Interview Transcripts
Selections
from Interview with Joe
Kellwood on December 28, 2004:
...In
1939,
somewhere around there, we get the report from Ernie Pyle; he was in
England. And
my teacher, she let us know
what’s going on, what country fall, where Hitler is heading and all
those
things. And between time, my Mother passed away in 1937 and my father
passed
away in 1939. I had one sister that never went to school, so she don’t
speak
English and she need help ‘cause there a horse and someone needs to
haul water
and supplies. And in those days, I think I drop out of school one time
and try
to support her.
You were in High
school
at that
time?
Yes,
Wingate Vocational High School. I drop
out of High School and at that time some Japs start going around
Gallup. That’s where I was working when I
enlisted, Wingate Ordinance Depot. I used to work with the bombs, two
ton, we
used to push those on the conveyor and unload them in the storage area.
I did
pretty good there. I was in good shape as a person, with good muscle. I
was
easy going and everything was easy for me o learn. So, I turned up
pretty fast
on that job and was making good money.
(Into
the Military)
And then the Japanese
bombed Pearl Harbor. And
you should have seen the big
long line at the places where they recruit into the service. Everybody
wanted
to join the service. I didn’t go at that time, when they bombed Pearl
Harbor, but
stayed on at the job until I
turned twenty-one. I found more information on what outfit to join. I
took the
one that took Guadalcanal, the
First Marine Division. I
followed that one. When I was working I would tell them, “that's the
outfit
I’m gonna join.” I sure did. I made it to that one. They had good
experience.
They were a high-class outfit. They know the Japs. In early days, it
was not
just war. The Japanese were very hateful people. Not
anymore, but in those days, they don’t
just kill you, they cut you up. Anything they can do to you, they do
it. You go
back and find your dead buddy. He’ll be hanging on a tree, with his
tongue in
his mouth, you know what I mean. So that’s the way I know. I joined
after they hit Guadalcanal. I joined in October first and second in
Phoenix. I had joined in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Being that Arizona is my home, they sent me down here.
That’s 1942, when I enlist here.
Training Camp
From here I
went to San Diego. Let
me go back, I
enlisted in Albuquerque, they give you two weeks
to put
your (things in order) and return to where you enlisted. You go there
ready to
go. All prepared to go into the service. In my case, they sent me down
here (Phoenix). We stopped in Gallup, New Mexico, in the evening. Here
come all
these Navajos that I went to school with and a lot of others that I
don’t know.
I ask where they’re going and they say, “San Diego, Marine Corps.” So
there’s a group
of us that come from NM to Needles. It’s one of those places, I know
there’s
Williams and there’s Needles. I have to change the train there to go to
Phoenix and there rest went on
through L.A. and on to San Diego. I was coming down to
Wickenburg at 10:00 o’clock in the morning. My
instructions were, when you get off the
train go a block east and a block north. I stay overnight here and they
have a
place for me to stay and they furnish me food. The next day in the
evening, we left here and stopped some place
for a freight train to go by. We were near Yuma. They had the double
engine that
they put onto the one we had. So we went through the tunnels. We
stopped in old Mexico. Service people are on
the side, all guarding the
train, so no one jumps off. From there we made it to San Diego.
That’s how
I joined the service
You asked
me why I joined the Marines. My sister was kind of getting scary.
Because the
way these enemies were doing things, torture. I just let her know that
I was
going to get training to meet the enemy. And that made her cry.
Is she
still alive, your sister?
No,
cancer about twenty years ago…
So,
that’s my reason; to meet the enemy. That’s what I told
her and that’s what I did. After that we went through boot camp, half
Navajo
and half white. We went through boot camp with Platoon 920, 921, 923.
Working
together and competing against each other. There were four platoons
always in
group competition. We had to do this and that. At the boot camp, met
people
from the Northwest, Boston (college people), Chicago.
They all
went to motor transport. They all got thirty days leave. We didn’t get
thirty
days leave. First Marine Division was in Guadalcanal. The
Second Marine Division was getting ready to go.
