Navaho Codetalk was the encryptment system used by US Marines. There was a seperate system for each 'secion' of the US armed forces, to make messages as secure as possible.
The code waas originally suggested by a man named Philip Johnson. He felt it would be a good choice for the code since it is unwritten, and extremely complex. Being the son of a missionary to the navaho, he was experienced with the langage and ready to develop the code.
While he was in Boot Camp in 1942, Johnson and a few of his friends created the code. It was approved to be used, and each soldier-in-training was to memorize the entire ditionary of the code. The Men who were best at learning and speaking the language were designated as "codetalkers", or special communicators of the code. These codetalkers spoke to each other through telephones and radios. Although there were over 700 Navhos servng in the Marines, only 375-420 of them served as codetalkers.
There were many commonly used army terms that had no Navaho word for them, so they had to make up word combinations to represent them. This added to the advantage of the code, since those who knew the language only heard a jumble of seemingly unrelated navaho words. A few 'codewords' are listed below:
besh-lo (Iron fish) = submarine
da-he-tih-li (hummingbird) = fighter plane
debeh-li-zine (black street) = squad
A captured Navaho was tortured and forced to listen to the code as it was transmitted. He was rescued, and admitted to Americans later "I never did figure out what they were talking about."
There were also several words that could be used to represent each individual letter of the alphabet. For example, there were three different Navaho words that could all be used to represent A;
wo-la-chee (ant)
be-la-sana (apple)
tse-nill (axe)
Since the code wasn't always the same, it made it very hard to simplydecode the Navaho language, adding to its effectiveness. The Japanese stayed puzzled by the Navaho code, even after they had broken the codes of the army and the air force.
The code remained very useful throughout the war-- and even remained useful after the war. Code talkers from World War II were only recently recognized by the government for all of their efforts.
