The Code Talkers of WWII

The Unwritten Tongue

In the midst of the Second World War, as American forces fought across the Pacific, they faced an enemy with an almost supernatural ability to intercept and decipher their most secret communications. Every code the military devised, no matter how complex, was eventually broken by the brilliant cryptographers of the Japanese Imperial Army. A new kind of weapon was needed—one that was not forged from steel, but from something far older and more elusive: language. The solution came from an unlikely source. Philip Johnston, the son of a missionary, had grown up on the Navajo Reservation. He was one of a handful of outsiders who could speak the complex, unwritten language of the Diné, as the Navajo call themselves. He knew its intricate syntax and tonal qualities made it nearly impossible for a non-native speaker to master. While other Native American languages had been used in World War I, Navajo was unique in its isolation and complexity. At the outbreak of the war, it was estimated that fewer than 30 non-Navajos on the planet could understand it. Johnston proposed a radical idea to the U.S. Marine Corps: use the Navajo language as the basis for an unbreakable code. In a demonstration under simulated combat conditions, he showed that Navajo speakers could encode, transmit, and decode a three-line message in a mere 20 seconds. The standard encryption machines of the day took 30 minutes to do the same task. The military, desperate for an edge, was convinced. In May of 1942, a pilot program was launched, and the first 29 Navajo recruits were sworn into the Marines. They were not told of their specific mission until after they completed the brutal ordeal of boot camp. These young men, many of whom had been forbidden to speak their own language in American boarding schools, were now being asked to wield it as a weapon to save the country that had tried to silence them.