Who would have known that the language of Native Americans, created hundreds of years before the founding of our nation, would prove to be one of America's greatest secret weapons? The Japanese cracked every code that the Army and Navy came up with, but not the Navajo code.
Navajo is a spoken language handed down orally from generation to generation. The Code Talkers created a system of native words to represent characters of the English alphabet so that they could spell out English words that had no Navajo equivalent. The code talkers also assigned their own expressions such as iron-fish for submarine, to over four hundred important military terms. Each code talker memorized these special words for there were no written materials that could …show more content…
Then at Camp Pendleton, this first group of Navajo code talkers developed a dictionary and numerous words for military terms. The dictionary and all code words had to be memorized during training. Once a Navajo code talker completed his training, he was sent to a Marine unit deployed in the Pacific theater. The code talkers primary job was to talk, transmitting information on tactics and troop movements, orders and other vital battlefield communications over telephones and radios. The code talkers also acted as messengers and performed general Marine duties. Carl Gorman was one of the Navajos sent to Guadalcanal in the fall of 1942. As a young boy attending school at the Rehoboth Mission in Chinle, Arizona, he had been locked in chains in the school basement for refusing to speak English instead of Navajo. With Japanese forces sweeping over Guadalcanal and listening to every Marine radio frequency, Gorman and his friends William Yazzie, Jack Nez and Oscar Ilthma called in artillery fire and provided status reports in what again sounded like gibberish to the enemy. The Japanese, being skilled code breakers, remained baffled by the Navajo language. The Japanese chief of intelligence, Lieutenant General Seizo Arisue said that while they were able to decipher the codes used by the U.S. Army and the Army Air Corps, they were never able to crack the code used by the Marines. Joe Kieyoomia, a Navajo soldier who was not trained as a Code Talker, was captured and survived the Bataan Death March, only to be tortured into trying to decode intercepted Marine communications. Left standing naked in the snow, feet frozen to the parade ground, he couldn't confess to what he didn't understand. The secret code made no sense, even to another Navajo. It was said by high military officers that the Marines would never have taken Iwo Jima without the Navajo Code Talkers, and World War II might have had a different
Navajo is a spoken language handed down orally from generation to generation. The Code Talkers created a system of native words to represent characters of the English alphabet so that they could spell out English words that had no Navajo equivalent. The code talkers also assigned their own expressions such as iron-fish for submarine, to over four hundred important military terms. Each code talker memorized these special words for there were no written materials that could …show more content…
Then at Camp Pendleton, this first group of Navajo code talkers developed a dictionary and numerous words for military terms. The dictionary and all code words had to be memorized during training. Once a Navajo code talker completed his training, he was sent to a Marine unit deployed in the Pacific theater. The code talkers primary job was to talk, transmitting information on tactics and troop movements, orders and other vital battlefield communications over telephones and radios. The code talkers also acted as messengers and performed general Marine duties. Carl Gorman was one of the Navajos sent to Guadalcanal in the fall of 1942. As a young boy attending school at the Rehoboth Mission in Chinle, Arizona, he had been locked in chains in the school basement for refusing to speak English instead of Navajo. With Japanese forces sweeping over Guadalcanal and listening to every Marine radio frequency, Gorman and his friends William Yazzie, Jack Nez and Oscar Ilthma called in artillery fire and provided status reports in what again sounded like gibberish to the enemy. The Japanese, being skilled code breakers, remained baffled by the Navajo language. The Japanese chief of intelligence, Lieutenant General Seizo Arisue said that while they were able to decipher the codes used by the U.S. Army and the Army Air Corps, they were never able to crack the code used by the Marines. Joe Kieyoomia, a Navajo soldier who was not trained as a Code Talker, was captured and survived the Bataan Death March, only to be tortured into trying to decode intercepted Marine communications. Left standing naked in the snow, feet frozen to the parade ground, he couldn't confess to what he didn't understand. The secret code made no sense, even to another Navajo. It was said by high military officers that the Marines would never have taken Iwo Jima without the Navajo Code Talkers, and World War II might have had a different