We met some other Navajo that had finished code talker training and
they
were the ones that let us know what we can do. Other than that we don’t
know.
We were just going there to fight... They let us know how to stay with
it and
learn things like Morse Code (the sounds) and like “F” Brigadier
General and
Come to chow is “K” and come to chow now is “Q” and it really works.
And you
remember things in Morse code it’s just the sound. And we go
“Speedy Gonzalez after that. You
have to send and receive ten words a minute. Whatever is on the paper.
So that’s how you
became a Code-talker, you
requested that job?
No,
you
don’t request when you join the service, you just volunteer and they
tell you
what you’re going to do. They say they
have a job for you, but not what space. But just that they have an
important
job for you. Most of the guys talk about going to sit at a desk in
Washington, DC and do paper work, but it didn’t work out
that way. They want a code
from our own language. Like an alphabet.
We don’t have no “A” in Navajo so we had to make names for all those
things.
The first group was the one that made all these up. That was the start
of the
alphabet in the Navajo language. The first one is Wol-la-chee. You say
it.
Wol-la-chee
A
little louder!
When you are in Code School you have
to speak loud and clear. Quite a lot of Navajos didn’t make it through.
Either their English was not good enough. People that had tenth grade
did
pretty good.
Myself, eighth grade and going to school - at Vocational High School
you
work half a day and go to school
half a day. What really helped me was I had the night on my side. I
stayed up
nights to learn all these words. Words like rendezvous, these long
words like
administration and movement, terrorists and terrorize, at risk, billet.
Military words. Did you ever go to a square dance? Well, there you’ve
got it,
words for the movements and box. We made words for everything. We went
through
the words in the morning and Morse code in the morning and also
semaphore (the
signal flags)
and telephone. We use all kinds.
You have to set up your own radio and change frequency – raise it up
and down.
When they can hear you loud and clear they let you know what number
works good.
That’s the way we went to school and we try to decide what word is
going to be
easy to remember. Like “the” we had a problem with that. We called it
“lut-say”. Another one was “are” and we call it Got-so or jack rabbit.
This is
how you make names for these things and substitute words. But you have
to
memorize these things, because there is a lot of noise and things
booming, and
a lot of times the Japanese interrupt. They are beating on a can on the
radio
and scratching on the radio. They will tell you to stop. And you wait a
while
and then start your message again. You know the Japanese they spoke
good English.
They went to school at that place in the East. What’s the name, Yale?
And other
places, they graduate from there. They speak good English.
What was it like, being depended on in the war? How did you
feel about your responsibilities?
I did a good job. You know, when you sit
with an
officer and he don’t know. And you are taking down the messages. He may
have a
college education, but he don’t know Navajo. You know you’ve done
something
good with your life. The whole mess of these words, 919 words had to be
memorized. And we had these other words that we don’t use very often.
Other
than that we had to spell it out. There we some things we got back from
Guadalcanal. You know, Guadalcanal had four
“A”s, so if you say “Wol-la-chee” four times, they are gonna figure it
out.
They’re gonna break the code. So we had to add two more, san-ah (apple)
and ex.
And “E” we added eyes, ears. Easy ones, short ones, everything had to
be short.
People write to me. I got cards
and letters, one from Salt Lake City, Ganado, and one from Australia.
Were these people you didn’t know,
like pen-pals?
No, I knew the one from Ganado. I gave her
a ride
from Gallup to Fort Defiance. I gave
her a ride before I left and she took my address and started writing to
me. She
was a religious person. Before I went overseas, I went to Melbourne,
Australia to catch up with the First Marine Division. They were gonna
get me fattened up before I was killed.
R & R Recreation, first?
That’s the way the Indian
always say, “Fatten up the
sheep before they are killed.” It might be the same with the Marines.
They were
real skinny when they came out of Guadalcanal, so
they
were getting fattened up. The first
signal battalion, that whole battalion is all communication people;
telephone
radio, clerk-typist and scout. So we go to school down there and
maneuver and
we did a good job with our message center. We really killed the
officers with
the message that they got from us.
