One of the last Navajo Code Talkers dies at the age of 95

War History Online has an article about one of the Diné code talkers:

On 6 September 2016, Joe Hosteen Kellwood, one of the last Navajo code talkers who served the American army during World War Two, passed away at the Veterans’ Hospital in Phoenix, Arizona. An indication of the respect afforded this old warrior was the fact that the Marines shared a video of Joe Kellwood singing the Marine Hymn in Navajo with the text: Honor the fallen. Yesterday, one of the last remaining Navajo code talkers passed away at 95 years old.”
Kellwood was born in Steamboat, Arizona and was educated at a military school on an Apache reservation. He went in the Army in 1942 with the dream of joining the Marine Corps after reading of their battle at Guadalcanal. Instead of the Marines, he was placed in a secret program that harnessed the Navajo language as an unbreakable code. He was sent to Camp Elliott for training in Morse code, radio procedures, and the Navajo codes.
“I studied on my own at night,” he said about the training. “You had to memorize all the words at the time, two hundred and eleven words. They were long words. I spelled it. I learned.”
The Navajo code was used because the syntax of the Navajo language is almost impossible for a non-Navajo to learn. Also, the language had no written form, so the likelihood of the Axis powers having a native Navajo speaker were exceedingly slim. This program was so successful that, by the end of the war, there were more than three hundred code talkers, accompanying Marines in every theater of the Pacific. The Japanese were never able to break the code and, as this program was classified until 1968, all the members of the program were banned from talking about their experiences before then.
Once the program had been unbanned it was not long before Hollywood stepped in and released the movie called Windtalkers, starring Adam Beach and Nicolas Cage, directed by John Woo, in 2002.
Roy Kellwood, Joe’s brother, also served during World War Two in the Army Air Force in Europe. Joe and his brother Roy were very close and often swapped stories of their life in the war. They died within few days of each other, and there will be one funeral for both brothers. “They were Navajo warriors; that’s what everyone calls them. They defended the country, not just for the US, but for the Navajo nation and the Navajo people,” said Roy Kellwood Jr.

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