At 8:28 on the morning of August 28, 1945, an American transport plane landed at Atsugi Airfield outside Tokyo. Waiting by the runway was Lieutenant General Seizo Arisue, the head of intelligence on the Japanese Army’s General Staff. He saluted the first American officer off the plane, a colonel named Charles Tench, and led him to a tent in the middle of the field. Forty-seven years later, the United States Navy issued a statement claiming that Arisue had admitted Japan cracked American Army and Army Air Corps codes but never broke the code used by the Marines — the Navajo Code Talkers.
The problem is that nobody has been able to show when Arisue made that statement or to whom. The sentence first appeared in a fact sheet the Navy distributed on September 17, 1992, when a code talker exhibit was dedicated at the Pentagon. Since then it has been repeated in National Archives publications, museum collections, and news stories about the deaths of code talkers. The fact sheet names no interview, no date, and no supporting document.
There are actually two separate claims inside that one sentence. One says the Japanese penetrated American Army traffic. The other says they got nowhere with the Marines’ Navajo code. Each can be tested on its own terms.
The meeting at Atsugi itself survives in two versions. The account drawn from the American occupation history says Arisue offered Tench food, and the colonel, who had brought his own rations, politely declined. A newspaper retelling from 1995 claims the general offered orange punch instead and drank some first to prove it wasn’t poisoned. Both versions agree on the salute and on who did the welcoming.
Arisue was 50 that summer. Before the war he had served as the army’s representative at the embassy in Rome, and during the war he took over the second bureau of the general staff, the intelligence side. The first half of the admission holds up, at least in part. The American Army issued a small cipher machine built on a Swedish design to its divisions, and the Army Air Forces used the same machine for routine operational messages.
Before the war, Tokyo’s general staff had bought a prototype of the Swedish original. A mathematician named Setsuo Fukutomi, drafted as a soldier and working in the army’s code section, later wrote that he found a weakness in how the machine’s keys were set and broke into it in 1944. A team that included him went to the Philippines, where the Americans were landing that autumn. Fukutomi admitted they got results, but the Americans changed their keys every day, and his team could not break every day’s traffic.
So the army half of the sentence holds up, with limits Fukutomi was honest about. The break came late in the war and never worked daily. It also matters who was talking. Arisue spoke for the army.
Japan’s navy ran its own code-breaking service, and the two services barely cooperated. Navy code breakers had only limited success against American military codes and leaned increasingly on direction finding and radio traffic analysis. The Marines half is harder to check because it is a claim about something that never happened. The Marines had been sending messages in Navajo since the fighting on Guadalcanal in 1942.
By the end of the war, there were code talkers in every Marine division in the Pacific. Picking the transmissions out of the air was easy enough; what the listeners heard was a language almost nobody outside Navajo country had ever studied, carrying a military vocabulary the Marines had built on top of it. The clearest proof of their effectiveness came on Iwo Jima in February 1945. Major Howard Connor, the signal officer of the 5th Marine Division, had six code talkers working around the clock through the first two days of the battle.
By the Navy’s account, they sent and received more than 800 messages without a single error. Connor was blunt in his assessment: were it not for the Navajos, the Marines would never have taken Iwo Jima. One of the men who came ashore with that division was a teenager named Thomas Begay, who had talked a recruiter into taking him when he was probably 16. His age, in his own words, was flexible.
On Iwo Jima he went to the 27th Marines as a replacement for a code talker who had been killed. By his memory, two code talkers died on the first day and three more were wounded. Two days after the plane landed at Atsugi, General MacArthur flew in himself. Within weeks, the man who had run Japan’s army intelligence had a new employer.
Before the surrender, Arisue had quietly gathered intelligence files, and afterward he handed them to Major General Charles Willoughby, MacArthur’s intelligence chief, who in September 1945 asked him to build a network to watch for a communist uprising in Japan. The group around him became known as the Arisue Agency. Some officers at MacArthur’s headquarters wanted him charged as a war criminal of the highest class. He never was.
The Americans had spent four years trying to find out what the general knew, and once he was sitting across the table, they decided to keep asking. The occupation authorities barred him from public life provisionally on November 28, 1947. Even so, according to a Kobe University study of the agency, he served as an advisor to American forces in Japan for ten years from 1946. Arisue wrote two volumes of memoirs.
From 1970 he chaired a National Federation of Japanese Veterans and later became its honorary chairman. The code talkers came home to silence. Their code stayed classified in case it was needed again, and they were told not to talk about it. It was not declassified until 1968.
After a television segment in 1981 brought letters pouring into the White House, President Reagan proclaimed August 14, 1982, as Navajo Code Talkers Day. Arisue died of heart failure in a hospital in the Suginami ward of Tokyo on February 14, 1992, at the age of 96. Seven months later, the Navy handed out its fact sheet at the Pentagon with his admission in it. By the time it appeared in print, the only man who could confirm it was gone.
The fact sheet doesn’t say whether he told the Americans during the occupation, wrote it in one of his memoirs, or said it in a conversation someone remembered years later. His memoirs were published in Japanese, and none of the English-language accounts checked point to them. The quote may be in there, but nobody who repeats the line has shown that it is. A quote with no date is a rumor with good manners.
None of this makes the admission false. The Army half checks out against a Japanese code breaker’s own account, and no one has shown any evidence that the Navajo code was ever broken. What the paperwork cannot do is place Arisue in a room on a given day saying those words. The original 29 code talkers received the Congressional Gold Medal in Washington on July 26, 2001.
Chester Nez, the last of those 29, died in his sleep at his home in Albuquerque on June 4, 2014, at 93. By summer of the year of that tribute’s anniversary, of the roughly 400 Marines who served as code talkers, two were still alive: Peter MacDonald, who lied about his age and joined at 15, and Thomas Begay, the teenager from Iwo Jima. On August 14, 2026, Navajo Code Talkers Day, Begay made the long trip from his home on the Navajo Nation to the Arizona state capital in Phoenix. He was 101 years old.
When the national anthem played, he saluted.