey, here's what we're going to do. We're going to wreck your economy. We're going to destroy your crops and livestock and poison your wells and kill all your buffalo and put you on reservations and march you, to New Mexico, where your new home will be and will be known as the Long Walk. Yeah,

it was basically their trail of tears. Yeah, exactly. It was just right out of the Westward expansion playbook. Yep. And so the Navajo found themselves, when was that the mid, it was 1857, I think. Yeah, and like, why, I mean, it's important for a lot of reasons, but the men who ended up being the Navajo Code Talkers in World War II, their grandparents were these people that were forced to go on the Long Walk. Yes. And it wasn't, you know, hundreds and hundreds of years later. Right. Like direct descendants that ended up fighting for the United States. Yes. And this is not like, hey, do you mind moving over here? It was very much like the trail of tears. It was movement 300 miles to a reservation against their will at the barrel of

a gun. Yeah, like, I don't want to go, okay, I'll shoot you. Yes, exactly. There were reports of the injured, of the tired people who fell behind were just shot by the US infantry. There was at least one family that reported that their pregnant daughter was, they were forced away from her. She was kept behind and they heard her being shot as well. Yeah. It was just a violation and atrocity done to the Navajo like it was done to so many other Native American groups. And by the 19th century, like basically 1857 on, the Navajo lived exclusively on reservations in the Southwest. Yeah. And starting in about the 1870s, the US government said, here's what we're going to do. You have to assimilate into American society. We want you to

forget your culture as you knew it. You can't speak your native language anymore. We're going to round up your kids and send them to American boarding schools, teach them to read and write in English only. And you're going to be punished and forbidden from speaking your native tongue, from singing in your native tongue. Yes, you will be beaten if we catch you speaking Navajo to one another. And like, I think you just said that they would kidnap children, take them to these schools, just like they did with the Aboriginal tribes in Australia, just like they did with the first Americans in, or the first nations in Canada. Yep. And it was just not only have we taken your land, not only have we forced you to live in this one area that no one

else wants to live in, like we want to destroy your culture now. Like we're going after your culture. We just don't want to obliterate you guys completely. We'll let you live, but under these conditions and we're not, we're going to murder your culture. And so not only were these co-talkers, the grandchildren or the grandsons of the people who went on the long walk, they were the very people who went to these Indian schools and were beaten for speaking Navajo. And then about 1942, the United States military specifically, the Marines showed up and said, Hey, we'd love for you to come speak Navajo officially for the United States government. Would you mind doing that? Yeah. And this was after World War One. It went on in World War One, actually. World War Two got

all the press and the Navajo, of course, did more than anyone else, like you said. But in World War One, there were, in 1918, there was a captain from the 142nd Infantry Regiment who heard two Choctaw soldiers speaking in their native tongue and was like, Man, we're getting hammered with the Germans and the French cracking our codes. So I think that this language could be of use to us because it's really complex. Germans have no idea what's going on with your language. And I think we could put you to use. And so the very first co-talkers, I think, were these Choctaw co-talkers in World War One? Yeah. Well, we were fighting with the French and we were talking to the French, but the Germans spoke French and English. And we're using regular telephone lines in World

War One, I guess. Sure. They just had them tapped. So they were just eavesdropping. And we might as well have been speaking German for as well as they were translating these coded transmissions. Yeah. Now, all of a sudden, they're like, what is this? We've never heard this language before ever. It's just a couple of Choctaw guys talking to one another. But it was for Germany and I'm breakable code at least as long as World War One was going on. Yeah. And I don't think this early World War One code was so much a code as like you're saying, like, right, we're just going to put a Choctaw on one end and a Choctaw on the other end of the line. That's it. And they'll just relay the messages that we tell them to and they're native tongue. And the Germans were like,

nine. That's the only word I could think of. Nine. Hogan. That was World War Two. Shoot. That would come years later. So it wasn't just Choctaw, members of the Choctaw tribe who were code talkers in World War One. Also, the Comanche played a role. Yeah. The Fox, which is also known as the... Oh, man, I had it. Have you ever heard of the Fox tribe from, I believe, Mississippi? I don't think so. Oh, you don't? There was also the Comanche. They played a big role and some other tribes did as well. Yeah. But there's like, we're talking a handful of people in the capacity like you were saying. It's like, just say this in your native language to this other guy who speaks your native language and he'll tell the guy on the other end what you

just said in English. Yeah. And here's the rub. I mean, it is rich with irony throughout this whole story, but here's the rub in World War One is that Native Americans weren't even granted citizenship until 1924. So the World War One code talkers were not even American citizens, yet they were doing this. And they were not even recognized by the United States and acknowledged and thanked until 2008. Right. 2008, 10 years ago. France even recognized them in, I think, 1988. 89, yeah. 89. Did you say that? No. Okay. So France recognized them first and it took another 20 years before the US recognized them officially. Unbelievable. It is unbelievable. But the problem with World War One is it worked, but we became friendly with