My first maneuver, it
was at --------. I got a message from this guy from Louisiana wrote a
message. He was
one of the guys that drove the officers around at Guadalcanal. They
told us we were
going on maneuver. So we all split up into different regiments. There
were
three of us that received together; Dennis Cattlechaser (from Tuba
City), Andrew
Calveto (from Crown Point) and Joe Kellwood (from Steamboat Canyon). It
took us almost a month to get from San Diego to Melbourne, Australia.
And we
had to stop in New Caledonia. We had to unload a lady
nurse and a Marine paratrooper there. The rest of us went to Melbourne,
Australia to catch
up with the First Marine Division. And when we got there we met a
“bloody Aussie” and I’m
a “bloke” and you say, “I’m all right chap.” It’s another language. We
become good Aussies down there. We spent seven months there. Got there
in
April, left on March 11. It was good country, lot of sheep and cattle.
It was like
the reservation. No sheepherder, they’re only in the pasture. Then we
went
to New Guinea. All the fighting was going on to the north of there.
Port Moresby, the Australians were
fighting the Japanese. Christmas Day we went to Cape Gloucester (New
Britain), just across from New Guinea. On that island I could
hear another Indian talking, real slow. I think they were Hopi. They
were with the Army. They had some talkers over there too. And also,
Ernie Tall
(he was with us on Okinawa) tells us that there were
Navajos over in Italy. They did the same thing
there, only ours was in code. Theirs was just plain language.
There were Code Talkers in Italy?
Yes, but they just used the Navajo
language. And he
(Ernie) wants to hear how we talk. On March 26 we sailed to Okinawa. So we
set
upon the ship to talk to each other. And just like that it was
condition red.
The Navy don’t know about us. As so as we get on the air, it was
condition red.
They thought we were Japanese. It was all top secret from 1942 until
1968. My
daughter was graduating from High School. That’s the first time she
knew. Now
they’ve got something better. They just change the battery and it
works. The
Marines use something electronic about the size of a cigarette pack.
That took
our job.
Did your family know about your job
during the war?
No, one of my friends wrote home. They
asked what his
job was and he said he peeled potatoes. Potato was a hand grenade!
That’s in
Navajo. This book Navajo Weapon (by S. McClain) has the
Navajo code in it. This was given to me by the person that wrote it.
This is
one of my classmates from the second group (points to a photo). I learned a lot with the Marine life. I’ve
done pretty good with just eighth grade. And I retired as a carpenter
at 68
years old. I spent 43 years driving nails. I worked in Sun City, Palo
Verde, jobs like that. It’s a good trade rock hanging, driving nails,
welding
and all that. Now a days everything is a separate job. When I went to
school at
ASU it was a college. They teach you electrician, plumbing, carpenter,
architect. You’ve got your hands full. I open the door and close the
door.
I
had one (speaking engagement) at ASU, Sept
29. Every year I go to Scottsdale Community
College and Paradise Valley community
College. I
travel a lot. One time I went down to Glendale Community
College. My wife has been so
sick.
That makes things rough. But she passed way last month. We were married
59
years.
Was she Navajo?
No, she was Norwegian.
Did you teach your children Navajo?
Yeah, the kids called
themselves “Navawegian”. But they stick with English.
It seems one of the keys to winning
the war was having those
two languages to build an unbreakable code.
The code has never been broken. We
traveled a lot to Washington, DC. March in
many parades. I went to the Carter Inauguration. Reagan
invited the Code talkers to the White
House. The code talkers were invited to the rededication of the Statue
of Liberty. The Code talkers have been invited to Hollywood to raise
money for scholarships.
Did your children get Marine scholarships?
Well, one joined the Marines and went to
Vietnam, lost
his leg over there. And the pneumonia got him in 1992 and the Asiatic
flu.
