Code Talkers Day

14 August 2027

Code Talkers Day, 14 August, honours the Navajo Marines who built and used a code in their own language in the Pacific during the Second World War. The date comes from a presidential proclamation. On 28 July 1982, following House Joint Resolution 444, President Ronald Reagan designated 14 August 1982 as National Navaho Code Talkers Day, for all members of the Navajo Nation and for all Native Americans who gave their talents and their lives so that others might live.

In 2027, 14 August falls on a Saturday. Arizona, which made the day a legal state holiday in 2021, observes it on the Sunday after 14 August when it lands on any other day, so there it is marked on 15 August.

The programme began in 1942. Philip Johnston, a civil engineer who had grown up on the Navajo reservation, proposed it to the Marine Corps, which tested the idea and agreed. Twenty-nine Navajo men were sworn in at Fort Wingate, New Mexico, on 4 May 1942, and were set to building the code after basic training. They made it in two layers: a spelling alphabet, in which Navajo words stood for letters, and direct substitution for military terms. A fighter plane was a hummingbird, a submarine an iron fish, a tank a turtle. The first list held 211 terms and grew to about 411 by the end of the war. Nothing was written down in the field; each man memorised the whole code.

More than 400 Navajo men served as code talkers by 1945, taking part in every Marine assault in the Pacific. Japan’s chief of intelligence, Lieutenant General Seizo Arisue, said after the war that his codebreakers had read United States Army and Army Air Corps traffic but never the Marines’. The programme stayed classified until 1968. Congress voted the original 29 the Congressional Gold Medal in December 2000, and President George W. Bush presented the medals on 26 July 2001 to the four then living and to the families of the other 25. The Arizona law also names Hopi code talkers: eleven men who built a separate code for Army intelligence.

Sources

• Ronald Reagan, Proclamation 4954, “National Navaho Code Talkers Day”, 28 July 1982
• Office of the Governor of Arizona, “National Navajo Code Talkers Day To Become Official State Holiday”
• Arizona State Senate, amended fact sheet for S.B. 1802, Fifty-Fifth Legislature, First Regular Session
• Office of the President and Vice President of the Navajo Nation, “Navajo Code Talker Day 2024 proclamation”

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