– September 11, 1978, San Diego, California

San Diego, California

San Diego is the eighth-largest city in the United States and second-largest city in California. The city is located on the coast of the Pacific Ocean in Southern California, immediately adjacent to the Mexican border. The birthplace of California, San Diego is known for its mild year-round...

) proposed the idea of using the Navajo language

Navajo language

Navajo or Navaho is an Athabaskan language spoken in the southwestern United States. It is geographically and linguistically one of the Southern Athabaskan languages .Navajo has more speakers than any other Native American language north of the...

 as a Navajo code

Code talker

Code talkers was a term used to describe people who talk using a coded language. It is frequently used to describe 400 Native American Marines who served in the United States Marine Corps whose primary job was the transmission of secret tactical messages...

 to be used in the Pacific during World War II

World War II

World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...

.

Early years

Philip Johnston was born in Topeka, Kansas

Topeka, Kansas

Topeka |Kansa]]: Tó Pee Kuh) is the capital city of the U.S. state of Kansas and the county seat of Shawnee County. It is situated along the Kansas River in the central part of Shawnee County, located in northeast Kansas, in the Central United States. As of the 2010 census, the city population was...

 on September 17, 1892, the son of a missionary, William Johnston. The elder Johnston brought his family to Flagstaff, Arizona

Flagstaff, Arizona

Flagstaff is a city located in northern Arizona, in the southwestern United States. In 2010, the city's population was 65,870. The population of the Metropolitan Statistical Area was at 134,421 in 2010. It is the county seat of Coconino County...

 on September 16, 1896, to serve Navajos residing on the western part of the Navajo Reservation

Navajo Nation

The Navajo Nation is a semi-autonomous Native American-governed territory covering , occupying all of northeastern Arizona, the southeastern portion of Utah, and northwestern New Mexico...

. Philip's father was able to intervene and defuse a potentially violent clash called "The Padre Canyon Incident" which revealed underlying tensions between Navajos and Anglo

Anglo

Anglo is a prefix indicating a relation to the Angles, England or the English people, as in the terms Anglo-Saxon, Anglo-American, Anglo-Celtic, Anglo-African and Anglo-Indian. It is often used alone, somewhat loosely, to refer to people of British Isles descent in The Americas, Australia and...

s involving livestock rustling. For resolving that incident in a peaceful manner, local Navajo leaders allowed Reverend Johnston to build a mission 12 miles north of Leupp, Arizona

Leupp, Arizona

Leupp is a census-designated place in Coconino County, Arizona, United States. The population was 970 at the 2000 census.-History:During World War II, an abandoned Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding school in Leupp was used as the Leupp Isolation Center, for Japanese American internees considered...

. After that incident, Philip's father worked to expand the boundaries of the western part of the Navajo reservation in order to resolve livestock rustling disputes around which developing tensions were generally centered.

On the reservation, young Philip learned to speak Navajo while playing with Navajo children. In 1901 Philip traveled to Washington D.C. with his father and local Navajo leaders when they spoke to the newly appointed President Theodore Roosevelt

Theodore Roosevelt

Theodore "Teddy" Roosevelt was the 26th President of the United States . He is noted for his exuberant personality, range of interests and achievements, and his leadership of the Progressive Movement, as well as his "cowboy" persona and robust masculinity...

 to persuade him to add more land to the Navajo Reservation via an Executive Order. Philip was the Navajo/English translator between the local Navajo leaders and President Roosevelt.

Around 1909–10, Johnston attended the Northern Arizona Normal School, now "Northern Arizona University", where he earned an academic degree. In March 1918 he enlisted in the U.S. Army's 319th Engineers, where he received a reserve commission. Between March and September 1918 he trained in Camp Fremont

Camp Fremont

Camp Fremont was a World War I-era military base located near Palo Alto, California. Construction started in July, 1917 and the post closed in September, 1919.-Location:...

 at Menlo Park, California

Menlo Park, California

Menlo Park, California is a city at the eastern edge of San Mateo County, in the San Francisco Bay Area of California, in the United States. It is bordered by San Francisco Bay on the north and east; East Palo Alto, Palo Alto, and Stanford to the south; Atherton, North Fair Oaks, and Redwood City...

 before being shipped to France

France

The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...

 as part of the AEF

American Expeditionary Force

The American Expeditionary Forces or AEF were the United States Armed Forces sent to Europe in World War I. During the United States campaigns in World War I the AEF fought in France alongside British and French allied forces in the last year of the war, against Imperial German forces...

 to participate in the Great War. It is here that he may have heard about Comanche

Comanche

The Comanche are a Native American ethnic group whose historic range consisted of present-day eastern New Mexico, southern Colorado, northeastern Arizona, southern Kansas, all of Oklahoma, and most of northwest Texas. Historically, the Comanches were hunter-gatherers, with a typical Plains Indian...

s being used as code talkers by U.S. Army units.

