David Stonehouse Features

Canada's windtalkers

The wartime role of the Navajo is recognized in a new action film, but there's also a good story in the part played by their Cree counterparts.

By David Stonehouse

They were two young men who grew up in neighbouring northern Alberta villages, bonded by their Cree heritage. They knew each other most of their lives. Here they were, standing in the lobby of a hotel in High Prairie with 50 other men, sense of duty resolute but future uncertain.

They were signing up for war.

Charles (Checker) Tomkins, the quiet one with a new bride at home, was headed for a tank corps in the Second Armoured. His friend Arthur Plante -- a fun-loving, boisterous fellow better known to all as Archie -- was given duty in the First Army as a mechanic.

Both were off to England. But it wasn't until a few years later that these young Cree would be thrust together in a secret effort to thwart the Germans.

The day it began in 1943 was as unpredictable as any other in war. Private Tomkins was ordered to report immediately to Canadian military headquarters in London for reasons undeclared. Not even his commanding officer knew why.

Once there, he was sent on to another hall still with no word of what awaited him. When he walked in, there were native faces all around. About 100, he figured, but none that he recognized. His first thoughts were grim.

"I thought maybe they were going to send us on the first wave of an invasion," he recalls even now, almost six decades later. "And then this American major came out and explained what we were there for."

The United States military sought them out, eager to enlist some of them as native code-talkers. They knew from experience that the enemy had trouble cracking messages passed in native languages, and they were eager to adapt that in the Air Force.

The Navajo were used successfully in the Pacific -- a chapter of the Second World War about to unfold on movie screens across North America when John Woo's Windtalkers opens tomorrow.

The film, starring Nicolas Cage and Canadian Adam Beach, dramatizes the real-life success U.S. Marines had in using native soldiers to pass messages that proved unbreakable by the Japanese.

Beach, a Saulteaux who spent his early childhood on the Dog Creek reserve north of Lake Winnipeg and now divides his time between Ottawa and Los Angeles, had to learn Navajo to play code-talker Ben Yahzee. Cage plays a war-weary corporal, Joe Enders, assigned to protect him on the battlefield.

Bringing in the Navajo proved to be a turning point for the campaign in the Pacific. The Japanese cracked U.S. codes constantly -- until the Navajo were brought in. The Marines recruited them and had them devise their own code -- a chicken hawk, for instance, was a dive bomber, while tortoise was a tank.

The idea was the brainchild of Philip Johnston, a U.S. missionary's son who grew up on the Navajo reservation in Arizona and spoke the language. In the wake of the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, he convinced authorities that Navajo would be an excellent code as it was an unwritten language that very few people off the reserve could speak or understand.

For decades after the war, the code-talking remained a secret. Only in recent times has the heroic and vital role of the Navajo become known. Last summer, President George W. Bush presented four surviving code-talkers with the highest American military decoration, the Congressional Medal of Honor. But the Canadian participation remains a little-known footnote to the war.

Americans freely recruited men like Checker Tomkins to ensure the stealth of Allied bombing runs over Europe. To this day, not much is known about their mission -- no one, it seems, can say how many there were and what they did. For decades, the men themselves did not speak of it -- their participation was considered classified. The details live only with the men who served, faltering with time or buried altogether when the code-talkers died, as Archie Plante did in 1977. Veterans Affairs officials once sent out a call for information on these men but heard little back in return.

"I can recall several years ago speaking to a World War II veteran who was Blackfoot-speaking. He said they were over in England, they had been tried out but, in his instance, it was never put to use," says Hugh Dempsey, a historian and author in Calgary who has written extensively on native history. "I had heard of the Cree-talkers, but the only person I know who could talk about that, I believe, has passed on."

Indeed, Tomkins believes he could very well be the last one left alive. He is 84 years old, yet still working as the superintendent of a 16-unit apartment building in Calgary. His words come slow and the details of his code-talking days are few. It's hard to tell whether he simply can't remember any more or just doesn't want to volunteer any information.

He recalls how he passed the testing that day in the hall and how the Americans asked him for names of other Cree who would be able to help. He gave them the names of five, including Archie Plante and his older brother, Peter Tomkins.

They were rounded up and posted to the 8th Air Force and 9th Bomber Command north of London and relayed radio messages between them for aircraft movements and bombing runs. For six months, the Cree helped ensure that the Germans and other enemy agents listening to radio traffic did not learn about looming attacks.

The American forces they worked for were mighty. The 8th Air Force was the largest armada assembled by any one country in war. At its peak strength, it had 200,000 servicemen and could target enemy territory with more than 2,000 bombers and 1,000 fighters. The 9th Bomber Command was responsible for pummelling the German defences along the French coast.

The Cree code-talkers returned to their Canadian units to finish out the war. Tomkins's six all returned alive. But only much later did families start to hear a few details here and there about the sensitive code-talking mission.

"He couldn't mention it in his letters home," Archie Plante's widow, Irene, says from her home in Richmond, B.C. "Everything was such a secret." He did tell her how the code-talkers were instrumental in the capture of enemy soldiers posing as Canadians and how he was once hit by shrapnel while doing reconnaissance work during a code-talking mission.

Tomkins reveals none of the drama. To him, it was a chapter in a war he does not like to speak of.

"They talked more about the fun they had then anything else," recalls his brother, James (Smokey) Tomkins. When code-talking did come up in conversation, there was not much said and the families gave it little passing notice -- until President Bush presented the Navajo with their medals. When James Tomkins heard that, he sent off a letter to Bush telling the president how his brothers were among a group of Cree who served the U.S. as code-talkers. He suggested these men be honoured as well. He received no reply.

When he talks of it, his voice cracks with hurt. He thinks of Peter, the other family code-talker who died more than four years ago.

"I think Checker should get something before he goes," he says from his home in Alfred, Ont., about 70 kilometres east of Ottawa. "Because my older brother Peter didn't get it."

At the urging of another relative, Veterans Affairs in Ottawa sent Checker Tomkins a letter of commendation for his code-talking work.

The Canadian military never set up its own code-talking units in a formal way. Native veterans tell how men within the same units who spoke a common dialect would use that to their advantage, but there were never whole units and there was no formal code-training.

"The idea was there, but on the Canadian side there were just too many hurdles," says James Dempsey, an associate professor of native studies at the University of Alberta in Edmonton.

The biggest problem was that there were not enough native soldiers who could speak both English and their own language fluently enough. Throw different dialects into the mix, and it just proved unworkable.

The U.S. government acknowledges it recruited code-talkers during the Second World War, though it could not find details on its recruitment of the Cree or other Canadian natives.

"There were code-talkers used in the European theatre. Not to the extent that they were used in the Pacific," says Patrick Weadon, a spokesman for the National Security Agency at Fort Meade, Md. "In the Pacific, the Navajo were used exclusively to move tactical information back and forth, and they did a superb job. In the European theatre, many of the other Indian tribes that were used, that was kind of done as another duty, as assigned."

For Checker Tomkins, all this sudden interest in code-talking seems too much after decades of indifference.

"What upsets me is I've got one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel," he says. "It's a little late now."