In just one day, he’s gone. So, he’s over there in the National
Cemetery, just
about a block from his Mama. I go over there just about every other
day. I left a little Christmas tree out there with its roots. I plant
it out at the
cemetery. It will be a National Forest soon. I think your five minutes
is up.
(Laughs)
Continued conversation about early
memories:
You support the family.
You took good care of them and they take
good care of
you. That’s what my father always said. He had a lot of sheep. At one
time he
had a thousand head of sheep along with some donkeys and horses. That
was
before John Collier’s sheep reduction. That sheep hating man, that’s
the way
the Indians always said it. He got rid of all those animals.
Does your family still own that ranch?
Yes,
but I’m glad
I’m not there now. Those young
people they’re just trying to divide what’s there.
You’re supposed to have 39 sheep and two
horse. That’s all you can have on the reservation. I can’t live on
that. So, I
go up there one month a year and the rest of the time I’m here
(Phoenix, AZ). I
spent one year there I had a job at the School of St. Michael in
1948-49. Most of the time I’m here,
but sometimes I’m working out of town. But my family always lived here.
I bought a place in 1947 for $350 down and $35 a month for one acre
irrigated
land. We had lot of chickens, lot of watermelon there, lot of tomatoes. I walked from there. I had to carry a tool
box on my shoulder to the bus to get to work. No body was shooting at
you. I
only had one problem when I was working for the Goldwater family.
They’re rich.
I was working and the guy was talking about Indians. I went down and
sang the
Marine Hymn in Navajo.
The Marine Corps was a good taste of life. I enjoyed
every minute of it. I re-enlisted one time. I support the groups that
support
our troops. I am very proud of myself. There were things
that were not easy to swallow. My good buddy was hit twice on Peleliu.
Once out
in the field and again as he was going back on the ship.
|
Joe H. Kellwood
1st Marine Division
photograph by Kenji Kawano
|
|
Selections
from Interview with Keith Morrison Little on January 23, 2005:
Tell
me what you were
doing before you
enlisted with the Marines.
Well,
I was in the U.S. Marine Corps from May 1943 to
November 1945. I was in school before enlisting. I was in the 10th
grade. When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, I felt
that I had to enlist, I had to do something. It was a feeling of
retaliation. I
think that was the underlying reason I enlisted in the Marine Corps.
Can
you tell me
about a specific story of your service during the war?
I
don’t have a real interesting story about the war, but
here is one of the crazy ones. This happened in either February or
March 1945,
on an island called Iwo Jima. We had been at the front
lines for over a week and we were all tired and we didn’t have anything
to eat.
We had rations, but we didn’t have anything hot. Then one day they
pulled us to
the rear. They told us we would rest there and recoup ourselves from
the battle
– we had hot chow coming! Well the hot chow came, and the people that
brought
the meals, they hollered, “Come and get it!”
A bunch of guys went right ahead of us. Me and another guy, we kind of
dragged our feet, took our time. Just about the time we were getting
there, we
heard a whistling noise coming, so we all dove for cover wherever we
could find
a place. The shell that came, it went right into the hot chow we were
supposed
to get, and busted it all up! A lot of the guys ahead of me got wounded
that
day. We were really upset with the Japanese that fired that shell. We
called
them every crazy name there is – “Go to hell!” we said – for shooting
up our
hot chow, the first hot chow we had in more than a week. We didn’t get
to have
it that day. Then we didn’t get any hot chow for another week.
How
did you get
involved with the Navajo Code project?
First,
when I enlisted, I went to San Diego for boot camp. Just about the time
I was getting
done with boot camp training, my drill instructor came up to me one day
and said, “Are you an American Indian?” I told him, “Yes, sir.” Then he
said, “Are you a Navajo?” And I said, “Yes, sir.” Then he made a remark
that the
Marine Corps needed Navajos because they made good scouts. My platoon
mates
heard everything he said to me. I got a good ribbing out of that. They
said
that I was going to get my butt shot off for being eligible for going
scouting
(scouts cross the front line and go ahead to look around), because I
could get
shot at all the time. I didn’t understand that he was saying that
Navajos would
make good communicators.
