New book a comprehensive guide to the Code Talkers

Posted by Cindy Yurth | Aug 3, 2017 | Life |

WINDOW ROCK

There are, at last count, 37 books about the Navajo Code Talkers if you include novels, children’s stories and a coloring book. The latest, “Voices of Victory: The Navajo Code Talkers” (CRM Books, 2017) is the one for serious Code Talker geeks.

Submitted
The latest book on the Navajo Code Talkers, by North Carolina author Catherine Ritch, is a good reference, but falls short of being an
interesting read.

For everyone else, it’s a bit of a slog.

North Carolina author Catherine Ritch, who had 20 books under her belt before one of her readers suggested she take on the Code Talkers, certainly gets an A for effort. This is possibly the most thorough and best researched book on the subject (though I admit I have not read all 37).

While most books on the Code Talkers start with Pearl Harbor (and by the way, did you know the word “infamy” was not in the original draft of FDR’s speech? That’s among the things you can learn in this book), Ritch goes back to World War I, setting the stage for the second World War with an overview of the state of the U.S. and the world.

She gives a brief history of military communications, including the fact that Choctaw and other Native American languages were used to relay messages in World War I, so code talking was not a completely novel idea when World War I veteran Philip Johnston suggested it to the U.S. military in 1942 — although, as Ritch points out many times throughout the book, the fact that the Navajos were not just using their language but actually developed a “code within a code” based on it, makes the Navajo Code Talkers unique.

Ritch also delves into the aftermath of the Code Talker experience: their admonition to keep their war experiences secret, even from their families; their struggle to claim their Veterans Administration benefits; the fact that they weren’t fully recognized for their role in winning the war until 1982.

She gives well deserved credit to Michael Smith’s efforts to establish the popular Code Talker Day celebration on the Navajo Nation — perhaps the most original contribution this book makes to the Code Talker story, as I have not seen that recent history anywhere else.

The book also includes some of the most recent photographs of the surviving Code Talkers, taken at the 2015 Code Talker Day celebration.