Code Talker (26 page)

The Army communications center on Angaur wasn't much to look at. It was housed in a small tank. The other code talkers and I ventured out from that tiny communications center to relay messages as ordered.

That first night, the voice of Tokyo Rose blasted from Japanese loudspeakers. This wasn't new. It seemed that no matter where we fought, the broadcasts of Tokyo Rose kept us from sleeping at night. Tokyo Rose was actually several different women, all of whom spoke perfect English in a sensual voice. Her messages were calculated to get the troops upset, to make us worry. She talked about American troop movements as though she knew what would happen the next day and the next week. She gave us gruesome details about how we would die in battle, alone, with no one to care. She told us that our sweethearts were going out with other men, having a good time at home while we fought the Japanese. She told us our families had forgotten about us. Her voice droned on and on. It was impossible not to wonder: Was there any truth to what she said? Sleep eluded us while we struggled with uncertainty.

Several men shouted out dirty jokes, all starring Tokyo Rose. Then angry cries of “Hey! Cut if off!” punctuated the night. But everyone knew the transmissions came from the Japanese, and the Americans couldn't control them, except for shooting out the occasional loudspeaker.

And that night, no one wanted to risk raising his head to shoot.

“She makes it all up,” Francis said. “All of it.”

“But it still gets you to worrying, doesn't it?” I huddled deeper into the foxhole. “She's a bad woman.”

The next evening was hot, as usual. Francis and I walked together, talking quietly in Navajo, as we returned from an assignment. The sun had just set, and we were headed back to the Army communications center.

Suddenly two United States soldiers waylaid us.

“Don't move, Japs,” one of them said. “Why are you wearing United States Marine uniforms?”

One soldier held a rifle on Francis, and the other held a .45 pistol to my head.

The soldier with the .45 accused me. “You killed a Marine and stole his uniform, didn't you, Jap?”

I stood my ground. “I
am
a Marine,” I said. “Just listen to me. I speak perfect English. How could I be Japanese?”

“Lots of Japs speak perfect English,” the soldier said. He looked at his buddy. “Should we shoot these Japs right here?”

Mywhole body went cold. After surviving Guadalcanal, Bougainville, Guam, and Peleliu, would I die here, killed by an American soldier?

My mouth went dry, but I managed to blurt out, “One of you guys go to the communications center. Get hold of an officer. They'll vouch for us.” Because of the secrecy of our mission, Francis and I could not tell those Army men that we were code talkers. Navajos. The soldier with the .45 looked me straight in the eye, and I could feel his hatred.

“C'mon, man,” I said. “I'm on your side.”

The soldier's eyes wavered, just barely. He turned and nodded at his buddy. “Get someone from communications.”

The three of us waited in an uneasy silence. My mind strayed to home. How long would it take for Grandma and Father to find out about my death?

Finally—after what seemed like enough time for the soldier to have circled the island three times—an Army communications officer, a major, arrived. He took one look at Francis and me and yelled, “What the hell are you men doing, capturing our own Marines? Of course these men are U.S. military. You're damn lucky you didn't shoot them.”

I breathed a sigh of relief.

“You men”—the officer dragged his icy stare from one Army man to the other—“report to me tomorrow morning for disciplinary action.”

The Japanese, once masters of the South Pacific, were losing their grip. Thanks, in part, to our code, a war that had once seemed unwinnable had now begun to tilt in our favor. On Angaur, like Peleliu, the Japanese had built underground bunkers. This made it difficult to confront the enemy. Angaur's terrain was flatter than that of Peleliu, so U.S. troops used bulldozers. Managing to approach the bunkers and tunnels, they sealed their entrances. Starving and dehydrated, the Japanese gave in. The Army's 81st Division secured Angaur just a few days after our arrival there, on September 20, 1944.

We four Navajo code talkers were sent back to the continuing bloodbath on Peleliu.