So
I went with a bunch of Navajos. We loaded up onto a truck
and they hauled us up to a place called Camp Pendleton.
We got there about noontime. There was nobody in the barracks, just us
new arrivals. When
the company came back it was about 4:30 in the afternoon, and we went
out to see what they looked like. There were about 200 Navajos there,
and we were stymied, wondering what all those Navajos were doing here
together. They still wouldn’t tell us what we were doing there.
The
next day they told us exactly what we were going to do.
We were going to study the Navajo code and memorize it. They told us,
“When you
go on leave, when you go home to your family, don’t tell anybody what
you’re
doing.” It was top military secret. It was bewilderment for all of us.
You
wanted to know why, but they wouldn’t have any of it. They wouldn’t let
us ask
questions. “Just do what you are told”, they said. When we were in the
classroom we were drilled and drilled. No writing it down. It was all
memorized. No pencils, no pieces of
paper would go out of the classroom. At the end of the class you had to
hand in
every pencil and piece of paper.
When
did you
learn to speak English?
I
had a hard time learning English. When I was growing up on
the reservation around the Tuba City area, there was no church. But I
learned to say my prayers in Navajo.
We were restricted from talking Navajo with
each other at school. In class they taught you to write English and
recognize
letters and words, and then you’d try to talk. It was really hard to
communicate with another student because if you really wanted to tell
him
something or tell her something, you didn’t know how to do it in
English. If
you spoke out in Navajo, even secretly, there were people watching you
all the
time and tattling on you, You would get whipped or punished for it.
That’s how
the Christian mission was. The mission was to get the savages civilized
and fit
them in with American society.
Where
did you
go after you learned the Code?
I
finished my Code Talker school in November, shipped out in
January, and ended up in Pearl Harbor. Then they told us
we were going to some islands in a string, one was Roy (?) and the
other was Bemor (?). We came back to Maui to
rest and train some more, then
boarded ship again in May. Then we went to Saipan. On June 15, 1944
we landed on Saipan.
We were there about 3 weeks. When the island was secured then we could
take it easy.
I
was a radio man for a battalion commander. I followed that
commander around everywhere. I served him – he could talk on my radio
if he
wanted to. Back at the command post I also manned the division radio,
using the
code. The code was not regular Navajo language, but military language.
A code
talker, he’s got it all in his head. He gets a message in plain written
English. As he transmits it, he is encoding it as he is talking. As the
guy on
the other end receives it, he hears the code. He translates it, and
then he
writes it down in plain English. Then the written note in English goes
to its
destination, for whatever execution is needed.
Later
we loaded up and went to Pinyen(?). We completed that
project and came back to Maui.
We recouped there, and
that division was brought back up to strength. When we were strong we
always
looked for something new to do. With the code talkers we were taken to
division
headquarters on Maui and studied a “refreshed” code –
sometimes there were new words developed
during the process of battle. The code was getting streamlined a little
further. They were always trying to improve the speed and accuracy of
the
message, in such a way that the Navajo Code really outdid the
conventional
military code.
Sometime
in December we pulled out again, went to Pearl Harbor,
got on ship and stopped at Guam.
None of us got off the boat there. After that we found out that we were
going to Iwo Jima.
In February 1945 we landed on Iwo Jima.
According to the
information that we had, we were not going to spend more than two weeks
on that
island. But right off we realized that the Japanese were defending the
island
with everything they had. We were being shelled as we were coming in.
We spent
from February 19 to March 26 on that island. Then we came back to Maui
again so we could regroup and train through the summer. We were ready
to leave
again, I guess, when the word came that the Japanese had
surrendered.
Everything was done.
What
was your
homecoming like?