Germany in between World War One and World War Two. And Germany said, we're going to hedge our bets here. We're going to send some people to the United States to learn Native American languages and culture so that if we ever go to war with the United States again, we'll have their number. And they did. Apparently there were plenty of, well, I don't know if plenty is the right word, but there were Germans who spoke Cherokee, Comanche, chocolate. That's crazy. So much so that some of the American commanders in World War Two were like, we can't use Native American language because there's Germans who know this already. They were compromised, basically, between World War One and World War Two. You want to take a break? Oh, yes.

All right. Let's take a break and we're going to come back and talk about the dawn of World War Two in a man named Philip Johnston. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster?

Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot sexy teen

crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Oh, just stop now. If so, tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right. So right before World War Two, there was a training exercise going on with, uh, with soldiers from Michigan and Wisconsin. There were Native American soldiers involved. And there was a man, uh, and they were, you know, they were testing out these

coded transmissions. They were like, we did it World War One. Let's try it again. There was a man there named Philip Johnston, uh, who was a white man, but he actually grew up on a Navajo Reservation. I think he just read an article about this actually. Oh, really? Uh-huh. Um, yeah, he wasn't in the army at this time because they brought him in like he was way too old. Way too old, but around this time I think he was about 50 years old. Yeah, but he had the benefit of growing up on a Navajo Reservation. Right. Considered himself a Navajo, spoke the language, followed World War One, and said, I want to make a comeback. And I want to go back and fight in World War Two and start up this crack team of Navajo Code Talkers. It was his idea. Yeah. And they said he went into the

office of whatever higher-up general he needed to, spoke some Navajo, and said, this worked once, why can't it work twice? And they were just like, by George, I think you're onto something. Well, they said, we'll give you a, we'll give you a chance to demonstrate this. So apparently in Los Angeles, he recruited four Navajo men who I guess he was friendly with because like you said, he considered himself Navajo. His parents were missionaries. Yeah. Um, and apparently he spoke Navajo so well that at age nine, he served as the official translator for a Navajo delegation that had gone to Washington D.C. to lobby for better treatment and rights for the Navajo nation. Which is amazing because as you'll learn, the, uh, not a lot of, because there were other white

people who spoke Navajo that tried to be Code Talkers and none of them made the cut. No. Because it's such a hard language. Right. So this guy must have just had an ear for it too. Yeah. And was raised with it. Yeah. But, um, he, uh, he said, we, I, I know you guys are trying to make a code. I've got this language. I've got these four guys from Los Angeles with me. Just give them a shot. And so they gave them a shot at, I think Camp Elliot. And, um, they, they gave two, they took the two of the four Navajo guys, broke them into pairs, put them in separate rooms and said, here, say this in Navajo, say this English phrase. Um, the eagle lands at midnight, we'll say. All right. That'll bit.

And tell your buddies and see what they say. So they transmitted the eagle lands at midnight or whatever it was, um, over the phone in Navajo, the guys in the other room took it in Navajo, translated it back into English in like a minute. And the, uh, guys at Camp Elliot were pretty impressed by this. They said, we're going to bring in some German and Japanese people to listen. Right. And they were like, did you guys get that? They went, I have no idea. They said nine. And whatever the Japanese word is for no, do you know that? Uh, Niet. Niet? Oh really? No. I was like, that sounds a lot like Russian. What is the Japanese word from now?

They say no so infrequently. I was about to say, you know why you don't know that? Because all you say is yes. Right. When you go over there. Yeah. Sure. I'll take more. Yes. More please. They just bang my bowl on the table. So, uh, so yeah, they, they, they actually didn't do that. I'm kidding, of course, but they said, this is great. And this is, the trick was not only was it, like basically impossible to crack, but like you're saying it was super fast, way faster than machine codes. Right. So that's a huge advantage that this, this offered was you're using Navajo speakers to send a coded message prior to this. And in addition to this, you would, you would use basically machines that used algorithms to encode and decode a message.

