The War Of Secrets: Cryptology In WWII

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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

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