The
anticipation of going home was really overwhelming for
everybody. I came back to the U.S. in
November and was discharged later that month. I went back
home and
visited
around, visited my friends and family, and went back to school. I
graduated
from high school in Oklahoma, and
went for more schooling, and finally got a school teacher job. I taught
Indian kids at an Indian school. When I left the reservation, the
Navajo
people were
resisting sending their kids to school, because of how they were being
treated,
so there was a lot of teenage kids who were illiterate. The Bureau of
Indian
Affairs decided education was a priority, so they sent these people to
a
five-year program, and I was teaching in that program. I had kids there
that
never spoke a word of English. They learned English and learned
something about
a trade there. Later I left there and became a logging manager for a
Navajo tribe.
I am retired now.
How
did it feel
not to be able to talk about your work
with the Navajo Code?
We
were told that the code was a top military secret. When
we left the USMC we were told we were not to tell anybody what we had
done,
because the Navajo Code was still classified. We could not tell our
kids what
we had done in the Marines. In 1968 it finally was declassified, and
the 4th
Marine Division, at their annual reunion in Chicago,
had the Code Talkers come to the reunion (I had a job and at that time
I could
not attend).
Later
on in the year the Code Talkers got together in Window
Rock and got medallions. Then we could finally work on what we had
done, all
the stories you hear now came from that time we were together. We
finally got
recognized by the President of the U.S.,
so that the guys who started the code, the initial guys recruited in
1942, they
got gold congressional medals of honor. The others like myself, we knew
nothing
about what we were doing, we just wanted to fight the Japanese. We got
recognized on November 11, 2001.
We got silver medals.
What
made
you
want to defend the U.S. in the war, when you hadn’t been treated very
well by
American people?
I
call it “brainwashing” in the schools – they were trying
to civilize us to be ordinary American citizens, so being patriotic was
a main
priority. But in that Christian school we must have had the right
teacher
(laughter!), because they said we were really the first people in
America!
They wanted to convert the savage Indians to make them civil, fit them
into
American society. They had their work cut out for them! They were going
to
teach these kids not to be Indians.
A
lot of people say, “Why did you have to go fight for the U.S. when they
treated you so bad?” Well, they might have mistreated my
ancestors,
our people, imprisoned them, but they did let us come back to our land,
our Mother. America was our land. Supposing the Japanese came to the
mainland? They could
have come to our land. Patriotism, being an American Indian, I guess
that’s it.
This land is where we live, where our animals are, where our people
are.
Are
your
children and grandchildren able to speak
Navajo in school?
For
me, it’s number one that my children and grandchildren
are Navajos. They know what they are, and they also need to learn
English as
the primary language of the U.S. We teach them Navajo at home.
I
would like it if you would observe Code Talker Day on
August 14. Tell stories about Code Talkers on that day, or maybe have a
Code
Talker come to your area on that day. I’m always available.
|
Keith M. Little
Todich'ii'nii Clan
4th Marine Division
photograph
by Kenji Kawano
|
|
Selections
from Interview with Samuel
("Jesse") Smith PFC by Susan Hansen on January 8, 2005:
What
do you
think about the treatment of Navajo's at Missionary Schools?
The treatment was
good, as was learning the English language
Do
you think
the American government treated Navajo's wrongly during history?
Yes,
Very
When
did you
learn to speak English?
I learned to speak English when I was
5
years old at Day School.
Did
you like
learning English?
I had to in order to live as
others.
Where
did
you learn to speak Navajo?
I learned Navajo at birth, spoke at home
while growing
up
When
did you
join the Marines?
May 3, 1943
Why
did you
volunteer for WWII?
I wanted to get even with the
Japanese for sinking the USS Arizona and bombing of Pearl
Harbor
What
were
you doing when you joined the Marines?
Going to school
Did
you
learn Morse code and semaphore?
Yes
Was
it
confusing thinking in both Navajo and English at the same time?
No,
I had been doing it most of my life.
Do
you have
a specific memory of one of your experiences?
Many.
After
the
war, were you
treated any differently than before?
No
What
did you
do after the War?
I went back to school to finish
the 12th grade.
Do
you feel
that returning veterans became leaders in the Navajo community?
Yes, I have.
When
did you
join the Code Talker Association?
1972
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