CODETALKERS :

When Navajos Fought Japanese for Ne-He-Mah : The new film "Windtalkers" celebrates the Navajo codetalkers with typical Hollywood overstatement. But the history of the real codetalkers is no less remarkable. (David Kahn, June 15, 2002, NY Times)

The idea of using Navajos to conceal the content of Marine messages came from Philip Johnston, a missionary's son who grew up on their reservation speaking the language. [...]

But Mr. Johnston saw that the 50,000-member Navajo tribe offered a sufficiently large pool of English- and Navajo-speaking young men. And he knew that no Germans, Japanese or Italians had studied the language, whose complexities defy both interception and interpretation. It includes sounds that don't exist in German, Italian, Japanese or English. For example, the word doc pronounced with a low tone means "not"; with a high tone, it means "and." And while English and Navajo distinguish between unvoiced and voiced consonants (f is unvoiced, v is voiced), Navajo also has ejective consonants, expressed with a burst of breath. An enemy wanting to decode messages in Navajo would first have to transcribe those unfamiliar sounds. But would the decoder know what to listen for and how to notate them?

Moreover, Navajo verbs have different grammatical modes to denote different points in time, among other things. A speaker must use one form if he himself was aware of the start of rain, another if he believes rain was falling for some time in his locality before he noticed it, and so on. The Navajo verb, one anthropologist has said, is "like a tiny imagist poem." Thus na'il-dil means "You are accustomed to eat plural separable objects one at a time." This linguistic and phonetic complexity makes the language not only difficult for non-Navajos to understand but almost impossible to counterfeit.

Mr. Johnston persuaded the Marines to let him demonstrate his idea. On Feb. 28, 1942, four Navajos living in the Los Angeles area were given five messages to send in Navajo. Although there were inaccuracies when a Navajo misheard the message, Maj. Gen. Clayton B. Vogel, commander of the Amphibious Force of the Pacific Fleet, realized the potential of the Navajos. He recommended to the commandant of the Marine Corps that they be recruited and trained for secret spoken communications.

By the beginning of May, the first 29 had been inducted, and they received basic training and were sent to Camp Elliott, Calif., to prepare as codetalkers. [...]

During the first 48 hours of the Iwo Jima landing, the signal officer of the Fifth Marine Division operated six Navajo radio nets, whose codetalkers sent more than 800 messages without error. It was a codetalker message that reported that the Marines had reached the summit of Mount Suribachi, where the famous flag-raising took place. The Japanese never interpreted a single message.

One of the most startling things you find when you read histories of WWII is what a huge advantage we had in both the Pacific and Europe because we cracked the Axis codes and they couldn't crack ours. Posted by Orrin Judd at June 15, 2002 9:12 AM