World War II: Navajo Code Talkers

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As 1942 dawned, World War II was not going well for America and her Allies. Japanese carrier-borne bombers and fighters had crippled the U.S. Navy’s proud Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941; attacked American bases in the Philippines and on Guam; and were intent on seizing other island bases in the south and central Pacific. In Europe, France had fallen to Germany’s blitzkrieg, and stalwart Britain was still staggering from the Nazis’ relentless nighttime bombing during the previous year.

Half a world away, two great British ships — the battleship Prince of Wales and battle cruiser Repulse — and members of their crews lay at the bottom of the sea off the coast of Malaya, unfortunate victims of Japanese bombing attacks on December 10, 1941. Meanwhile, Germany’s armies continued to advance methodically into the Soviet Union, while Hitler’s submarines wreaked havoc on supply convoys outbound to Russian ports from the United States.

For the U.S. Armed Forces, communications, which had always been a complex issue, had now become a bewildering problem. Japanese cryptographers were proving themselves amazingly adept at breaking top secret military codes almost as rapidly as newer, more complicated procedures could be devised. Many of the Japanese code breakers had been educated in the United States where they had learned to speak English and had become familiar with American colloquialisms, including slang terms and profanity. As a result, American battle plans became known to the enemy almost immediately, often before they had become operational, and there appeared to be no immediate workable solution. The result was an appalling loss of American lives. One war analyst commented, ‘Military communications were made available to the enemy like sand sifting through a sieve.’ Some months before, Philip Johnston, a middle-aged civil engineer who lived in Los Angeles, read a newspaper article on military security. During World War I, he had served with U.S. forces in France, and although too old to fight in World War II, Johnston wanted to aid the current war effort in some way. From the age of four, he had lived on the Navajo Indian Reservation, where his parents were Protestant missionaries, and had consequently grown up speaking the Navajo tongue with his playmates. Now, as he read, the concept of a secret military code based on the Navajo language flashed across his mind.

In February 1942, after formulating his idea, Johnston traveled south to Camp Elliott near San Diego, where he tried to convince Lieutenant Colonel James E. Jones, the Marines’ Signal Corps Communications Officer, that a code based on the Navajo language could not be broken by the enemy. Jones, after listening intently to Johnston’s idea, responded: ‘In all the history of warfare, that has never been done. No code, no cipher is completely secure from enemy interception. We change our codes frequently for this reason.’ But Johnston’s graphic presentation proved so convincing that the two men agreed to set up a test.

Johnston’s confidence in his theory lay in the fact that the Navajo language includes a number of words that, when spoken with varying inflections, may have as many as four totally different meanings. Navajo verb forms are especially complex. To most listeners, the language is virtually incomprehensible and has been variously likened to the rumble of a moving freight train, the gurgling noises of a partially blocked sink drain, or, jokingly, the resonant thunder of an old-fashioned commode being flushed. As a result, use of the Navajo tongue was confined almost entirely to the reservation; few non-Navajos spoke or understood it. And it was a ‘hidden language,’ there not yet being an alphabet or written form for others to study.

Returning to Los Angeles, Johnston spent nearly two weeks seeking bilingual Navajos from among that city’s population. On February 28, 1942, he returned to Camp Elliott with four Indians in order to prove their linguistic capability before a group of skeptical Marine staff officers. Sent in pairs to separate rooms, the first two Navajos were given a typical military field order to transmit in their own language to the others several doors away. When retranslated back into English, the message received by the second pair proved to be an accurate copy of the order as it was given. The Marines were amazed at the speed and accuracy of the interpretation, and the presentation was pronounced a complete success.

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Tags: 20th - 21st Century, American History, Historical Conflicts, Historical Figures, World War II

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