Navajo Code Talkers Research Paper

An Uncrackable Code Do you know about the Navajo code talkers? Surprisingly, lots of people still don’t know who they are, but they were some of the most important soldiers who served in World War II. They might even be the reason that the Allied powers won the war! The Navajo Code talkers are a group of about 400 Navajo soldiers who created and used a secret code using the Navajo language, which turned out to be extremely useful. To Japan, the code was undecipherable. With the help of the Navajo Code talkers, the Allies won many important battles in World War II, Including Iwo Jima. After World War II started in 1939, the Allies faced a difficult problem. Since a number of important conflicts happened on islands in the western Pacific Ocean, they were faced by a strong Japanese military, and they also had to deal with dense jungle terrain on the islands. Therefore, Secure radio and telephone communications were vital to winning these battles. However, the Japanese intelligence quickly deciphered any codes the Allies could come up with. The U.S. marines finally discovered an unbreakable code when a World War I veteran recommended recruiting Navajo, a tribe of Native Americans living in the American Southwest, to create and use a code out of their own language. …show more content…
While there are code talkers for other Native American languages, the Navajo are the most popular, and they are the code talkers that were most crucial to victory for the Allies in World War II. During the war, Philip Johnston, the son of missionaries to the Navajo, proposed to the U.S. Marines that Navajo language could be used in radio and telephone communications. This was because, like many other Native American languages, Navajo has no alphabet, therefore no writing or prints that could be useful to Japanese code crackers. In addition, it was unknown to most non-Navajos, and its difficult pronunciations, complex structure, unique syntax, and singsong qualities made it extremely hard to