

One estimate indicates that less than 30 non-Navajos, none of them Japanese, could understand the language at the outbreak of World War II.Įarly in 1942, Johnston met with Major General Clayton B. It has no alphabet or symbols, and is spoken only on the Navajo lands of the American Southwest. Its syntax and tonal qualities, not to mention dialects, make it unintelligible to anyone without extensive exposure and training.
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Johnston believed Navajo answered the military requirement for an undecipherable code because Navajo is an unwritten language of extreme complexity. He also knew that Native American languages notably Choctaw had been used in World War I to encode messages. Johnston, reared on the Navajo reservation, was a World War I veteran who knew of the military's search for a code that would withstand all attempts to decipher it. The idea to use Navajo for secure communications came from Philip Johnston, the son of a missionary to the Navajos and one of the few non-Navajos who spoke their language fluently. They served in all six Marine divisions, Marine Raider battalions and Marine parachute units, transmitting messages by telephone and radio in their native language a code that the Japanese never broke. Marines conducted in the Pacific from 1942 to 1945. Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Peleliu, Iwo Jima: the Navajo code talkers took part in every assault the U.S.
