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Code talker

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"Codetalkers" redirects here. For the band, see The Codetalkers.
Page one of Navajo recommendation letter, 1942.
Page two of Navajo recommendation letter, 1942.

Code talkers were Native American soldiers serving in the U.S. armed forces who primarily transmitted secret tactical messages. The Code Talkers transmitted these messages over military telephone or radio communications nets using formal or informally developed codes built upon their native languages.

The name is strongly associated with bilingual Navajo speakers specially recruited, for the first time during World War II, by the United States Marine Corps, under the Dept. of the Navy to serve in their standard communications units in the Pacific Theater. However the United States Army, under thehkgv Dept. of War, on a smaller scale also used Native American Indians to perform the same missions in both World War I and World War II.

Use of Navajo

Philip Johnston proposed the use of Navajo to the United States Marine Corps. The idea was accepted and the Navajo code was formally developed and centered on the Joint Army/Navy Phonetic Alphabet that uses agreed-upon English letters to spell out words. For each English letter in the phonetic alphabet system the code talkers were asked to generate several nouns and sometimes verbs in Navajo using the principle of letter and word substitution. Concurrently it was envisioned that phonetically spelling out all military terms letter by letter into words in combat can be time consuming, so some terms, concepts, tactics and instruments of modern warfare were given uniquely formal descriptive nomenclatures in Navajo. As the war progressed the baseline codes nouns, verbs, and descriptive nomenclatures were added on and incorporated program wide, and in other instances informal short cut code words were devised for a particular campaign and not disseminated beyond the area of operation. To ensure a consistent use of code terminologies Pacific Theater wide, representative code talkers of each of the U.S. Marine divisions met in Hawaii to discuss shortcomings in the code, incorporate new terms into the system, and update their codebooks. These representatives in turn would train the other code talkers who could not attend the meeting.

For classroom purposes, a codebook was developed to teach the many relevant words and concepts to new initiates and was never to be taken into the field. The code talker was supposed to memorize all the English/Navajo and Navajo/English word associations in the codebook. To an ordinary Navajo speaker, the entire code talking 'conversation' would have been quite incomprehensible because the nouns and verbs were not used in the contextual sequence of conveying meaning within a Navajo sentence structure. What the uninitiated would hear are truncated, unrelated and disjointed strings of individual unrelated nouns and verbs. See the link at the end of the article to see the now-declassified "Navajo Code Talkers' Dictionary." The codetalkers memorized all these variations, and practiced their rapid use under stressful conditions.

The movie "Windtalkers", directed by John Woo, is based on the Navajo codetalkers who are enlisted in the US Marine Corps. These codetalkers are nicknamed the "windtalkers" who are deployed to front-line areas in the Pacific, to use their language as a code which is impossible to crack.

Cryptographic properties

Native American languages were chosen for several reasons. Most importantly, speakers of these languages were only found inside the United States - the languages were virtually unknown elsewhere. Hitler did know about the successful use of code talkers during World War I, and sent a team of some thirty anthropologists to learn Native American languages before the outbreak of World War II. However, it proved too difficult to learn all the many languages and dialects that existed. Because of Nazi German anthropologists' attempts to learn the languages the U.S. Army did not implement a code talker program in the European Theater. Also the U.S. Department of War issued a memorandum not to create separate Native American units, but to integrate Native Americans in standard U.S. Army units in accordance with standard recruitment procedures (Meadows).

The Navajo spoken code is not very complex by cryptographic standards, and would likely have been broken if a native speaker and trained cryptographers worked together effectively. The Japanese had an opportunity to attempt this when they captured Joe Kieyoomia in the Philippines in 1942. Kieyoomia, a Navajo Sergeant in the U.S. Army, was ordered to interpret the radio messages later in the war. However, as Kieyoomia had not participated in the code training, the messages made no sense to him. When he reported that he could not understand the messages, his captors tortured him. Given the simplicity of the alphabet code involved, it is probable that the code could have been broken easily if Kieyoomia's knowledge of the language had been exploited more effectively by Japanese cryptographers.

The Imperial Japanese Army and Navy never cracked the spoken code, and high ranking military officers have stated that the United States would never have won the Battle of Iwo Jima without the secrecy afforded by the code talkers. The code talkers received no recognition until the declassification of the operation in 1968. In 1982, the code talkers were given a Certificate of Recognition by President Reagan, who also named August 14 "National Code Talkers Day."

Anecdotally, Native American languages were used informally for military communications in both the European Theater of Operations (ETO) and Pacific Theater of Operations (PTO). In these instances, two-man communications teams composed of members of the same tribe were formed on an ad hoc basis by a figure of authority to address immediate tactical needs. They primarily used their native languages in unencoded conversational exchanges of transmitted military communications. These teams were not officially documented, but their stories reside in the oral histories of Native American veterans of World War I, World War II, Korea and Vietnam.

An unfamiliar spoken human language is harder to crack than a code based on a familiar language. The languages chosen had little written literature, so even researching them was difficult for non-speakers. Also, many grammatical structures in these languages are quite different from any the enemies would be expected to know, adding another layer of incomprehensibility. Non-speakers would find it extremely difficult to accurately distinguish unfamiliar sounds used in these languages. Additionally, a speaker who used the language all his life sounds distinctly different from a person who learned it in adulthood, thus reducing the chance of successful impostors sending false messages (see Shibboleth). Finally, the additional layer of an alphabet cypher was added to prevent interception by native speakers not trained as code talkers, in the event of their capture by the Japanese. A similar system employing Welsh was used by British forces, but not to any great extent.

See also

References

  • Aaseng, Nathan. Navajo Code Talkers: America’s Secret Weapon in World War II. New York: Walker & Company, 1992.
  • Durrett, Deanne. Unsung Heroes of World War II: The Story of the Navajo Code Talkers. Library of American Indian History, Facts on File, Inc., 1998.
  • McClain, Salley. Navajo Weapon: The Navajo Code Talkers. Tucson, Arizona: Rio Nuevo Publishers, 2001.
  • Meadows, William C. The Comanche Code Talkers of World War II. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002.
  • David Kahn, "The Codebreakers - The Story of Secret Writing", 1967. ISBN 0-684-83130-9
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