Some Navajo and other Native American Marines in WWII were Code Talkers: a remarkable team of communications specialists whose code was never broken by the Japanese.
The Code Talker program wasn't declassified until 1968.
They used a comparatively simple set of substitution codes, where the word "turtle," for example, would stand for "tank." Or, more accurately, "wakaree'e" - the Navajo word for "turtle."
"Code Talkers" is a pretty good description of the program, and the people who made it work.
I heard and read about this program when it stopped being a closely-guarded secret,f an remember a detail that didn't appear in the "Code Talkers" article. After forty years, I can't verify this, but the Code Talkers may have done more than simply use their relatively undocumented language and substitution codes to keep military messages secret.
According to one source, many of the Code Talkers knew each other's families and communities, or were related. When they weren't transmitting military messages, they'd talk about the folks back home, or anything else that came to mind.
Normally, I suspect that use of military channels for personal communications is frowned on. In this case, it meant that Japanese intelligence had hours of talk in an unknown language, which might, or might not, be
- Extremely detailed battle plans
- A discussion of somebody's cousin's family, hunting plans for post-war life, with a few brief official messages mixed in
- Nothing but reminiscing about the winter of '33
- Or something else
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