Nights were tough on Peleliu. As on every other island, we could hear the Japanese Zeros, their sirens wailing, and count how many bombs they dropped. Each bomb made a click. Cramped into the shallow depression that served as a foxhole on the coral island, we'd count the clicks.
Click click click click.
Four bombs. Then we'd wait. The whistle came next as the bomb approached. Wondering whether it would hit us, we'd feel cold sweat breaking out on our foreheads and under our arms. We knew those shells respected no one. Many men hollered to relieve the tension. We Navajo men would usually stay silent. When the bomb finally hit, the ground shook. The concussive noise assaulted and numbed our eardrums like a flash of light blinds your eyes.

Sometimes we took over Japanese foxholes, constructed when the enemy had had time to blast the stubborn coral rock with explosives. These were sometimes linked by tunnels. We'd crawl into the tunnels when the bombs came, but we'd still feel the ground shaking.

The 1st and 7th Marine Regiments, belonging to the 1st Marine Division, attempted to climb up and destroy the Japanese entrenchments on Umurbrogol Mountain. There, the Japanese had hidden artillery positioned so as to produce a deadly cross fire. Men attempting to climb the ridge were easy targets, cut down pretty much at will. Our American fighting men suffered tremendous losses, and Umurbrogol became known to us Marines as “Bloody Nose Ridge.”

On September 23, the 321st Regimental Combat Team, members of the Army's 81st Infantry Division, arrived on the island. General Rupertus had resisted calling the Army in to help when it became apparent that we Marines were undermanned, but General Roy Geiger had overruled him.

Fresh from their speedy victory on Angaur, the Army managed to establish and hold an offensive line on the west side of Bloody Nose Ridge. Then the 5th Marine Regiment, also belonging to the 1st Marine Division, moved northward along the line established by the Army, capturing northern Peleliu on September 30.

In mid-October 1944—a month after our initial landing—III Amphibious Corps commander General Roy Geiger declared Peleliu secured. Although sections of Peleliu were ours, his declaration was premature. Many of the enemy still fought from the island's mountains and ridges, secure in their hidden caves and bunkers. Also, the Palau Islands housed Japan's administrative headquarters for its South Pacific island holdings. And Japan's Lieutenant General Sadae Inoue, managing the Peleliu defense from another of the Palau Islands, was not about to let the men under Colonel Nakagawa give up the fight on Peleliu.

 

 

I woke up in a bomb crater blasted into the flintlike coral. No munitions noise. I'd arrived back on Peleliu, after helping out on Angaur, three weeks—or was it only a few days?—before. One day had become interchangeable with the next. I sat for a moment, eyes closed, knees pulled up to my chest.

What island would be next?

I nudged Francis. “Time for breakfast.”

Francis groaned, then opened one eye.

Someone shouted, “Hey, Chief, did you hear? One of your guys brought in some Jap prisoners. Four of them.”

Another Marine yelled, “No, there were half a dozen, at least.”

I said nothing, waiting to hear more.

The first Marine gave Marine number two a slantwise look. “Anyway, he walked right into camp with 'em, holding his rifle. Just like John Wayne.”

“We thought he was a Jap bringing in his own men,” Marine number two added. “We should of said, ‘C'mon over here, Chief. Let me see your dog tags.'”

The story of the code talker and his captives spread, giving everyone a good laugh. Like the Army men on Angaur who had detained me and Francis, some of the Marines thought we dark-haired, dark-skinned code talkers resembled the Japanese. At first, I couldn't understand it. In my opinion, the two races—Japanese and Navajo—looked nothing alike. But later, after staring eye to eye with that young Japanese prisoner on Guam, I understood. But I never did understand why so many American troops thought our Navajo transmissions were Japanese. I guess Navajo just sounded foreign to them. Our language and the language of the enemy sounded nothing alike.

The Marines continued to tease us Navajos about our man who had captured the six Japanese. I really didn't mind the ribbing the other Marines often gave us. And I didn't mind the nickname “Chief.” We didn't think of it as a slur. We knew we were well respected as fighting men. We laughed and joked with our fellow Marines, giving back as much as we took.