Johnston attended the University of Southern California

University of Southern California

The University of Southern California is a private, not-for-profit, nonsectarian, research university located in Los Angeles, California, United States. USC was founded in 1880, making it California's oldest private research university...

, Los Angeles where he earned his graduate civil engineering degree in 1925. Afterwards he took a job with the city of Los Angeles

Los Ángeles

Los Ángeles is the capital of the province of Biobío, in the commune of the same name, in Region VIII , in the center-south of Chile. It is located between the Laja and Biobío rivers. The population is 123,445 inhabitants...

 water department.

The Navajo code talkers project

Though he worked in Los Angeles he maintained his social connections with the Navajo people with whom he grew up. He was working as a civilian in Los Angeles when the Imperial Japanese Navy

Imperial Japanese Navy

The Imperial Japanese Navy was the navy of the Empire of Japan from 1869 until 1947, when it was dissolved following Japan's constitutional renunciation of the use of force as a means of settling international disputes...

 attacked Pearl Harbor

Pearl Harbor

Pearl Harbor, known to Hawaiians as Puuloa, is a lagoon harbor on the island of Oahu, Hawaii, west of Honolulu. Much of the harbor and surrounding lands is a United States Navy deep-water naval base. It is also the headquarters of the U.S. Pacific Fleet...

. After the attack he had read of the U.S. Army using Comanches in their Louisiana field maneuvers to transmit military communications and began to think that the Navajo language could also be applied in this manner. He presented this idea to the United States Marine Corps

United States Marine Corps

The United States Marine Corps is a branch of the United States Armed Forces responsible for providing power projection from the sea, using the mobility of the United States Navy to deliver combined-arms task forces rapidly. It is one of seven uniformed services of the United States...

 (USMC), and he was directed to present his proposal.

Johnston recruited four Navajos who were working in the Los Angeles shipyards, and arranged to demonstrate the utility of using the Navajo language to transmit military communications. The officer in charge of this demonstration was Communications Officer, Amphibious Force, Fleet Marine Force (FMF) Major James E. Jones, USMC at Camp Elliot, San Diego and Commanding Officer; Amphibious Force, Pacific Fleet General Clayton B. Vogel heard of the event and attended the demonstration. Initially Philip thought the Navajo language could be used unmodified to transmit military communications, using conversational Navajo. Just before the actual demonstration started, the Navajos received their samples of common military expressions they were to convey to each other. They informed the gathered personnel that in order to send the military messages they would have to use word and letter substitution methods to convey the messages. After some deliberation to agree upon which Navajo words would represent English equivalents the Navajos were divided into two groups and put into separate rooms, where field phones had been installed, at opposite ends of the same building.

At that point they transmitted the common military expressions they were assigned to be coded into Navajo and decoded into English, by verbally encrypting, transmitting and decoding the messages nearly verbatim from English, to Navajo and back into English. Philip indicated that this Camp Elliot exercise revealed limitations to using conversational Navajo for military communications and that he was inspired to use the letter and word substitution

Substitution cipher

In cryptography, a substitution cipher is a method of encryption by which units of plaintext are replaced with ciphertext according to a regular system; the "units" may be single letters , pairs of letters, triplets of letters, mixtures of the above, and so forth...

 methods to encrypt Navajo. On the other hand USMC documents indicate that it was after this demonstration, when they were independently investigating the logistics of using the Navajo language as a code, that it was Bureau of Indian Affairs personal who stated that a coding system for Navajo had to be created.

