Gunshots whistle overhead. Their screams combining with the patterned explosion of guns, and land mines, enfolding all in a column of death and smoke. The symphony of sounds, seamlessly morphing into a ghastly melody: one of lament and agony. Harsh sounds saturating the shredded landscape with a nightmarish quality. Your tortured senses protest, their cries of indignation lost amidst the clamour of soldiers. Fixed and rigid in place, soldiers’ minds and bodies slowly succumbing to the inevitability of death. All previous remnants of glory, of patriotism- gone, obliterated by the incessant screaming of the battlefield. This is an environment to cause trauma for any soldier. Now try and image you are not a soldier, but instead a Code Talker. …show more content…
However there were some costly drawbacks; radios were large and heavy, making transporting them during the heat of battle dangerous and difficult, and worst of all, the enemy could hear these radio conversations as well. The Japanese military used groups of English-speaking soldiers to listen in on American military radio messages, in hopes of learning details about American defenses and troop movements ("Navajo Code Talkers: World War II Fact Sheet.). The US developed codes to ward off such possibilities but enemy codebreakers were able to figure out these codes, making those codes ineffective and created the need to make up an entirely new one. This was not just time consuming but the codes had become so complicated that it could take hours to translate messages, and by then it might be too late to act. What was sorely needed was a simple, yet unbreakable code. The solution came not from the military but form a Los Angeles engineer named Philip Johnston. The son of missionaries who had spent years working with the Navajos, Johnston knew the Navajo language well and after reading about the military’s efforts to develop secret codes, he believed that a code based on the Navajo language would be almost impossible to break. …show more content…
For example, the names of different birds were used to stand for different kinds of planes. The initial code consisted of 211 vocabulary terms, which expanded to 411 over the course of the war. Hummingbird in Navajo is pronounced Da-he-tih-hi, and was code for fighter plane. Dive bombers were named for Chicken hawks, or gini,, and the bombs dropped given the codename a-ye-shi, the Navajo word for eggs. Observation Planes were owls, Battleships were whales, and Submarines were “iron fish”. Aside from word association, another method- the alphabetical method- was used when a military word had no word in Navajo. “When a Navajo code talker received a message, what he heard was a string of seemingly unrelated Navajo words. The code talker first had to translate each Navajo word into its English equivalent. Then he used only the first letter of the English equivalent in spelling an English word. Thus, the Navajo words "wol-la-chee" (ant), "be-la-sana" (apple) and "tse-nill" (axe) all stood for the letter "a." One way to say the word "Navy" in Navajo code would be "tsah (needle for N) wol-la-chee (ant for A) ah-keh-di- glini (victor for V) tsah-ah-dzoh (yucca for Y) (Navajo Code Talkers: World War II Fact Sheet.)" A skeptical lieutenant decided to test their skills and the code before trusting them to deliver actual combat messages. The Code Talkers
Prior to the use of the Navajo language as code there had only been one other instance when a native language had been used as code. It was used once in the First World War but instead of it being the language of the Navajo Indians it was Choctaw. "Wartime communications using American Indian languages had been successful during the First World War, one of the most notable examples being the 141st Infantry's use of Choctaw Indians to transmit messages in Europe"( "Coded Contributions" History Today, Jul 91). Even prior to this there are oral traditions about a secret Navajo warrior language that was used in the seven and eighteenth centuries. His coded language was used so that enemies would not be able to hear and understand what was being said.
He was seen as wanted and needed in the Marines, because he was in order to send coded messages to the allied forces. Ned explains, “For so many years I had been in schools where I was told never to speak our sacred language. I had to listen to the words of bilaga’anaa teachers who had no respect at all for our old ways, and who told us that the best thing we could do would be to forget everything that made us Navajos. Now practically overnight, that had all changed.”(Burchac 81) As Ned explains, for the Navajos they were told to stop being Navajo, but now as they become Code Talkers that all changes.
Bullets flying through the air right over me, my knees are shaking, and my feet are numb. I see familiar faces all around me dodging the explosives illuminating the air like lightning. Unfortunately, numerous familiar faces seem to disappear into the trenches. I try to run from the noise, but my mind keeps causing me to re-illustrate the painful memories left behind.
broke. When a Navajo code talker received a message, what he heard was a string of
As a result of many negative stereotypes associated with certain variations of English many students have adapted codeswitching. When this concept came up in the book it made me think about my own language. I realized that I code switch quite often between what is seen as Standard English and African American English or Ebonics. Usually with family or other friends that speak Ebonics I use that Ebonics to communicate, but when I am in school, in a
Although this idea had been successfully implemented during World War I using the Choctaw Indian's language, history generally credits Philip Johnston for the idea to use Navajos to transmit code across enemy lines. Philip recognized that people brought up without hearing Navajo spoken had no chance at all to decipher this unwritten, strangely syntactical, and guttural language (Navajo). Fortunately, Johnston was capable of developing this idea because his missionary father had raised him on the Navajo reservation. As a child, Johnston learned the Navajo language as he grew up along side his many Navajo friends (Lagerquist 19). With this knowledge of the language, Johnston was able to expand upon the idea of Native Americans transmitting messages in their own language in order to fool enemies who were monitoring transmissions. Not only did the Code Talkers transmit messages in Navajo, but the messages were also spoken in a code that Navajos themselves could not understand (Paul 7).