And it could take hours, hours. If you're trying to send a desperate message on a front line battle in the Pacific theater, you don't have hours for that thing to, to get across. So the idea that you could do the same thing in minutes and a code that you were just positive, the Japanese would have no idea what to do with. That was a huge advantage for sure. Yeah. And like the Grabster pointed out, it was taking a long time with the code machines that the Germans in Japanese were cracking anyway. Right. So this was the solution. There was like no, no downside to it. All right. So like we said, Johnston was, Philip Johnson was far too old because he was a World War one veteran. They gave him a special

commission, said you're now a staff sergeant and the Marines again, or I don't know if you use the Marine or in the army initially. I don't know. But at any rate, he was in the Marines this time and they said, you're going to lead the code talker project. Go out and recruit. So he went to reservations, recruited young men and between three and 400 of these young men became code talkers. He recruited more than that, but a lot of them failed out for very, various reasons. Like, you know, they still to go through boot camp and all that stuff. So you still have to be a soldier on top of it. Although it was a kind of a truncated version of boot camp because they had to get them in there quick. They needed them so badly. They're

like, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, you're fine. Yeah. We need to take you to code school. Basically, yeah. But the whole thing started with 30. They originally recruited 30 Navajo speakers. One of them dropped out. So 29, there were 29 original Navajo code talkers and they were put to work initially creating the code because very importantly, the Navajo code talkers not only spoke to one another in Navajo, which was incomprehensible to basically anybody living it, listening to it, who didn't speak it. They would also use a code, they would use code words in Navajo. So what they created was a code within a code. And it was as unbreakable as any codes ever been come up, that anyone's ever come up with. I think we should, you and I can't speak Navajo.

I'm rusty. I think we should play just a little bit of Navajo. All right. And then I'll translate. So what you just heard in Navajo was this is from the parable of the prodigal son. This is from the movie Wind Talkers. What you just heard was not long after that, the younger son got together all he had set off for a distant country and there squandered his wealth in wild living, something everybody does from time to time. But that was what you just heard in Navajo. And it's so foreign sounding for a reason. It's a really difficult language in that the same vowel can have four different types of intonation and four different meanings. So one word can have four different meanings based on whether you go up or you speak through your

nose or whatever. But you're saying the same word. You're just intoning it differently. Yeah. And that just changes the meaning dramatically. There was one reason why it was so impenetrable. Yeah. And like you said, they memorized 500 code words, three different versions of the alphabet and went to war. I mean, I use the word irony. I don't think that's sort of undersells it, what was going on and why these men would sign up for something like this. And Ed points out, like you can't get into the head of them or explain every person's motivation because it was all different. But through interviews, what sort of stood out was that they still, even though that the United States had stomped them down into near oblivion, they still had a tie to that land.

Right. And that was their land. And regardless of what had gone on in the past, the Germans and the Japanese were invaders, that they were a threat to their holy land. They were a common enemy between the United States and the Navajo. Yeah. I mean, it says so much about their people that they could just put all the other stuff aside and the genocide and the long walk and the Trail of Tears and say, well, this is still my land, even though I'm on a reservation and I want to help protect it. Amazing. Yeah. Some of them were joined up because they subscribed to the Navajo warrior culture. And the Navajo definitely had their own warrior culture, although that wasn't necessarily the

central focus of their culture. Others were like, oh man, you're going to get me off of this reservation and I'm going to go travel the world. I've never even been on a bus before. Let's go. Some of them were like, I like this GI bill you're talking about. Others were drafted, didn't want to go, but they were still drafted and they went. So they were just like to paint it any other way is to make it like, to give it the wind talker treatment. That's not the stuff you should know away. There were as many different people, I think there were 421 Navajo code talkers who ended up serving in World War II. I'm sure there were 421 different reasons for why they went. Yeah.

That's just the way it is. They're people. Yeah. We're talking about people here. 420, huh? 421. Dollar short, day late. So let's talk a little bit about this code within a code. Here's one example. So troops moving forward to the lake is what the Grabsturb came up with. And they wouldn't just get on the horn with their Navajo counterpart on the other end and say troops moving forward to the lake in Navajo. They would substitute in different words. Sometimes they would spell out some words one letter at a time with that letter being represented by a word, like the first letter and the word that they say. And it was, I mean, there were rules

for the code, but the person on the other end, they were so in sync with one another that they didn't necessarily look at a chart and say, well, this means this and this means this. They were just able to converse rather organically within this code, within the code. Right. And they all knew that code that was like this means this and this means this. Yeah. But yeah, from the research, it seems like they were able to shift in, like you said, make it organic on the fly. And they knew what one another was saying. Kind of threw out the playbook a little bit, I imagine, in certain circumstances. And I'm sure the American, you know, the generals and the people in charge were just like,

just do it, man. Just do your thing. Or they were like, I have no idea what you just said. They had no idea they threw out the playbook. A lot of times they had to do that because there weren't equivalents of certain words. Like they didn't have words for bombardment and shell casing and things like that, because they didn't have those things in their culture. So they had to make up things that they would be able to understand both ways. Well, they were also, so there was an alphabet, right? So every... Three alphabets.

