Language is about communication. It’s about conveying a message that someone else can understand. When two groups don’t speak the same language, translators come in to aid the process.
But what about the case that the goal is to not be understood? In military tactics, one of the most crucial requirements is the ability to quickly and reliably send messages that your enemy cannot understand, but your friends can. It’s a tough balance to strike. And at the height of World War II, the Allied forces found themselves in a pickle.
But what about the case that the goal is to not be understood? In military tactics, one of the most crucial requirements is the ability to quickly and reliably send messages that your enemy cannot understand, but your friends can. It’s a tough balance to strike. And at the height of World War II, the Allied forces found themselves in a pickle.
While the US military developed increasingly complex machines to design increasingly tricky codes to encrypt top secret war messages, the Japanese got increasingly good at deciphering every single one of them. Every time they cracked a code, the US had to come up with an even tougher one, which the Japanese would crack all over again, and devastatingly soon the situation reached the point where the codes were so complex that they took two and a half hours to send—over an hour to encrypt for transmission and as long again to decode once they had been received. It was a terribly inefficient system for sending such crucial, time-sensitive information. And to top it all off, the Japanese were still intercepting the messages, cracking them, and sending false ones to throw off the Allied forces. Needless to say, things began to look grim. The US military needed an “untranslatable language”.
That’s when Phillip Johnston heard about the problem. While not a tribal member himself, Johnston had grown up on a Navajo reservation and knew that the language had some uniquely useful characteristics. It was spoken only by a small population, and it was notoriously difficult to learn, nearly impossible for anyone who had not grown up with it from a young age. As an added advantage, it had no written alphabet, and therefore no characters to be deciphered. In other words, ideal fodder for a military code.
After getting permission to take on the project, Johnston assembled an elite team of twenty-nine Navajo boys, some as young as fifteen, and together they set to work building the perfect code, one that would completely alter the course of the war. The code itself was deceptively simple. The Code Talkers used Navajo words for things that resembled the military words they wanted to convey. For example, they used the word “tortoise” to mean tank, inspired by the hard shell common to both. Dive bombers went by “chicken hawk,” since chicken hawks also dive-bomb their prey.
After getting permission to take on the project, Johnston assembled an elite team of twenty-nine Navajo boys, some as young as fifteen, and together they set to work building the perfect code, one that would completely alter the course of the war. The code itself was deceptively simple. The Code Talkers used Navajo words for things that resembled the military words they wanted to convey. For example, they used the word “tortoise” to mean tank, inspired by the hard shell common to both. Dive bombers went by “chicken hawk,” since chicken hawks also dive-bomb their prey.
Simple, and yet it was the only code the Japanese never cracked. Rather than hours, messages could be sent at the speed of a human voice. And because of the swapped words, even native Navajo speakers couldn’t understand the messages if they were not trained in the code.
The Navajo Code Talkers proved to be a crucial element in winning key battles that ultimately determined the outcome of World War II. Cool!
The Navajo Code Talkers proved to be a crucial element in winning key battles that ultimately determined the outcome of World War II. Cool!
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