The title “code talker” had not been coined yet, since most of the Marines did not know of our secret function. But other Marines had been warned not to call us Navajos or Indians. No one wanted the Japanese to draw any dangerous conclusions. So “Chief” stuck.

Francis, the two Roys, and I ate cold military rations—packages filled with sardines, a packet of bland crackers that were neither sweet nor salty, and fruit in a can. I used my Ka-bar to open the side of the fruit can. The canned stuff was good, but I especially liked the wild fruits, like coconuts, that dropped from the trees on the islands. A quick stab of the Ka-Bar broke the coconut open. We sliced them like pineapples. They were sweet, delicious.

Now that Peleliu had been declared secured, we had a big mess tent, and the food had taken on more variety. So after eating our cold rations, we walked to the mess for some hot food. After we'd repeatedly gone for days without food, the more we could eat, the better.

I munched on a hunk of nonmoldy bread.
Wait a minute.
I couldn't believe my ears. Did the mail sergeant actually call my name?

“Nez, Chester.”

There it was again. I rushed from the mess tent to grab my letter. With all the stamps and crossed-out addresses—sending the innocuous envelope from one battlefield to another, until it finally stopped on Peleliu—I could barely tell that it was from home. But it was.

Letters from the United States routinely took eight months to reach us men on the islands. And, judging from what my family said in the few letters that had reached me, my responses took months to make it home.

I pulled a paper from the open envelope. There were only a few readable lines. The remaining sentences were blacked out. I knew requests from home for inappropriate things, like battle souvenirs, were always censored. But the reasons for much of the other censorship remained a mystery.

At any rate, the readable portions of my letter from home said things like “Hello. How are you?” and “Take care of yourself,” with plenty of blacked-out lines in between. I studied the handwriting, knowing that it was my younger sister Dora who wrote the letter, in English, and who read my letters to everyone back home. I hated to have to destroy it after reading it, but those were the orders. Command didn't want to take a chance that the Japanese might get hold of our letters. They didn't want them to be able to infer how things were at home in the United States, how morale was holding up and who was in the service. The Japanese were a smart adversary, and they could surmise things about troop movements from unlikely sources. Of course, our outgoing letters were censored as well as the incoming. Still, just knowing that my family was thinking about me, praying for me, made the day grow brighter.

I joined the other guys who had letters, and quite a few who didn't. We lucky ones all read our messages from home out loud. It's amazing how similar the Navajo letters tended to be, after being censored. Pretty much all of our relatives had to find someone who wrote English in order to send a letter. Our generation had attended school, but our parents generally spoke the unwritten Navajo, not English.

I think hearing them read out loud made the men who had no letter feel almost like they'd received one, too. At least it worked that way for me. And the letter-reading session always turned into a good opportunity to talk and joke. That made everyone less tense.

I would have liked to get more uncensored news—about my family, our neighbors, the sheep. When I answered a letter, I knew my response would arrive, months later, ruthlessly censored as well. No doubt my relatives were just as bewildered by the censoring as we Marines were. I pictured Dora laboring over my letters, trying to make sense out of them, trying to have something meaningful to translate for the others. But I was too busy to let something like mail worry me for long. I had to keep my mind clear. There was too much else to think about.

The 5th Marine Regiment, having taken northern Peleliu, about-faced and attacked the Japanese on Umurbrogol, or Bloody Nose Ridge, from behind. Ferocious battles followed as the 7th Marine Regiment, still attacking from the south, attempted to climb the steep ridges of Umurbrogol. The series of coral ridges seemed endless, rising from the ground like miniature mountains. The coral cut our boots and slashed our bodies when we dove for cover. The coral, in addition to making it impossible to dig foxholes, shattered when hit by Japanese fire, its shards becoming shrapnel. As the Marines climbed Umurbrogol, the Japanese easily picked the climbers off from adjacent pillboxes and caves. Things looked grim.

But another of the Army's 81st Division Regiments—the 323rd Infantry Regiment—arrived on Peleliu near the end of October. We raggedy Marines, decimated in numbers, exhausted, and clutching our sanity with shaky hands, finally left.