General Vogel was so impressed with the Camp Elliot demonstration that he asked the Commandant of the Marine Corps to recruit 200 Navajos. But Vogel was only given authorization to recruit 30 Navajos, under a pilot program status to investigate the feasibility of this proposed program with actual Navajos. On the morning of May 4, 1942, twenty-nine Navajo recruits boarded the bus at Ft. Defiance, Arizona, were transported to the induction center at Ft. Wingate, New Mexico, and, after lunch, were transported overnight to Marine Corps Recruit Depot, San Diego

Marine Corps Recruit Depot San Diego

Marine Corps Recruit Depot San Diego is a United States Marine Corps military installation in San Diego, California. It lies between San Diego Bay and Interstate 5, adjacent to San Diego International Airport and the former Naval Training Center San Diego...

 (MCRD,SD) for administrative in-processing, then to start their seven weeks of standard recruit training. Upon completion of recruit training the first all-Navajo platoon 382 graduated from MCRD,SD on June 27, 1942, where they were immediately ordered to report to Camp Elliot for about eight weeks of basic communications training and to develop a code based on the Navajo language. As for developing the code, the Navajos were guided by a cryptographic officer under the command of now Lt. Col. Jones in the basics of employing letter and word substitution encryption methods in the formulation of the code. Shortly after the beginning of this project three additional Navajo Marines were added to the program, and together the 32 Navajos worked to develop the code. Their stay in Camp Elliot ended in the latter half of August 1942.

Based upon the successful training of the pilot talker program on 25 August 1942, the authorization to fulfill the recruitment of 200 Navajos commenced and Marine units "were asked to submit recommendations relative to the number of Navajos they could usefully employ".

After training, one group of 13 were assigned to the 1st Marine Division, a second group of 16 were assigned to the 6th Marines and the 2nd Signal Company of the 2nd Marine Division. Three individuals were retained stateside to recruit and train Navajos to become code talkers. The first group of Navajo code talkers arrived at Guadalcanal on September 18, 1942 near Lunga Point. The second group arrived with the 6th Marines on January 4, 1943, and relieved the 1st Marine Division code talkers and then participated in the latter stages of the Battle of Guadalcanal.

After the USMC officially instituted the "talker" program, Johnston asked the USMC for a special dispensation to serve in the Navajo Code Talking Program as a Staff Sergeant. His request was granted on September 22, 1942, and he served as a school administrator for the "confidential" program. By October 26, 1942, Staff Sergeant Philip Johnston USMCR and Corporal John A. Benally USMC, one of the three stateside code talkers, were sent out to recruit more Navajos to join the program. From late October through November 1942, they recruited Navajos throughout the western portion of the reservation, until they were recalled back to Camp Elliot. On December 7, 1942, the Navajo Communication School at Camp Elliot began formal lessons under Johnston's supervision. Navajo recruits trickled in and went through standard Marine Corps boot camp, whereupon after graduation they were sent to Camp Elliot. The next all-Navajo platoon to go through boot camp was Platoon 297 in March 1943 at MCRD,SD.

Johnston may have proposed the idea of using the Navajo language to encrypt USMC tactical communications, but he was not yet on active duty with the USMC to be present during its creation by the first 29 + 3 Navajos who created the vocabulary with guidance by a USMC cryptographic officer.

Later years

Not much is known of Johnston after World War II. He created a non-profit organization to raise college money to send Native Americans to college during the 1950s, but after five years it was dissolved. At the initial reunion of the Navajo Code Talkers in 1968, Johnston may have inadvertently been responsible for the code being declassified. The Navajo Code was kept secret after the end of World War II until a group known to raise money for the children of Marines killed in action decided to honour the Navajo Code Talkers at a scholarship banquet in Virginia. At the event Johnston called himself the inventor of the Navajo Code causing the many Navajo Code Talkers in the room to disavow his statement and nearly starting a physical altercation. Inevitably the Navajo Code Talker Association disavowed Johnston and ended their relationship.

A friend of his indicated he spent a lot of time in Phoenix, Arizona

Phoenix, Arizona

Phoenix is the capital, and largest city, of the U.S. state of Arizona, as well as the sixth most populated city in the United States. Phoenix is home to 1,445,632 people according to the official 2010 U.S. Census Bureau data...

in his later years. Philip Johnston died in 1978.

External links

• Dept. of Navy Navajo Code Talkers' Dictionary
• Dept. of Navy Navajo Code Talkers: World War II fact Sheet
• Northern Arizona University Special Collections, regarding Navajo Codetalkers
• Northern Arizona Normal School Brochure
• To see some of the Philip Johnston photograph collection type the name Philip Johnston.