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Marching in formation, Camp Pendleton,
California (American Forces Information Service).
The U.S. needed to use every advantage it possessed to take on the
Japanese in the Pacific Theater, and they had an incalculable ace
in the Navajos. A central challenge facing U.S. forces was generating
a viable code that the Japanese, accomplished code breakers, couldn't
crack.
The idea to use the Navajo language as code was the brainchild of
Philip Johnston, a World War I veteran and the son of a missionary
to the Navajos. Johnston was one of the few non-Navajos to speak
the language, and knew it was uniquely suited to the task. An unwritten
language, Navajo had no alphabet, and was spoken by only a handful
of non-Navajos. It was also a sophisticated spoken language, with
a variety of tones and dialects. Even if the Japanese were to somehow
learn the language, the code could still be next to impossible to
understand.
When Johnston tried to convince the Navy to use the Navajos, he
was met with indifference. So, Johnston took his idea straight to
President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who thought the idea was worthy
of consideration. In a test conducted by the Navy, the Navajos were
pitted against Morse code machines. The Navajos transmitted messages
in a fraction of the time it took the machines.
Major General Clayton B. Vogel, the commanding general of the Amphibious
Corps, Pacific Fleet, recommended to the Commandant of the Marine
Corps that the Marines recruit 200 Navajos. The first group, 29
recruits in May 1942, developed a dictionary, and also numerous
words for military terms that did not exist in their native tongue.
The dictionary and code words had to be memorized before training
was complete.
Navajo code talkers took part in every Marine assault in the Pacific
Theater from 1942 to 1945. Major Howard Connor, a signal officer
for the 5th Marine Division at Iwo
Jima, declared that the Marines could not have taken the famous
hill "were it not for the Navajos." Lieutenant General
Seizo Arisue, the Japanese chief of intelligence, declared after
the war that though they cracked the Army and Air Corps codes, the
Navajo code remained indecipherable.
How the Code Works
The Navajo code consists of strings of seemingly unrelated Navajo
words. Each word is translated into English, and the first letter
of each English word is used in the code.
To say the word "blue" in code:
SHUSH = BEAR = B
NASH-DOIE-TSO = LION = L
SHI-DA = UNCLE = U
DZEH = ELK = E
The Navajos also had to create lexicon for words that did not exist
in Navajo. For example, the word "TORTOISE" (CHAY-DA-GAHI
in Navajo) was used for "tank." The Navy's official Navajo
code dictionary contains the complete code.
Sources/For Further Reading
Back: The
Navajo Code Talkers
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