Joe Kieyoomia translated the Navajo words the two Japanese women showed him without any trouble at all. They had written the sounds out in English letters, the way the language had struck a Japanese ear. Every answer he gave them was correct, and not one of them was worth anything to them. The United States Marines had put together the code in 1942 and never allowed it into the field on paper.
Sergeant Keomeah had never heard of any of it. He was army, not Marines. He went into captivity when Bataan surrendered on the 9th of April, 1942. The first 29 Navajo recruits for the Marines reported to the recruit depot in San Diego on the 5th of May.
Part of the reason the Japanese were never going to get what they wanted from him is in a letter a Marine general signed on the 6th of March, 1942. When Japanese bombers came over on the 8th of December, the New Mexicans fired first, a claim their veterans kept for the rest of their days. Their powder train fuses could reach only 20,000 ft, and the bombers were flying at 23,000. On the 9th of April, it went into captivity with more than 75,000 American and Filipino soldiers, and Kiumi walked the march north.
He said later that he watched guards order weakened Americans to dig their own graves before shooting them. A few days after that, they put him aboard a ship for Japan instead. Nothing in his account dates the voyage or names the ship. By his telling, the beatings went on for months before they believed him.
The man who started the Marines code never saw the inside of a Japanese prison. Philip Johnston was a civil engineer for the city of Los Angeles, the son of a missionary, raised on the Navajo reservation, and old enough to have served in the First World War. Early in 1942, he came across a newspaper story about the army trying out Native American signalmen on maneuvers in Louisiana, and the next day he took the idea to the Navy’s office in Los Angeles. By the 28th of February, he had four Navajo men at Camp Elliott outside San Diego with a telephone line strung between two offices to test them.
It went into Navajo in one office and came out in English in the other nearly word for word with the dawn turned into this morning. Outside the tribe, only 28 Americans were thought to know the language beyond a superficial level. Johnston’s own claim, repeated in the same letter, went further that the Navajo were the only tribe not yet infiltrated by Germans posing as students, art dealers, and anthropologists. The program that grew out of that letter is what the Japanese eventually ran into, and the man they brought to it was sitting in a concrete cell in Nagasaki.
Neither his 1995 interview nor the Navy’s 1992 summary explains how the two came together. He believed afterward that Japanese listeners had been baffled by radio traffic in a language with no written form and had gone looking for anyone who spoke it. Once his captors finally accepted where he came from, he said, “The questioning changed, and that was when the two women came. ” The title of this video says Japan made him listen to the Marines code, and that is how the Navy told it in 1992.
The Navy sheet gives no source for it. It has two women and a page of sounds spelled out in English letters, which is exactly what someone would end up with after listening to the broadcasts and trying to write them down. Both versions can be true. Neither source says which came first or how many sessions there were.
Either way, what reached him was a string of real nouns with no sentence behind them, each meaning exactly what it had always meant at home. He could tell the Japanese that a word was turtle, but he had no way of telling them that turtle was a tank because nobody outside the Marines classrooms knew. And he said plainly that he had not known the code existed. The Japanese could not have chosen a worse man to ask.
His captors did not accept his answers. And he was told he would not come back inside until he gave up the code. It was 27° the snow was about 6 in deep and the guard said he would shoot if Kiyoomi moved. After an hour, he was allowed back, but he could not walk because his feet had frozen to the ground.
The beatings, he said, went on almost every day after that. For all of it, the Japanese had in their hands the one thing General Vogel’s letter counted as rare, a fluent speaker of the language, and they were spending him on the question of whether he was lying. Back in March 1942, while Kiyoomi’s regiment was still holding on Bataan, not every Marine officer had been convinced. On the 26th of that month, the Marine’s director of recruiting, Colonel Frank Halford, argued that the speed everyone admired mattered less than it looked because urgent messages usually went out uncoded anyway.
He also disliked the thought of officers directing a fight on the strength of a translation in a language they had no chance of understanding. The Marines overruled him and approved the program on the condition that every recruit passed the same 7 weeks of boot camp as anyone else. It came to 211 terms. Most were ordinary words from the language handed military jobs, and the English letters had their own alphabet of animals and things.
America was our mother, Germany was iron hat, and the Philippines, where Sergeant Kiyoomi had gone into captivity, were floating land. A man raised in the language without the training would not understand the messages. Somewhere between 375 and 420 men went through that training before the war ended. The Marines were never quite as sure of their code as its reputation suggests.
The same handful of animals came up again and again, the way E and T come up again and again in English. The fix was to give the common letters more than one word each. So the alphabet grew from 26 terms to 44 with extra words for the 12 most frequent letters. The word list nearly doubled from 211 terms to 411.
Whether anyone ever put a spelled passage in front of him or tried to tally what he told them, nothing in his account says he was still in the concrete cell on the 9th of August, 1945, when the second atomic bomb went off over Nagasaki. He credited the walls with his life. Of the 1,816 men identified with his regiment and its sister regiment, the 515th A-29 did not survive the fighting, the camps, or the months after liberation. The Marines kept their code secret until 1968, and he said it was years after the war before he found out what the code talkers had been doing while his captors questioned him about them.
According to the Navy’s fact sheet, he told the code talker he never figured out what you guys who got me into all that trouble was saying. The sheet names neither the code talker nor the place where the two men met. The story gave his age as 72. And even if I knew about that code, I wouldn’t tell the Japanese.
Joe Kieyoomia died on the 17th of February 1997, 4 years before the code talkers he saluted were called to the capital rotunda for their medals. And he is buried in San Juan County, New Mexico, a long way from that parade ground in Nagasaki. Unsung has 36 stories.
And if someone in the family served, there’s a guide at the back that shows how to get the actual service file.