Navajo Code Talkers

At the beginning of World War II, only 28 non-Navajos spoke Diné, the language of the Navajos. One of them was Philip Johnston whose missionary parents raised him on the Navajo reservation which overlaps New Mexico and Arizona. Johnston had served in the U.S. Army during WWI and was working as a civil engineer in Los Angeles at the time of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.

After the U.S. suffered devastating losses in the Pacific, the need for a coded language to prevent the Japanese from learning of American troop movements became paramount. In an article in the newspaper, Johnston was alerted to the challenge. Johnston located a few Navajos living in the Los Angeles area and arranged for them to demonstrate to the U.S. Marine commanders the utility of using Navajo and English languages in transmitting military communications.

After impressing the officers at the U.S. Marine base in San Diego, they obtained permission to enlist 30 young Navajos from their reservation. Willing to fulfill their patriotic duty, many recruits were younger than 18, the legal age of enlistment. They fibbed about their ages, since the Navajo custom was not to record birth certificates.

"They gave us two weeks to think about it. I did my own thinking; I didn’t inquire of my parents."

~ Cozy S. Brown, young Navajo soldier

The U.S. Marines recruited an initial 29 men intended to be code talkers, whose numbers grew to approximately 420 by the end of the war. Even so, 3,600 Navajos eventually served in the military forces during WWII—a sizable percentage of their population of 50,000.

Ironically, the young Navajos were assigned to make a code from the very language they were forbidden to speak in government-run BIA schools. The Navajo Code Talkers’ military success in preventing the Japanese from deciphering American military actions, helped to shorten the war in the Pacific. The code was never broken, nor no code talker ever captured. The Japanese military remained frustrated as they tortured captured Navajos who could not understand the code when the Japanese forced them to listen to it.

For many years after the war to protect the project’s secrecy, the code talkers were not publicly recognized for their bravery and unique contributions. Only within recent decades have the Navajo Code Talkers been honored, especially with long-deserved Congressional medals. In February 2000, the toy company Hasbro introduced a Navajo Code Talker GI Joe doll to honor the men. Their critical contributions to the preservation of this country had finally been recognized.

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Bataan Death March

The Bataan March of Death began at dawn, April 9, 1942, after the three-month Battle of Bataan and against the orders of Generals Douglas MacArthur and Jonathan Wainwright. Major General Edward P. King, Jr., commanding Luzon Force, Bataan, Philippine Islands, surrendered more than 75,000 (66,000 Filipinos, 1,000 Chinese Filipinos, and 11,796 Americans) starving and disease-ridden men. King inquired of the Japanese colonel in charge if the prisoners would be well treated, to which he responded, “We’re not barbarians.” A month later, General Wainwright was forced to surrender Corregidor.

The prisoners-of-war immediately were forced to give up their belongings and to endure a 75-mile march to captivity at Camp O’Donnell. Thousands, already weakened by lack of food and medicine during their defense of the Philippines, died en route from disease, starvation, dehydration, heat prostration, untreated wounds, and random execution. If an item “Made in Japan” was found in their possession, they were immediately executed. To the Japanese military for whom surrender was not an option, the captives, surrendered by their commander, were considered cowards (“dogs”).

Anticipating 25,000 prisoners, the Japanese were not at all equipped to handle the numbers they encountered. Prisoners were beaten randomly and were often denied promised food and water. Those who fell behind were usually executed or left to die. The sides of the roads became littered with dead bodies and those begging for help.

Along the Death March, approximately 54,000 of the 75,000 prisoners reached their destination. The death toll of the March is difficult to assess. Approximately 5,000-10,000 Filipino and 600-650 American prisoners of war died before they could reach Camp O'Donnell.

On June 6, 1942, the Filipino soldiers were granted amnesty by the Japanese military and released while the American prisoners continued to be held. Camp O'Donnell was hell. They would line up once a day for water. Men were weak and dying from dysentery and beriberi. Eventually they were transferred to camps outside of the Philippines.

