I know that Hollywood put that into a movie but the Marine Corp says that it isn't true. By the way it is a good thing that these guys were Marines because the Army's use of code talkers in WWI and in WWII never got any publicity, meaning that in the Army there was no celebrity tied to knowing an Indian language, you were still just a radio man talking code.
“. By the way it is a good thing that these guys were Marines because the Army’s use of code talkers in WWI and in WWII never got any publicity, meaning that in the Army there was no celebrity tied to knowing an Indian language, you were still just a radio man talking code.”
Several tribes were used as code talkers. A distant relative of mine, Cherokee, served as one.
http://www.thewildwest.org/cowboys-western/556/American-Indian-Code-Talkers.html
[snip]More than 12,000 American Indians served in World War I—about 25 percent of the male American Indian population at that time. During World War II, when the total American Indian population was less than 350,000, an estimated 44,000 Indian men and women served.
American Indian Code Talkers were communications specialists. Their job was to send coded messages about troop movements, enemy positions, and other critical information on the battlefield. Some Code Talkers translated messages into their Native languages and relayed them to another tribal member. Others developed a special code within their languages that they used in combat to send important messages.
Native Languages Used in Code Talking
During World War I and World War II, a variety of American Indian languages were used to send secret military messages. Here are the American Indian Code Talkers’ languages and the numbers of tribal members who served, if known. There were at least two Code Talkers from each tribe.
World War I: Cherokee, Cheyenne, Choctaw (15), Comanche, Osage, Yankton Sioux
World War II: Assiniboine, Cherokee, Chippewa/Oneida (17), Choctaw, Comanche (17), Hopi (11), Kiowa, Menominee, Muscogee/Creek and Seminole, Navajo (about 420), Pawnee, Sac and Fox/Meskwaki (19), Sioux – Lakota and Dakota dialects