A Missouri State University anthropology professor, who is an expert on Native Americans’ unique military contributions to World Wars I and II, says it is ironic the U.S. government had previously spent almost 200 years trying to stamp out the tribes’ valuable abilities.
Dr. William Meadows has testified before Congress and written books documenting the role of American Indian “code talkers” who used their native languages to confound enemy eavesdroppers while communicating battlefield orders via radio and telephone.
From the mid-1700s to the early 1900s, Native American children were often yanked from their families and communities and placed in boarding schools where the curriculum was intended to “civilize” them. Policies included, Meadows says, forbidding speaking in their native tongue; English was the strictly enforced rule.
“There is this myth that the boarding schools killed native languages,” Meadows says. “They didn’t — but they certainly interfered with it. And then in 1918, when the Army stumbled onto the use of tribal languages to communicate while confounding the Germans, the Indians didn’t hesitate a moment — they were very gracious about sharing their language. And their role was expanded in the Second World War. That’s the great irony.”
Meadows’ areas of expertise include other aspects of Native American history and culture (and Japanese culture, too), but his research into code talking has garnered the most attention — and will be the topic of a presentation scheduled for Nov. 30 at Wonders of Wildlife to cap observance of national Native American Heritage Month.
Want to go?
If you wish to attend Meadows’ two-hour “Native American Communicators in the World Wars” presentation at Wonders of Wildlife, the event is at 6 p.m. on Nov. 30. Tickets are $15 per person and may be ordered online through the Wonders of Wildlife website. A member discount is available. The official registration deadline is 11:59 p.m. Nov. 23, but late reservations may be accepted.
A crucial aspect of Meadows’ work has been to expand the list of tribes whose members served as code talkers. The Navajo are the best-known; they were formally acknowledged in 2001 when President Bill Clinton signed into law the “Honoring the Navajo Code Talkers Act” and awarded special medals to members of that tribe who were communicators in World War II.
More than just Navajo: now 33 tribes recognized due in part to Meadows' work
But Meadows has helped add others to the list, so that Congress now recognizes 33 tribes as contributors to the ranks of code talkers. Research that he began in 1989 as a doctoral candidate at the University of Oklahoma resulted in publication 2002 of his book titled “The Comanche Code Talkers of World War II.” In 2021, he published a second volume, “The First Code Talkers,” focusing on World War I. And he’s working on a third all-inclusive book.
“Since the first book came out, my phone hasn’t stopped ringing,” he says. “I get calls from all over this country and from France, England, sometimes Australia and Canada — colleges, cultural centers, museums, native tribes and so on. I’ve been asked to speak at the Library of Congress and for traveling exhibits of the Smithsonian Institution. I even get requests from high school and junior high history classes, and sometimes do Zoom talks for them.”
Perhaps the most significant call came in 2003, shortly after he joined the faculty at Missouri State. It came from the office of then-Sen. Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) requesting that Meadows journey to Washington to appear before the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs at a 2004 hearing labeled “The Contributions of Native American Code Talkers in American Military History.”
“I was instructed to present any and all information that I had on code talkers, particularly non-Navajo code talkers, the reason being that the Navajo already had been acknowledged with congressional medals,” Meadows recalls. The upshot was passage of the “Code Talkers Recognition Act” in 2008.
“Originally the government was going to mint one medal designed for all 33 tribes,” Meadows says. “But the tribes said ‘No, we each want something distinctive.’ The tribes designed their own medals. It took a couple of years, but 33 different medals eventually were created and presented by the federal government.”
Code talkers came from tribes large and small
Native Americans had served in the American military, although often in minor roles, in almost every conflict dating back to the Revolutionary War. In all, some 44,000 American Indians wore the uniforms of U.S. military branches during World War II. However, only about 680 were code talkers. Some 420 were Navajo, with about 280 actually seeing combat and, Meadows says, 11 killed in action.
The other 260 of that 680 total came from tribes large and small. Nineteen code talkers were Choctaw; the Comanche, Chippewa and Oneida contributed 17 each. Other tribes sent fewer members, ranging from eight to two.
The reason the Native American tribes’ languages were indecipherable by wartime enemies, Meadows explains, is that they were “largely unknown languages outside their immediate communities. Their syntax and grammar are different from Indo-European languages, so they don’t have the same ordering or same structuring.There are no cognates — like ‘police’ in English and ‘policia’ in Spanish — to help figure out meanings.
“They are largely unwritten; they are meant to only be spoken, and tone and inflection are important. The Cherokee and Choctaw do have written languages, but they’re used mostly in Bibles and hymnals and newspapers for local consumption only and not likely to have been collected by libraries in Germany or Japan.”
Meadows says their languages presented challenges for the code talkers, too, because there were no native equivalents for many military terms. So coded terms were developed — 250 in the Comanche dialect, more than 700 in the Navajo. For instance, a tank was called a “turtle,” a grenade a “potato,” a ship a “house on water,” a battleship a “big fish” and an aircraft carrier “carries around birds.”
Another problem was that Native Americans’ physical appearance could be mistaken for Japanese, according to Meadows.