“AIR RAID ON PEARL HARBOR. THIS IS NO DRILL.” This is the message sent out by radioman Kyle Boyer at 7:58 a.m. Sunday December 7, 1941; a date which will live in infamy. The empire of Japan had attacked the United States’ Pacific Fleet based in Pearl Harbor. For months the US Intelligence community, as well as others around the world, had been intercepting and decoding transmissions from mainland Japan to their diplomats and spies in the US. We had cracked their Purple Code, and knew exactly what military intelligence was being transmitted back and forth. The Dutch also cracked Purple and informed our government of the Japanese plan and were shocked to hear reports that we were taken by surprised. Even more disturbing, months before the attack a British double agent, Dusko Popov, codenamed Tricycle, turned over to the F.B.I. detailed plans of the Japanese air raid, which he had obtained from the Germans. The government had the information, and did nothing with it.
Wheelwright, M. (1942). Navajo Creation Myth. Navajo Religion Series, Vol. 1. Santa Fe: Museum of Navajo Ceremonial Art.
John Farella. The Main Stalk: A synthesis of Navajo Philosophy. Navajo Religion. (Tuschon: University of Arizona Press, 1984)
Kelley, Roger E. "America’s World War II Home Front Heritage." Cr.nps.gov. United States, n.d. Web.
Over the year and a half between Pearl Harbor and Midway the United States made headway with various technological and military advantages. One of the most important of which was the code breaking efforts of Commander Joseph J. Rochefort Jr. “Most of the U.S’s information [on Japan] came from Rochefort. R...
Lawson, Robert L., and Barrett Tillman. U.S. Navy Air Combat: 1939-1946. Osceola, WI: MBI Pub., 2000. Print.
At the end of World War II very little people knew about the Navajo code talkers, it was not until 1962 did people begin to learn about their existence and it was not until the 1990s did the full story come out (Navajo Code Talkers Cryptology, 2014) The Navajos were not allowed to tell anyone about the code, even their family until 1968. By the time the war was over there was about 400 Navajos trained as code talkers (Navajo Code Talkers Cryptology, 2014). Most of these young men grew up on the same reservation and went to the same Indian boarding school were they were taught to forget about their culture and their language. The irony of the situation is that the culture that the government wanted to wipe was the same culture that was the deciding factor in winning the War in the Pacific.
For instance, Mujumdar who grew up in the United States, but was born in India, was raised in an environment where her parents knew multiple languages: Marathi and English. Since the beginning, Marathi was a “symbol of security” for Mujumdar (1). Marathi is her protection from the outside world and only a few people are included in her privacy bubble. Therefore, one day when in the sleepy state she started talking in Marathi with her close friend sitting next to her, she felt more closer to her friend. She states, “To let someone else into that [close] blanket of security was a big moment” (Mujumdar 1). The person who has never let her marathi identity out to other people and when it does come out, it helps Mujumdar bond with her friend in a way that she never imagined. Code-switching is not necessarily an act of switching, but it’s about how language is being spoken that matters. Deggans on the other hand, had a hard time learning people’s reaction, but when he did he felt close to people
In the United States, an emphasize in learning the dominant language, English for example, can inevitably put other languages within the country in extinction. In reality, there are many other spoken languages in the United Sates, like those spoken by Native Americans, that are becoming endangered because of the immensity of more used languages. One may ask, what is an endangered language? According to Michael Cahill (Bonvillain), who has studied and researched many different endangered languages around the world, a language is endangered when "it is in fairly eminent danger of dying out." Cahill states two ways to quickly identify when a language is on its way to becoming endangered. One is when the "children in the community do not speak the native language of their parents, and the other is when there are only a small number of people left in the ethnolinguistic community" that know how to speak the language (Bonvillain). In specific, the Cherokee language fits into the category of an endangered language in the United Sates because less and less speakers speak it and because it is taught less often to younger generations as well. Although Cherokee, a language containing its own rules in grammar, morphemes, syntax, and phonetics, was once a language spoken in vast areas around the United States by native peoples, the language struggles to survive albeit historical foreign attack and current domination of other languages such as English.