User:StroudIL/Sandbox

Known as Navajo Code Talkers
Theirs is a great American story which even today isn’t widely known. A small group of young Navajo warrior patriots answered the call of duty to create a code using the language of the Diné or Dineh(the People), which at the time was not a written language. Their code played a vital role in saving untold numbers of lives and was never broken! As Marines, these specially trained soldiers served as radiomen, communicating between troops fighting in various parts of the Pacific. They served with distinction in every major engagement in the Pacific theater from 1942-1945. The code talker program was classified as Top Secret for decades after the war. It was finally declassified in 1983.

How it began
During the first few months of the war, Japanese intelligence experts broke every code the U.S. forces created. With many fluent English speakers at their disposal, the Japanese were able to understand and sabotage messages that were then used to ambush Allied troops. To combat this, increasingly complex codes were created. At Guadalcanal, military leaders complained that sending and receiving these codes required hours of encryption and decryption. It could take as long as two and a half hours for a single message. Clearly a better way to communicate was urgently needed. Phillip Johnston, a civilian living in California, had the answer. As the son of a Protestant missionary, he had grown up on the Navajo reservation and was one of only a few outsiders fluent in the difficult Navajo language. Since it had no alphabet and was almost impossible to master without early exposure, it had great potential as an indecipherable code. After impressing top commanders with a demonstration, he was given permission to begin a Code Talker test program. An elite unit of 29 Code Talkers, who had been recruited by Johnston, was formed early in 1942. Although the code was modified and expanded throughout the war, this first group was the one to conceive it. They are often reverently referred to as the "original 29". After the war, it was discovered that these first recruits were as young as 15 and as old as 35. (Most lacked birth certificates, so it was impossible to verify ages.)

The Code and Code Talking
The code they created at Camp Pendleton was ingenious as well as effective. Originally, the code used approximately 200 terms but grew to over 600 by the end of the war. It could communicate in 20 seconds what machines of the time took 30 minutes to encode. Native terms were used for the military terms or equipment they resembled. For example, the Navajo word for turtle was code for "tank" and a dive-bomber was a "chicken hawk". In addition to these terms, words could be spelled out using Navajo words assigned to individual letters of the alphabet. The selection was based on the first letter of the Navajo word's English meaning. For example, "Wo-La-Chee" means "ant" and would represent the letter "A". In this way the Code Talkers could quickly and accurately communicate with each other in a way that even untrained Navajos could not understand.

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