“Put yourself in the mindset of 1940-45. There was no internet, you had no television, travel was limited. Most white soldiers had never been around Indian populations that were largely confined to reservations. When they heard code talkers speak among themselves, they thought it was Japanese — they’d never heard either of those languages before.
“I talked to one Navajo who said that when he was first assigned to a Marine unit, nobody would talk to him for three or four days. Finally he asked them, ‘What is it with you guys?’ And they said, ‘Well, we don’t really want you here — you’re a Japanese-American.’ And he goes, ‘I’m not Japanese-American — I’m an Indian!’ After that, no issue.”
Interest in code talkers began while working with Comanche veterans
It was stories like that one that got Meadows interested in the topic of code talkers in the late 1980s and early ’90s.
“I was working with Comanches in southwest Oklahoma on a veterans-related project as part of my dissertation. I was interviewing a guy, Forrest Kasanavoid, who was an officer in a veterans organization there. Something came up about his service in World War II, and I asked what his MOS (Military Occupational Speciality) was. He said, ‘Well, there really wasn’t one for what I did.’
“On his DD-214 (discharge form) it said something like ‘slow-speed radio operator.’ But he told me, ‘I and 16 other Comanches were recruited about a year before Pearl Harbor to go through basic training, go to communication school, and then develop a code for our language.’
“He said there were only three other guys from his unit, and their training officer, who were still alive. ‘You ought to work something up on this,’ he said. Well, I was busy with my dissertation, so I didn’t take him up on it. But not long after that conversation, my grandfather passed. He had served in the Pacific in World War II, and it dawned on me that these guys were all in their 70s then and weren’t going to be here forever.
“So right in the middle of my dissertation work, I took on this other project. When colleagues ask me ‘Did you consult with your dissertation committee?’ I say ‘Well, no, because they would’ve told me not to do it.’ But I knew it had to be done.
“It was a matter of time — only a handful of years before they’d all be gone. So I went ahead and started interviewing surviving code talkers.”
History of code talkers traced to WWI battlefield in France
Among his findings was that code-talking didn’t begin as a formal program. He traced the beginnings to June of 1918 when the U.S. Army’s 30th Division was getting pounded by Germans in France. Runners carrying messages among scattered battlefield units were being cut down by snipers. And American officers began to suspect that the enemy was intercepting messages sent over radio and telephone.
So a scheme was devised. Messages were transmitted that falsely indicated the Americans were going to mass a large formation of troops at a certain location at a certain time. And when that time arrived, the Germans bombarded that site with artillery, confirming the eavesdropping suspicion.
One officer suggested that two members of his unit, who were members of the Ho Chunk (formerly called Winnebago) tribe, be used to communicate with each other in their native language to foil German listeners. The technique worked, and the practice spread to other American units.
Meadows has heard similar stories from World War II veterans.
“A Muscogee/Creek Seminole veteran was walking through a French apple orchard a few days after D-Day when he heard a guy singing. He recognized that it was a song of his tribe, a mourning song, meaning he’d lost someone who was close to him. So he made a beeline toward the sound and found that person.
“They were talking in their language when a sergeant came by, heard them and asked what they were doing. They said they were from the same tribe and were just visiting. The sergeant took down their names and units and said he might be in touch later. They thought, ‘In touch for what? We’re nobodies, just privates.’
“But a few days later they got transfer slips and became radiomen.”
Another one:
“A veteran told me that an officer came to him in a mess hall and said, ‘Chief, we think that we have another ‘chief’ in the division, and we need to find him. I want you to holler out in your language ‘Stand up and hold up a piece of bread!’ The fellow telling me this story said he balked at first, but the officer said it was a direct order. So he hollered as he was told to do — and someone popped up holding a piece of bread, and hollers back: ‘What do you want me to do with it?’
“They hadn’t known one another before but were from the same tribe, just from different states. And they, too, became radiomen.”
Meadows says the code talkers he was able to interview — only a few remain living — took special pride in their service. “They said — not in an offensive way — things like ‘If you can pass basic training, you can carry a weapon. But code talking was something that only we could do. We used our language as our weapon.’”
Code talking was something that only we could do. We used our language as a weapon.”
story relayed to William meadows by a native code talker
Meadows says the two acts of recognition by Congress helped acquaint the public with the role of the code talkers, as did the 2002 movie “Windtalkers” that starred Nicolas Cage as a white Marine assigned to guard the safety of a code talker.
“The code talkers I’ve spoken with about that movie said the mechanics of what they did in communicating was presented spot-on in the movie. But they were disappointed that the storyline focused mostly on the bodyguard rather than on the code talkers.”
Electronic scrambling replaced code talkers
No code talkers have been employed by the U.S. military since World War II due to advances in electronic communication systems that scramble messages to make them secure and unintelligible to outsiders. However, Meadows is passionate in his belief that the service of Native American code talkers should be better known and remembered.
“It is an important part of history. We know that this technique saved lives. It didn’t necessarily win the war, although there are people who claim that it did. But it definitely gave us great advantages and helped turn the tide of battles where it was used.
“There are a lot of Americans walking around today who might never have been born had the code talkers not been there alongside their fathers or grandfathers.”
