Marine Corps Recruit Depot San Diego was designed by Bertram Goodhue — the architect behind many of Balboa Park's landmark buildings — and it looks, from the water, more like a Mediterranean university than a military installation. Red-tiled roofs and arched stucco colonnades sit between the bay shoreline and Interstate 5, pressed against the north end of the harbor near the airport. The red tiles are visible from the water throughout the northern bay portion of the sail.
In June 1942, less than seven months after Pearl Harbor, Platoon 382 graduated from boot camp on the parade deck of this depot. Twenty-nine young men from the Navajo Nation had boarded a bus at Fort Defiance, Arizona, and been transported to San Diego for recruit training. They completed the same course every other Marine completed. Then they were assigned to a classified communications program unlike anything the Corps had tried before.
The Navajo language had no written form, was spoken by fewer than 30 non-Navajo people in the world at the start of the war, and had a grammar and tonal structure so different from European languages that even trained linguists required years to learn it. The Marine Corps, working with Philip Johnston — a civil engineer who had grown up on the Navajo reservation and was one of the few non-Navajo speakers — proposed using it as the basis for a military code.
The system worked by assigning Navajo words to military terms: turtle for tank, iron fish for submarine, big gun for cannon. Letters were encoded through a set of Navajo words whose first letters matched the letter being encoded. The code was spoken, not written, and transmitted by radio. A skilled Navajo Code Talker could encode, transmit, and decode a message in seconds that a standard encryption machine required hours to handle.
Japanese military cryptanalysts — who had successfully broken every other American code they encountered in the Pacific — never cracked it. After the war, Major Howard Connor, who served as communications officer on Iwo Jima, stated that the Marines would not have taken Iwo Jima without the Code Talkers.
The original 29 Navajo recruits trained the next class, which trained the next. By war's end, approximately 400 Navajo men had served as Code Talkers, deployed across every Marine division in the Pacific. The program remained classified until 1968. The original 29 Code Talkers were awarded the Congressional Gold Medal in 2001.
The depot that trained them is visible on the northwest shore of San Diego Bay, exactly where it has been since 1923. The red tiles catch the morning light. The parade deck where Platoon 382 marched is still in daily use.
Sources: Wikipedia, "Marine Corps Recruit Depot San Diego"; U.S. Marine Corps History Division, "Navajo Code Talkers in WWII"; MCRD Museum Foundation, Marines in San Diego Timeline.
Hear this story where it happened. JADA sails past this very spot. Join the San Diego Bay History Sail →