WWII Navajo Code Talkers: Transmitting an Unbreakable Code
During World War II, Allied soldiers and officers needed a way to communicate secretly with each other over long distances. They needed to send messages about attack plans, troop movements, orders, and other important information. Of course, they did not want the Axis forces to know what they were planning. They needed a code the Axis forces could not break. In the past, the Axis forces had broken other codes the Allies had used. The Allied forces found their solution in the Navajo language. The Navajo code, and the “talkers” who used it, were vital to the Allied victory.
Origins of the Code
The first codes based on American Indian languages were used during World War I. Soldiers used telephones to send messages in the language of the Choctaw, a tribe of the southeastern United States. They also used the languages of a few other tribes. The US military did not want to use these codes again during World War II. Leaders feared that Germany and Japan had studied these languages after World War I.
Instead, the military decided to use other Native American languages to encode messages. The US Marines used the language spoken by the Navajo Nation of the southwestern United States. The language, called Diné Bizaad in Navajo, has no written alphabet or symbols. It is a very complex language. Only a few people who were not Navajo could speak Diné Bizaad.
Code Talkers in the Pacific
The marines chose twenty-nine Navajo men from the Navajo Reservation. The reservation covers parts of New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah. The Navajo men trained to become marines. They also created a code with their language. The men created a phonic alphabet for Diné Bizaad. With this, they could spell out words letter by letter. Common letters such as a were represented by several words. The Navajo words for apple, axe, and ant all stood for the letter a. Using several words for the same letter made the code tougher for the enemy to crack. They also assigned Diné Bizaad words to common military terms. Dive-bomber was gini, the Navajo word for chicken hawk. Battleship was lo-tso, the Navajo word for whale.
By the end of the war, the Navajo code dictionary included 411 terms. It took just a few minutes for the Navajo marines to convert an English message into the Navajo code and send it by telephone or radio. They then received a response in the Navajo code and translated it back into English. It took much less time than using coding machines.
The Navajo marines served as “code talkers” during operations and battles in the Pacific. They served in Guadalcanal, Peleliu, Tarawa, and many other locations. During the battle of Iwo Jima, six Navajo code talkers sent and received more than 800 messages in just two days. About 400 Navajo men served as code talkers during World War II. The code talkers were assigned guards to protect them. They were very important members of the US military.
The heroic actions of the Navajo code talkers were kept secret after the war ended. The US military thought the code might be needed again. Years later, the public learned about the Navajo code talkers’ role in the Allies’ victory over the Axis forces. Many military members found out about the code talkers then, too. Today, the Navajo Code Talker Museum in Gallup, New Mexico, honors their service.
after reading answer the question,Explain how the Navajo Code was important during WWII. 2-3 sentences