Three, yes, that's right. So there were three different words for every letter of the alphabet. It's amazing. Okay. But there's something that is really easy to look past that we really have to think... This is one of the reasons why this is so unbreakable. If you wanted to use the letter I, or you would say the Navajo word for ice. Right. Okay. But the Navajo word for ice doesn't have... It doesn't begin with the letter I. They probably didn't have a word for ice though, but that's funny that you picked up. Well, no, the weird thing is that they did. They did? Yes, it was their most closely related to a native Alaskan tongue, which is why they think...

So natural ice. It's like evidence, it's linguistic evidence they came across the Bering Land Bridge. Gotcha. So yeah, they also have a word for shark, which is like... That doesn't make any sense either if they're from Arizona basically in New Mexico. Was it a land shark? That's what I thought. Yeah, they're like Chevy Chase. Yeah. But they have like a lot of... They have one for salmon, Copperhead salmon.

And that's not a lot of those in New Mexico, but yeah, it is delicious. But the point is, is the Navajo word for ice doesn't necessarily begin with I. So even if you knew Navajo, you wouldn't necessarily know that this is the word for the letter I. And then to confound it even more, if there's three different words for the letter I, even if you're spelling like... What's the word with multiple I's? Hurry up and give me one quick. Illicit? Yes. Okay. If you're spelling illicit out, you could use two different words for I,

and that cuts down on letter or in this case, codeword repetition, which is one of the easiest ways to break a code, look for repetitions and pair those up with the letters that are used most frequently in English. So if you're using three different codewords for a single letter, you can mix it up while you're spelling it out, makes it even more impenetrable. Like this is just such a gorgeous code. Yeah, they used imagery a lot of times, which makes it kind of strangely lyrical. A dive bomber was a chicken hawk, a submarine was an iron fish. And then they also use, you heard a cockney rhyming slang, which is,

geez, we could do a podcast on that, but that'd be kind of cool. I won't even get into that, but it basically made compound words in an English sound like a word in the message. So the examples that the Grabster got was like, the word secured, they would say the Navajo words for sheep cured or dispatch became dog is patch in Navajo though. So even if you knew Navajo and you heard dog is patch, you wouldn't know that that meant dispatch. Right. And if you didn't know Navajo, you wouldn't be able to hear and be like, oh, that rhymes with dispatched. I'll bet that's what they said.

It doesn't sound like anything you've ever heard before in your life. Yeah. And like you said, they would, they were so familiar with it and comfortable with it, that they would switch it up on the fly. And, you know, again, technically they had, they would do something to alert the person that was like a system in place to say like, now we're going to use this version. But they didn't even need to do that really. Right. That just seemed like a formality. It sounds like. Yeah. And I think one of the reasons why they were so able to shift like that, because these guys who were raised in the Indian schools, they had to speak to one another in

Navajo like surreptitiously. Yeah. So they had to be able to shift on the fly, not just between like nuance in Navajo, which is a very nuanced language to begin with, but also between Navajo and English, depending on who is coming their way. Right. Right. So there was a, I think it's my impression that from the treatment in Indian school, it would have made it easier for them to understand what somebody was saying when they broke the rules of the language really quickly. Yeah. They'd be able to follow. And then Chuck, there's one other thing that made this code even more

beautiful. It wasn't written down. Yeah. In 1942, there was no book, no document, no text that you could get and teach yourself Navajo. You couldn't get it. Nope. And like you said, even some like white kids that were raised out on training posts and spoke Navajo their whole life, they washed out of the Code Talker program. They had basically a success rate. Non-Navajo had a success rate of basically zero in the Code Talker program for Navajo code. Yeah. It was just that hard. Yeah. And that nuanced. Amazing. All right. Let's take another break. Yeah. I'm pretty, I'm pretty jazzed up here. Yes. All right. And we'll come back and talk about how this, how this really affected the war right after

this. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it. And now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL instant messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your

best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you.

Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different, hot, sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right. So like we said, at this point in the war, when they were brought in,

the Navajo Code Talkers, it was the fighting in Europe was dwindling. And the Pacific Theater is where things were really happening. And so the first action for the actual Navajo Code Talkers were at Guadalcanal. And I hope we didn't paint a picture that they're sitting in offices talking to one another in an air conditioned office on telephones and just sending orders to like, go bomb this place on Saturday. A lot of times these men are on the front lines and relaying positions and what it's like on the ground and what's going on. It wasn't just directives to go do this. They were relaying important information like live in the moment on the front lines. And to add to this, there was confusion a lot of times, even among American

soldiers, like to an American soldier 50 feet away, a Navajo Code Talker might look like a Japanese person. Were these like the very dumbest soldiers of all? I don't know, man. I mean, it's on record that there was friendly fire because of this. So they were actually fired on. I saw that like they had like guns pointed at them at some point and would be like marched over to be interrogated. It was such that they felt like they needed to assign them personal guards, which was frigging Nick Cage. And that's what that movie was about, is that he was a white soldier assigned to guard one of the Navajo Code Talkers because they were being mistaken for Japanese soldiers. Right. But he was also secretly ordered to kill that Code Talker rather than let them fall into

the hands of the Japanese. Yeah. I wonder if that's a thing or if that was wholly created for that movie. I don't know. I don't know. I could see it go both ways. And I don't know how smart the soldiers were and confusing. Right. I don't think it happened very often. And I think all that has to happen is two or three times and all of a sudden that's like part of the legend, you know? Yeah, maybe so. But it did happen. I mean, like it was, it happened from time to time. There was a guy named, I think George McCabe, who was a Navajo Code Talker who was taken prisoner by a fellow American because he was standing in a chow line on the beach at Guadalcanal waiting to get food. And the guy was like, you look Japanese. That's exactly what he did, pointed

a gun at him and said, you're coming with me. And then I'm sure it was like, sorry, but no, William McCabe, I'm sorry. But that was, yeah, if you look at a picture of a Navajo Code Talker, you look at a picture of a Japanese person, I don't see the resemblance. You should have been on the front lines, my friend. I would have been like, dude. What are you doing? Yeah. The language itself, and again, this is kind of funny because the language sounds nothing like Japanese, but sometimes US radio operators would jam the frequency. I guess, I mean, the Grabster said that because they mistook it for Japanese, I imagine they just heard a foreign language and just jammed it. I don't know if they necessarily thought it sounded

like Japanese. It sounds like its own thing for sure. Yeah, maybe they had no idea what Japanese or Navajo even sounded like and was just like, it ain't English. Maybe they were under orders for like, yeah, if it's not English, jam it. Yeah, possibly. I could see that. So these, like we said, the speed was one of the real keys and just how quickly they could get these messages delivered. And it allowed them to, here's a great quote from Philip Johnson who started the program. He said, during the first 48 hours, and this is at Iwo Jima, he said, while we were landing and consolidating our shore positions, I had six Navajo radio nets operating around the clock. In that period alone, they sent and received more than 800 messages without an error.

In 48 hours, 800 messages. No mistakes. No mistakes. That's amazing. And they're relaying these messages again in minutes and each of them would have taken hours to decode without the Navajo code talkers. There was another quote from a guy named Major Howard Connor who is on Iwo Jima as well in the signal core. And he said, paraphrasing here that the Marines would not have taken Iwo Jima had it not been for the Navajo code talkers. The entire operation, Iwo Jima, the very famous like flag raising statue, Iwo Jima, basically a turning point in the Pacific that the entire operation was done in Navajo. That was what was spoken over the radios for the entire operation. It's amazing. It really is. I mean, like if you think about how many American lives were saved

by that, that's, I mean, that was just such a direct contribution to the war. Iwo Jima, that was huge. Yeah. I mean, that's all you can say. Yeah, this deserves its own movie treatment, like sort of like hidden figures, like these minority voices who really had this huge impact that never got their due. And you know, with the Navajo code talkers, they came back to the after the war. And it was classified what went on until 1968. Apparently, they may have done this in Vietnam and Korea, although I don't think anyone is totally knows that for sure. It seems to be rumor. Yeah. But they did not, you would think like, oh, and after 1968, they were just put on a pedestal and praised all throughout the United States. That is not true. They were basically

