Before World War II, every code that the United States had created for warfare had been broken. Known as experts at code deciphering, the Japanese were never able to decipher the Navajo's secret code.
The success of the code was due, in a large part, to the complexity of the Navajo language. At the outbreak of World War II, there were only thirty non-Navajos who could speak the language, and not all of them could speak it fluently. Philip Johnston, had grown up on the Navajo Reservation, and could speak Navajo very well. He was a veteran of World War I, and had heard about a battle in that war, in which several Choctaw Indians were talking to each other by radio in their native language. It completely fooled the Germans, who were listening. The tide of the battle turned around, and the Americans won. With his knowledge of the Navajo people and their language, Mr. Johnston thought that the Navajos could easily devise a way of talking that no one would be able to understand.
With the somewhat skeptical approval by the U.S. Marines of Mr. Johnston's idea, recruitment for Code Talkers began in the spring of 1942. Two recruiters from the U.S. Marine Corps went to the Navajo Reservation and met with Chee Dodge, Chairman of the Tribal Council. He liked the idea and sent out word by shortwave radio to the Reservation. There was an immediate, excited response. The candidates had to be fluent in both English and Navajo. Many of them were just school boys and lied about their age, just to have the opportunity to go and fight for their country and protect it from the Japanese. Twenty-nine Navajos were inducted into the Marines.
When the first Navajos started to develop a code, they never realized the task that lay ahead of them. First they had to learn military and field terms in English. Then they had to create a Navajo equivalent for each of these terms. In order to maintain secrecy, no written version of any code was ever allowed in the battle zones. They had to commit every word to memory. While creating the code, the Code Talkers used four basic rules to make memorization easier.
1.) The code words had to have some kind of logical
connection to the term to which they referred
2.) Code words had to be unusually descriptive
3.) Code words had to be short
4.) They had to avoid words that could be confused
with similar words
For example, different aircraft were given the name of different birds that acted similar to the planes. For instance a dive bomber was much like a sparrow hawk to the Navajos, so it was called a gini; their word for sparrow hawk.
In order to be able to include other words in their code, besides the assigned terms, the Code Talkers added an alphabet code. They took the English letter and thought of something that started with the letter, and then used the Navajo word for that object. They then used a group of Navajo words to spell out an English word. In order to say "Navy" in Navajo Code they could say for instance, "tsah (needle) wol-la-chee (ant) ah-keh-di- glini (victor) tsah-ah-dzoh (yucca)." When they received a message, it either had terms they knew, or alphabet words which they could translate using the first letters of English words. In this way, the Code Talkers could encode anything!
The success of the code was due to the fact that Navajo families lived by themselves, on remote Reservations, and not together as a tribe for many of their earlier years. This kept their language from being known to almost anyone other than themselves. When the former chief of intelligence for the Japanese forces, General Seizo Arisue, found out many years after the war, that the code used by the the Americans was an American Indian Code, he replied, "Thank you. That was a puzzle I thought would never have been solved."
The language itself is a tonal language, meaning the vowels rise and fall when pronounced, changing meaning with pitch. There are four separate tones of voice used: low, high, rising, and falling. Two separate words with different meanings may therefore have the same pronunciation but with different tones. Some Navajo words are also nasalized, meaning that the sound comes through the nose instead of the mouth. The Navajo language is very difficult for non-Navajos to understand because of the precise way in which one object relates to another. Their view of life, which is that everything they do and that happens to them is related to the world around them, is very apparent in the way they speak. For example, a Navajo would not say, "I am hungry," but instead would say, "Hunger is hurting me." It has been said that in Navajo, words paint a picture in your mind.
At the bottom of http://library.thinkquest.org/J002073F/thinkquest/The_code.htm (has a recorded message of code talking done by Wilfred E. Billey saying,
"Request artillery fire on hill 105" . No wonder the Japanese couldn't br