A Code Talker is the name given to the elite group of Native American soldiers who were trained to relay messages on the front lines using their native languages. The most popular group of Code Talkers are the Navajo who were heavily recruited during WWII by the US Marines.

What is not widely known is that code talking was first utilized in World War I and the original tribes were Choctaw and Cherokee. My maternal grandfather and his two brothers joined the US Navy in WWII as Code Talkers who spoke their native language, Lakota Sioux.

My Grandpa and his brothers joined the Navy shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. My mother told me her dad was greatly affected by the surprise attack, and even though he had never stepped foot on a boat in his life, he joined the Navy with the specific purpose of helping to take revenge on the Japanese for what happened at Pearl Harbor. His job was training with a group of other Sioux where one would be dropped behind enemy lines and would relay coordinates on enemy bunkers, airstrips, and artillery back to the battleships allowing for coordinated mortar and air attacks.

My grandpa survived the war, but lived the rest of his life struggling with an addiction to alcohol. My mom told me he was a funny, kind and caring man who loved to play guitar, but often his demons from the war came out and he would go into periods of heavy drinking and depression. This lead to a divorce and my grandpa never remarried. He later became a truck driver and was killed by a drunk driver while he was gassing up his truck, here is a picture of him taken shortly before he was killed.



There were approximately 500 Native American men who were part of the code talking program during World War 2. It was widely believed that code talking was the only code that was never broken by the Axis during the war.

For more information on code talking you can check out these links.





And here was a story about the Lakota Sioux Tribe honoring the 67 known Code Talkers who fought in WWII