By William Knowles @c4i

Senior Editor

InfoSec News

March 24, 2013

Chester Nez, the last surviving member of the original 29 Navajo Code Talkers, will be the subject of filmmaker David DeJonge‘s upcoming 30-minute documentary.

“Chester is the last link from the Navajo people who forged a secret code that helped win the Second World War. Their code led to the training of 400+ additional Navajo code talkers. To record his story in first hand is critical to American and military history.” DeJonge said.

DeJonge who is well known for his work with the last WWI veteran Frank Buckles, and also his documentary “Pershing’s Last Patriot”, began producing the documentary on Nez after a visit to Gallup, New Mexico. Nez served with the United States Marines in the Pacific and helped defeat the Japanese by creating a code, using the Navajo language, that was never broken.

Sent to a boarding school as a child, Nez and other Navajo children were discouraged from speaking their native language and instructed to only use English, but that didn’t stop them from whispering Navajo to each other in secret. In 1942, Navajo was recruited from boarding schools to join the Marines and use their unique skills to develop an unbreakable code to pass messages. The film will tell Nez’s story from childhood through today.

Nez’s recently published memoir, written with Judith Avila and titled Code Talker, is the only book about the code talkers by one of the 29 original Navajo Marine volunteers. Avila also will be a consultant on the film.

“Most people think that the famous and unbroken Navajo code consisted of simply speaking Navajo. But that wasn’t the case. Even other Navajos could not crack the code – unless they had been trained as code talkers,” Avila stated.

In addition to filming Chester Nez, DeJonge will be interviewing several additional codetalkers who used the code that Chester’s team developed. DeJonge hopes to record several conversations of Chester Nez speaking the codes that he helped develop and used during WWII.

Filming will continue this spring. An initial grant from the Dennis and Phyllis Washington Foundation of Montana is supporting the project. DeJonge is seeking an additional $37,000 in donations to complete the project. Interested parties should contact him through this website. – www.survivorquest.org/

Photo credit: Northland College/Northland.edu