One of the most essential things at War is ensuring you can safely communicate in secret between your leaders without it being intercepted by enemies. During World War II, this battle for encryption was hitting another level, with the creation of crypto machines and the hiring of the most brilliant mathematicians to decipher the enemy's codes. That’s when the United States decided to bring a different weapon, a different language.
This language was not invented but instead picked from the native populations of North America. The Navajo tribe was selected because it has a distinct language but also has enough English speakers to be dispatched to the battlefield. They were used mainly on the Pacific Theatre, where 29 Navajo Code Talkers, as they were called) were dispatched to multiple locations to be able to send messages by radio without being understood.
One of the biggest challenges of using the Navajo language as the code was that there were some words that didn’t exist in Navajo, like an airplane. So, many terms were substituted with everyday Navajo words that bore phonetic similarity to the military terms they represented. For example, a “tank” was coded as “chay-da-gahi” (tortoise), and “bombs” were termed “a-ye-shi” (eggs). This allowed for the messages to remain indecipherable without extensive knowledge of Navajo and the specific code.
Unlike other codes used by the military, the Navajo code was never broken by enemy forces, proving its extraordinary effectiveness and demonstrating the profound impact of linguistic diversity in warfare. Post-war, the Navajo Code Talkers’ contributions remained classified until 1968, and it wasn’t until later that their vital role was widely recognized and celebrated. Go deeper: The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography - Simon Singh
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