Native Americans and African-Americans Serving During WWII 7.7

As we’ve talked about over the past couple of days, when the U.S. got involved in WWII (after Pearl Harbor), ALL Americans became involved. This included Native Americans and African Americans, who not only wanted to protect their country, but also wanted to prove to white Americans that they deserved equal rights (that they were not getting during this time).

During WWII, the quickest way of communicating was over telephones or “radios” as they were called – what we would think of today as mobile telephones. These telephones, while not as small as those we have today, were small enough to carry into battle. The problem for the Americans was that they did not have a safe way of talking over the phones. They could not just speak in English. The Japanese could understand English. If the Americans spoke in English, the Japanese would know what we were saying, where we were, how we were going to attack them, etc. Therefore, we needed a secret code – one that the Japanese could not break. The problem with this was that the Japanese were experts at cracking codes. What is a code? Think about inventing your own code – if you were going to invent a code, how would it work?

Navajo Code Talkers

An American soldier named Philip Johnston thought of a creative way of making a code. Johnston was the son of a missionary to the Navajos and raised on the Navajo reservation. He was one of the few non-Navajos who spoke their language fluently. Navajo is a unique language because it is ONLY SPOKEN – it is not a written language. It has no alphabet or symbols. In other words, you cannot learn how to speak Navajo from a book – you can only learn it by speaking it. Johnston was a World War I veteran who knew that the U.S. military was searching for a code that could not be broken by the Japanese. He also knew that other Native American languages had been used in WWI to encode messages. He believed that since Navajo is an unwritten language and extremely complex, it would be unintelligible to anyone who was not raised on a Navajo reservation. At the outbreak of WWII, there were less than 30 non-Navajo people who knew how to speak Navajo – and NONE of them were Japanese.

The U.S. Army decided to try to create a code based on the Navajo language or a “Navajo Code.” The Army explained what they wanted to do to 29 young Navajo men who had volunteered for the army and told them to make a code, using their language. What the Navajos came up with was a code that remained unbroken by the Japanese throughout not only WWII, but also remained unbroken throughout the entire Cold War (until it was revealed in the 1990s). The Navajo served in almost every major battle of the Pacific during WWII. Many army leaders later said that without the Navajo Code Talkers, we could not have won the war in the Pacific.

The Navajo Code Talker's Dictionary

The Navajo Code was a DOUBLE CODE. When a Navajo code talker received a message, what he heard was a string of seemingly unrelated Navajo words. The code talker first had to translate each Navajo word into its English equivalent. Then he used only the first letter of the English equivalent in spelling an English word. Thus, the letter A could be said by using the Navajo words "wol-la-chee" (ant), "be-la-sana" (apple) or "tse-nill" (axe). One way to say the word "Navy" in Navajo code would be "tsah (needle) wol-la-chee (ant) ah-keh-di- glini (victor) tsah-ah-dzoh (yucca)."

Most letters had more than one Navajo word representing them. Not all words had to be spelled out letter by letter. The developers of the original code assigned Navajo words to represent about 450 frequently used military terms that did not exist in the Navajo language. Several examples: "besh- lo" (iron fish) meant "submarine" and "dah-he- tih-hi" (hummingbird) meant "fighter plane." (for the complete dictionary, go to http://www.history.navy.mil/faqs/faq61-4.htm)


The Tuskegee Airmen – “Red Tails”

At the beginning of World War II, African Americans were still treated like second-class citizens. In the southern U.S., Jim Crow Laws and segregation were still the law (this was 10+ years before Brown vs. Board of Education and 20+ years before the Civil Rights Movement). Not only was the southern U.S. segregated, but the U.S. Army was also segregated during this time. African Americans were not given leadership opportunities in the Army nor opportunities to train for the highly skilled jobs, such as pilots, because it was believed that African Americans were not intelligent enough to handle complicated machinery such as an airplane.

During WWII, African-Americans started pushing the concept of “Double V” – winning both victory in battle overseas and victory against racism back home in the U.S.. Pressure was put on the U.S. Army by Civil Rights groups such as the NAACP to try out a test group of African American pilots. The Tuskegee Airmen were given their name because they were trained in Tuskegee, Alabama. The Tuskegee Airmen not only included pilots, but also navigators, maintenance and support staff, instructors, and all the personnel who kept the planes in the air. When the U.S. Army gave in and created this group, they thought that the Tuskegee Airmen would fall on their faces. They could not have been more wrong.

The Tuskegee Airmen were given the job of escorting bomber airplanes as they went on their missions to bomb targets in Germany. As the escorts, the Tuskegee airmen had to fight off any Nazi airplanes that were trying to blow up the bombers. In other words, their job was to save the lives of the white pilots and other white men who were flying inside the bombers. The white bombardiers soon came to realize that the African American escorts were the best escorts that they’d ever had. Not a single bomber airplane that was protected by the Tuskegee Airmen was ever shot down. The Tuskegee Airmen got the nickname “Red Tail Angels” because (1) the front and tails of their planes were painted red, and (2) the bomber pilots that they were protecting called them their “angels.”

The Tuskegee airmen overcame segregation and prejudice to become one of the most highly respected fighter groups of WWII. By the end of the war, 450 men had been sent overseas and 150 had died while in training or on combat flights. They proved, without a doubt, that African Americans could fly and maintain sophisticated combat planes. Their achievements led directly to President Truman’s order, in 1948, that the U.S. Army be fully integrated, a major advance in civil rights. He used an “Executive Order”, which meant that Truman could bypass Congress. Representatives of the Solid South, all white Democrats, would likely have held up or stopped such legislation.

NOTE: The experiences of African Americans during the war years provided the foundation for the civil rights movements of the 1950s and 1960s.