Code Talkers

Code Talkers

Introduction The date is February 19, 1945. A group of U. S. Marines reaches the beach of Iwo Jima island in the Pacific Ocean. All will be lost if the enemy learns of their plans, but the marines have a secret code. They can transmit messages that no one else can understand.

Philip Johnston's Bright Idea By 1942, the United States had entered World War II. The U. S. military was sending coded messages between groups of soldiers to keep them safe and ready to fight. However, the enemy was getting hold of those messages and was very good at breaking U. S. codes. In some cases, this led to many American deaths. Philip Johnston contacted the military about using a code based on Navajo (NA-vuh-hoh). Johnston had lived around Navajo Indians as a child. He knew that few people outside the tribe understood the Navajo language. He also knew that Navajo was a “ hidden language" --it was only spoken and had no written symbols. These things made Navajo perfect for top-secret messages. The U. S. military agreed to try it.

Mysterious Messages Sending hidden messages dates back to ancient times. Early on, only the sender and the person getting the message would know how the message was hidden. Sometimes they used invisible ink, which seems to disappear once it's put to paper. Later, heat or chemicals would make the ink visible so the message could be read. At other times, the sender would shave and then tattoo words on a man's head. Once his hair grew back and covered the message, he traveled to visit the person the message was for. That person would shave his head to read the message! With most modern coding systems, the message itself is not hidden, but its meaning is. Even if the message falls into enemy hands, the reader must know the code in order to understand it.

At the start of World War II, the American military changed codes all the time. Yet over and over, their efforts failed. Many Japanese students had learned American English in the United States. The Japanese code breakers could break messages almost as quickly as the Americans sent them.

Why Navajo? The idea of using a Native American language was not new. During World War I, the United States had used several Native American languages to transmit secret messages. So why not use those same codes during World War II? After World War I, both Germany and Japan had sent students to the United States. They had learned those Native American languages. However, any student would have had a hard time learning Navajo. It belonged to a different family of languages than many other Native American languages. The marines believed that no one outside the country would understand the Navajo code.