Ira Hayes at Marine Corps parachute school in Camp Gillespie, California, in 1942. (Department of Defense)
Until recently, a page on the Defense Department’s website celebrated Pfc. Ira Hayes, a Pima Indian who was one of the six Marines photographed hoisting a U.S. flag on Iwo Jima in 1945, as an emblem of the “contributions and sacrifices Native Americans have made to the United States, not just in the military, but in all walks of life.”
But the page, along with many others about Native American and other minority service members, has now been erased amid the Trump administration’s wide-ranging crackdown on what it says are “diversity, equity and inclusion” efforts in the federal government, a review by The Washington Post found.
Multiple articles about the Navajo code talkers, who were critical to America’s victory at Iwo Jima and the wider Pacific theater of World War II, were also removed, along with a profile of a Tonawanda Seneca officer who drafted the terms of the Confederacy’s surrender at Appomattox toward the end of the Civil War.
The purge, which also targeted multiple webpages about women and LGBTQ+ service members, highlights how aggressively military leaders are pursuing President Donald Trump’s anti-DEI mandate. Their actions mean that some of the most authoritative sources of public information about the achievements of minority service members, decades before government DEI programs existed, have disappeared. Some of the articles, including the piece about Hayes, remain online on websites or social media accounts for the individual branches of the military.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has vigorously supported an executive order that Trump issued on his first day in office banning DEI from federal government programs and contracts, which he claimed were “immoral” and wasteful. In a memo last month, a senior Hegseth aide announced a “digital content refresh,” requiring officials to take “all practicable steps” to remove articles and other media that “promote Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” from the department’s website and social media accounts.
In response to questions about The Post’s findings, Pentagon spokesperson John Ullyot issued a statement that did not mention the removal of specific websites but praised the department’s “rapid compliance” with the directive.
“As Secretary Hegseth has said, DEI is dead at the Defense Department. Efforts to divide the force — to put one group ahead of another through DEI programs — erode camaraderie and threaten mission execution,” Ullyot said in the statement Monday. He added: “In the rare cases that content is removed that is out of the clearly outlined scope of the directive, we instruct components accordingly.”
Last week, the website Task & Purpose, which covers military news, reported that Arlington National Cemetery had removed links on its website to information about prominent Black, Hispanic and female service members, along with material on topics such as the Civil War. A Defense Department webpage about Maj. Gen. Charles Calvin Rogers, a Medal of Honor recipient who was Black, was also briefly removed, before later being restored. Axios first reported the removal of more pages, including those about code talkers, earlier Monday.
The removal of the article about Hayes is particularly notable because of the legendary status of the Iwo Jima flag-raising photograph, which the Pentagon has labeled an “iconic image.” The photograph, which was taken on Feb. 23, 1945, by Joe Rosenthal of the Associated Press, won a Pulitzer Prize and was the model for a statue that serves as the centerpiece of the Marine Corps War Memorial in Arlington, Virginia.
The Pentagon quickly capitalized on the image’s popularity, sending Hayes and other Marines who appeared in it on a national tour to sell war bonds. Hayes, who was depicted in three major movies and was the subject of a song recorded by Johnny Cash, died at age 32 in 1955 after struggling with alcoholism.
During a 1993 speech at the Marine Corps War Memorial, Marine Corps Commandant Gen. Carl E. Mundy Jr. paid tribute to Hayes and noted his Native American heritage, according to a report from the time. Mundy said that were Hayes still alive, Mundy would have told him that the Marine Corps was made up of people from “the broad, strong ethnic fabric that is our nation,” and pledged that in the future “that fabric will broaden and strengthen in every category to make our corps even stronger.”
The Post found full archived versions of many of the removed pages using the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. The archives confirm that several of the pages, including the article on Hayes, were active even after Trump’s inauguration. Others were still active in the months before Trump entered office, but it was not possible to determine precisely when they were removed.
Each of the web addresses for the articles about Hayes, the code talkers and others now redirect to an error page where “dei” has been added to the original URL. In some cases, this change had the effect of appearing to describe the subjects of the articles. The address for the article on Hayes, for example, now includes “deipima-indian.” The URL for an article about combat medic Charles Norman Shay of the Penobscot tribe, who survived the D-Day landings in 1944, now reads “deinative-american-fought-with-distinction-in-world-war-ii-and-korea.”
During World War II, code talkers revolutionized military intelligence, developing a two-way communication method built on indigenous languages that were impossible for enemy soldiers to decipher. Native American troops developed the system themselves, relying on common words to describe military terms, like enemy tanks as “turtles.”
The Pentagon’s “digital content refresh” memo banned recognition of service members and veterans based on their “immutable characteristics.”
Yet those traits were foundational to how code talkers operated on the battlefield, making their purged stories even more vexing, said Ty Seidule, a retired Army brigadier general and a visiting professor of history at Hamilton College.
“The reason they were chosen was based on their ethnicity,” he said. “It’s impossible to disentangle their ethnicity from their mission success.”
The Pentagon’s “refresh” memo has been the guide for public affairs staff members on what to mark for deletion among tens of thousands of webpages, according to spokespeople at the individual services.
In the Army, staff members used keywords like “heritage month” to find and remove pages that recognized troops in ethnic and gender categories, an Army spokesperson said, deleting pages en masse and then reviewing results to restore items that fall outside the scope of the memo.
The Air Force consulted with staff historians on their process, an Air Force spokesperson said. About 45,000 pieces of content were removed, the spokesperson said.
An Army page recognizing the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, an all-Japanese-American unit that fought in World War II, was restored Saturday after its removal led to public outcry. The 442nd is the most decorated in U.S. military history for a unit of its size and length of service, the Army page said, with soldiers fighting on two fronts, “the Germans in Europe and the prejudice in America.”
The page recognizing Rogers, who received his Medal of Honor for service in Vietnam, was deleted for its apparent reference to his race. “As a Black man, he worked for sex and race equality while in the service,” a Defense Department news story in 2021 said. The deletion, which was noted on social media, was widely criticized before the page was restored.
