Although it is a largely unknown story, August 14, 2012 is
the day set aside to remember and give thanks to the Navajo Code Talkers of the
second World War.
These young Navajo men changed the course of history by
transmitting secret communications on the WWII battlefield, at a time when America’s
best cryptographers were falling short. They came up with the most ingenious
and successful code in military history.
At the beginning of WWII, Japanese intelligence was able
to decipher every code that the US devised. With plenty of fluent English
speakers among their ranks, the Japanese broke code at an alarming rate. They
were also able to send false commands and sabotage messages. Due to this,
increasingly difficult codes were produced which led to complaints that the codes
were taking hours to encrypt. The military had to come up with a better way to
communicate.
When a missionary’s son who grew up on a Navajo
reservation named Phillip Johnson heard of the crisis, he remembered that the
Navajo language had no alphabet and was impossible to decipher without early
exposure. He led the first test group to try out this language for use as
military code.
In 1942, 29 Navajo men of all ages were
recruited for this mission. The code originated with 200 terms but grew to 600
by the end of the war. The Navajo men could communicate in 20 seconds what
often had taken the coding machines 30 minutes. The code consisted of Najavo
terms that were associated with the respective military terms they resembled. The Navajo word for turtle meant "tank," and a dive-bomber was a
"chicken hawk."
In the first 48 hours alone in the battle
for Iwo Jima, the Navajos coded over 800 transmissions with perfect accuracy.
Although their undecipherable code played a
pivotal role in saving lives and helping to end WWII, the Navajo Code Talkers
did not receive proper recognition when they returned home. Their secret was
thought of as too precious to divulge. The code was declassified in 1968 but it
still took many years to be officially recognized.
In 2001, almost 60 years after they created
their remarkable code, the Navajo Code Talkers finally received their
Congressional Medals of Honor.
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