Unbreakable Codes — How the Navajo Code Talkers Helped Win WWII
The Navajo language is extremely complex, even for people who grew up speaking it. In this language, words, depending on the inflection of the speaker, can have up to four different meanings each. Verb tenses are almost impossible to figure out. There wasn’t even an alphabet until the late 20th century, and it wasn’t written down.
For all intents and purposes, the Navajo language was incomprehensible to everyone but a small group of southwestern people who grew up surrounded by it.
By 1942, France had been taken over, and England was struggling. Communication between the different factions of the Allied soldiers was difficult, and the Japanese soldiers were getting much faster at breaking codes used by their enemies. It seemed like almost every communication form had a fatal flaw, but Philip Johnson set out to prove them wrong.
Philip Johnson was from Los Angeles, and he had followed the issues the United States was having regarding military security and the search to find an unbreakable code. Johnson was the son of missionaries, and he had spent his younger years on the Navajo Reservation between Arizona and New Mexico.
More importantly, he had grown up speaking Navajo, and he knew this could solve the security issues. He went to the U.S. Marine Corps Camp…
