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| 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. |
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