A United States Marine was once placed inside a compound holding Japanese prisoners of war. His name was Samuel Tom Holiday, a Navajo code talker from Monument Valley in Utah who served with the 25th Marines. The Marines who detained him were convinced they had caught a Japanese infiltrator wearing an American uniform. Instead, they had captured one of their own radio men.
This was not an isolated incident. More than one code talker was seized by fellow Marines on more than one island, and the pattern at the moment of capture was often the same. A rifle at the back, hands raised, and a forced walk to an officer. In response, the Marine Corps assigned some code talkers personal bodyguards, and what those bodyguards were allegedly told became a darker part of the story.
The program began with an outsider. Philip Johnston, the son of missionaries who had grown up on the Navajo reservation, was among the few non-Navajos who spoke the language. On May 5, 1942, 29 young Navajo men reported to the Marine Recruit Depot in San Diego. From their own language, they built a military vocabulary in which a tank became a turtle, a dive bomber a chicken hawk, and a submarine an iron fish.
The code was never written down in the field, so it traveled only in memory. By the end of the war, somewhere between 375 and 420 Navajos had served as code talkers, most of them teenagers or in their early twenties, attached to Marine divisions from the Solomons to Okinawa. Holiday enlisted in early 1943 at the age of 19. He grew up with his mother in Monument Valley and was sent at 13 to the government boarding school at Tuba City.
With the Fourth Marine Division, he landed at Kwajalein, Saipan, Tinian, and Iwo Jima. In November 2003, speaking at a Veterans Day event in Washington, he told an Army News Service reporter what his own side had done to him. Once, while stripped to bathe, Marines from a unit that was not his took him prisoner. Another time, Marines put him in a compound holding Japanese prisoners, and he carried a bayonet scar on his back for the rest of his life.
He explained in plain words. Officers had warned troops that Japanese soldiers were coming into American lines wearing American uniforms. As he put it, “I look Japanese with no clothes on. ” A uniform was the only thing marking him as American, and he had taken it off to wash.
The 2003 report did not say on which island either capture happened. His memoir, written with historian Robert McPherson and published by the University of Oklahoma Press in 2013, recounts that he was taken prisoner twice by fellow Marines and nearly killed twice. His friend and fellow code talker, Dan Akee, also remembered Holiday being detained by other Marines. No published account says how deep the bayonet went or who was holding it.
Bill Toledo came from Torreon in northwestern New Mexico. Both of his parents died in accidents when he was an infant, and his grandparents raised him. In October 1942, he enlisted in the Marine Corps together with his uncle Frank and his cousin Preston, and all three became code talkers. A Marine photographer later captured Frank and Preston hunched over a field radio in the South Pacific, and the National Archives caption still describes them as cousins in an artillery regiment relaying orders in their native tongue.
Bill served with the third battalion, ninth Marines. On November 1, 1943, the ninth Marines landed on the northern beaches at Cape Torokina on Bougainville in surf so heavy it smashed dozens of landing craft on the sand. Nobody fired on their beaches that morning. The danger for Toledo came later, and it came from behind.
While moving through the jungle, a Marine decided he was Japanese. Accounts from his later talks say he was taken prisoner and brought back to headquarters at gunpoint. His daughter, Sharon Webb, heard the story from him after the war. In her telling, some of the men around him were asking whether they should simply shoot him.
A commander stepped in and told them he was a United States Marine. Toledo was 19 and made the entire walk with a rifle at his back. There was one Navajo the Japanese actually did capture. About 20 Navajo men were serving with the army in the Philippines in 1942, and one of them was taken prisoner at Bataan.
Later in the war, his captors made him listen to the strange radio traffic the Marines were putting out and tried to get him to explain it. He could not. The words were Navajo, but strung together they meant nothing he could follow. The code had been built so that only a trained code talker could turn it into English.
After the war, according to the Navy’s fact sheet on the program, he told a code talker, “I never figured out what you guys who got me into all that trouble were saying. ” The fact sheet leaves him unnamed. His captors never got the code out of him. After Bougainville, the Marine Corps gave Toledo a bodyguard.
His name was Richard Bonham, a radio operator in the same outfit. He told CBS News in 2002 that the young Navajo honestly looked no more than 12 or 13 years old. The two went everywhere together. “We shared foxhole together.
While I sleep, he’s awake. Then they switched,” the code talker explained in the same interview. On Guam the following summer, while filling in as a runner, Toledo outran sniper fire so quickly that Marines joked about the football career he must have left behind. According to that broadcast, in time every code talker had a guard of his own.
The Corps answered the problem of its own men being dragged in at rifle point by putting another rifleman at their elbow, so the next time somebody raised a weapon, there would be a man beside them to say who they were. Another story traveled with the bodyguards, and the code talkers heard it from each other. Toledo said the word among them was that if a code talker was about to be captured by the Japanese, his bodyguard was to shoot him so the code could not be taken. Chester Nez, one of the original 29, heard the same thing second hand.
Bonham told CBS that no direct orders were ever given, and the Marine Corps has always denied giving any order for one Marine to kill another. CBS reported that no bodyguard was ever put in that position. The code talkers believed it anyway and went back into the line. On Iwo Jima in February 1945, the signal officer of the 5th Marine Division, Major Howard Connor, had six Navajo code talkers working around the clock for the first two days.
Those six men sent and received more than 800 messages without an error. Connor said afterward, “Were it not for the Navajos, the Marines would never have taken Iwo Jima. ”
Holiday was on that island with the 4th Division. Toledo was there with the 3rd, and it was on Iwo Jima that he found his uncle Frank again.
On one of those landings, walking along the shore, Holiday passed a mortar shell as it went off and lost the hearing in his left ear. He refused to be taken back. “I came here to fight a war, not to stay in sick bay,” he said years later. After the war, the chief of Japanese army intelligence, Lieutenant General Seizo Arisue, said his people had been able to break the codes of the American Army and the Army Air Forces but never the one the Marines were speaking.
The code talkers went home unable to tell anyone what they had done. The code stayed classified until 1968. Holiday discovered what peace looked like on the road from Los Angeles back to Navajo country, where hotels and restaurants turned him away. “I fought next to black men, white men, Mexican and came back to segregation,” he said.
He worked five years as a police officer in Tuba City, went into coal mining and rose to foreman, and in later life became a traditional medicine man. For years he had nightmares of, as he put it, the enemy standing over him smiling, until an enemy way ceremony was held for him. Toledo finished high school at the Albuquerque Indian School, trained as a mechanic at Haskell Institute in Kansas, and worked in the uranium mines until his retirement in 1985. His nightmares ended after a three-day enemy way ceremony in 1970.
His daughter has said the war stories came out after his discharge papers turned up in 1972. The Congressional Gold Medals for the original 29 came in 2001, when only a handful of those men were still alive. The men who followed them, Holiday among them, received the Congressional Silver Medal. Toledo died on May 5, 2016, at the age of 92.
More than 90 people stood at his grave at Santa Fe National Cemetery. Samuel Tom Holiday died in June 2018 at the Southern Utah Veterans Home in Ivins at the age of 94. His family was with him.
About 11 Marines from the local detachment of the Marine Corps League came into his room, gave him a final salute, and presented him with a Quilt of Valor.