sent back to the reservations with what awaited them there, which was poverty and hardship and alcoholism and disenfranchisement. And some, I mean, some of them were lucky enough to bootstrap up from military service. I imagine. I think ones that stayed in the military afterward and made a career out of it tended to do better than ones that, you know, went back right after the war. Some of them were able to get into college. Some of them tried to buy houses on the reservation through the GI Bill, which was very much their right as veterans after World War Two. But through a fluke of treaties that put them on the reservation, they don't, they didn't actually own the land. The land that they own was held in trust. So they couldn't show the bank actually

own this land or the guy I'm trying to buy this land from owns the land. So the GI Bill was useless for a lot of them, which is a big black eye on what it was just basically par for the course for how most of them were treated afterward. Yeah. I mean, just right back on the reservation, it was just the usual reservation life again. In 1969, there was a reunion at the fourth Marine Division and 71 Nixon awarded them a certificate of thanks. Yeah. And a light punch in the arm. An old tricky dick. In 1982, August 14th was declared National Code Talker Day. That was for all code talkers. Yeah, not just Navajo Code Talkers. But those original 29 were given a Congressional Gold Medal in 2000. And in 2014 on June 4th, the final

original Code Talker Navajo Code Talker Chester Nez passed away. And just look up a picture of Chester Nez in EZ. Just that sweet face and he's got the veterans hat on that says Navajo Code Talker on it. Oh, I love those hats. Pretty amazing. The award ceremony, so they were awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor in 2000, the original 29. But when they actually presented the award in 2001, by that time, there are only four of them left alive. Yeah. And that's a big criticism too that it was like, you could probably done this a little sooner while they were alive still. Yeah, it could have. It might have taken 60 something years to just sort of get that ceremony in order. Right. They wanted to get everything just right. But that was amazing. And yeah,

hopefully somebody will make a movie about it. That's not mostly about Nick Cage's character, the white guy. If you want to know more about Code Talkers, you can search them on the internet. And there's some fascinating stuff out there. Oh, and Chuck, if you want to know more about Navajo Code Talkers and you happen to ever be in Cayenta, Arizona, there's a Burger King there. And it has basically a Navajo Code Talker Museum. Oh, cool. Which basically a display case. But it counts. It qualifies as a mini museum. Sure. Grab a Whopper, learn something. Yeah. And since I said that, it's time for Listener Mail. I'm going to call this Easy Bake Oven Follow Up from Oregon. So guys, just listen to Easy Bake Ovens. I've always been a big believer in kids

playing with whatever toys they want. And as a kid, I spent a great deal of time playing in the dirt with my brothers, making roads and parking lots for our Hot Wheels. Flash forward 20 years, my son wanted me to take him to the toy store to spend some six birthday money. Sixth birthday money. You got it. I followed him as he perused the remote control cars, various action figures, and he disappeared around the corner. And before I could get to the other aisle to find him, he came tromping back, holding an Easy Bake Oven. He asked me if he had enough money to buy it, and he did. Awesome. This was $19.99. It was about 20 bucks. As we walked to the counter, I asked him if he wanted me to carry it for him, put it in a cart, because the box was about as big as he was,

and he insisted on carrying it himself. Although I've always encouraged him to play with what he wants, I was surprised that he wanted to carry it himself. His dad was not always so open-minded to boys playing with what he called girl toys, and probably still isn't. We are no longer together, needless to say. Anyway, we pay for the oven, and my son carries it to the car. He won't let me put it in the trunk or even in the seat next to him. He held it on his lap the whole way home. The story is just adorbs in every way. I love it. While we were driving, he examined the box and made a rump sound. I asked him what was wrong, and he said that he was mad, and asked him why. He said, the box is pink, and there's only a girl on it, but boys like to cook too, mom. Told him I agree.

So I guess you could say he has always been woke. He made many treats with his oven over the years, and I even have a photo of him somewhere wearing his grandma's frilly cooking apron with a big smile on his face. And that is from Davina M. Berry in Portland, Oregon. Another M. Berry? Is there another one? Yeah. Really? Yeah. We never really figured out how to say that last name, but there was, like, within the last month or two, there was an M. Berry. Weird. I wonder if it was her. Thanks a lot, Davina. Yeah. Maybe it was. I think the other one was with an E. That's with an I, huh? Oh, okay. Yeah. Gotcha. I will figure it out one day. Yeah. If you want to, if you're an M. Berry or an M. Berry or whatever, you want to get in touch with us,

you can join us on social. Just go to StuffYouShouldKnow.com and find all the links there, or send us all an email to StuffPodcast at HowStuffWorks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit HowStuffWorks.com. to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to, Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right

place because I'm here to help and a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen, so we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.