This process began with American prisoners moving from Camp O'Donnell to Camp Cabanatuan or to prison camps in Japan, Korea, Formosa (Taiwan), and Manchuria in transports known as "hell ships." Thousands were drowned because the ships were not marked as prison ships, a violation of the Geneva Convention, and were attacked.

The 511 prisoners-of-war who still remained at the Cabanatuan Prison Camp as of January 1945 were freed during an attack on the camp led by U.S. Army Rangers known as “Raid at Cabanatuan” or “The Great Raid.”

The Bataan Death March is commemorated during annual ceremonies in Santa Fe and Albuquerque because of the valor of the New Mexico National Guard. As the first state National Guard to be federalized and sent to defend the Philippines in the fall of 1941, they were the first to fire at the Japanese planes and the last to lay down their arms. Since 1989, a Bataan Memorial Death March, or Bataan marathon, is held every year in March at the White Sands Missile Range near Las Cruces, New Mexico.

“Riveting accounts of the Bataan Death March...”

~ Mike Wismer, member of the Los Alamos County Council

Major, USAF Retired Operation Desert Storm Veteran

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Manhattan Project

Development of the atomic bombs was one of the greatest scientific achievements of all time, and the best kept secret of World War II. Because the Manhattan Project entailed a huge investment and the work of 129,000 people over a period of several years, it was also the largest scientific project in history. “Manhattan Project” was the code name for this nuclear research effort begun in Manhattan Island, NY.

In 1930, German-born Albert Einstein moved to the U.S. and settled at Princeton University. Einstein, as well as many scientists who were part of the Manhattan Project, had personal ties with European universities and laboratories. They knew the theories and discoveries in nuclear fission coming in 1938 from Berlin and elsewhere. They knew the scientists who remained in Hitler’s Germany and their capability to develop a nuclear weapon. In 1939, these scientists, many of them refugees, asked Einstein to write the letter he did, urging President Franklin Roosevelt to begin intense research on an atomic bomb. Roosevelt accelerated atomic research and the Manhattan Project was born. General Leslie R. Groves, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, became the Director in 1942.

American-born J. Robert Oppenheimer grew up on the isle of Manhattan, NY. He was a brilliant physicist with American and European schooling, who was teaching in California in October 1942, when Groves picked him to lead the research effort. From his early years, Dr. Oppenheimer knew firsthand of the remote Los Alamos Ranch School for Boys in New Mexico, and recommended it for the special site of the Manhattan Project for the duration of the war. In March 1943, the Project took over from the school. Santa Fe, New Mexico's capitol city, became the gateway for Manhattan Project scientists, both civilian and military, to come up to “The Hill.” A race ensued to develop a new kind of weapon, expected to be used on Hitler’s Germany. Many of the outstanding Jewish émigrés who had escaped from Hitler’s policies of exclusion, then extinction, became Manhattan Project scientists, contributing to the project’s success.

However, the war in Europe ended with Germany’s surrender on May 8, 1945, before atomic weapons were available for use. The weapons were ready by mid-July 1945, and the focus turned to using them on Japan if that nation did not accept the Allies’ Potsdam Declaration. President Harry Truman warned of a “rain of ruin” if Japan did not surrender unconditionally. Only the use of two atomic bombs, and the entry of Russia into Manchuria, convinced the Emperor to end the war. The Japanese military leaders were ready to resist an allied invasion on Kyushu. Some leaders pursued a coup to stop the Emperor's surrender message. When that failed, they acquiesced and gave up their arms.

Research on the Manhattan Project required multiple production and research sites that operated secretly around the United States, involving scientists and resources from England and Canada. The results of that research were ultimately assembled and tested in New Mexico, then sent to Tinian Island in the Pacific and put aboard B-29 planes.

www.losalamoshistory.org, Los Alamos Historical Society, Los Alamos, NM
www.atomicheritage.org, Atomic Heritage Foundation, Washington, D.C.
http://www.lanl.gov/museum/, Bradbury Science Museum, Los Alamos, NM

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