I just finished reading a fascinating book about the “code talkers”. In brief, the US Army decided that a secure way for battlefield troops to communicate (in the fierce battles against the Japanese), would be to used specially trained Navajo Indian soldiers, who were specially trained to communicate, using the obscure Navajo language (a language so obscure that only a handful of non-Navajo linguists understood).
The system worked well-the Navajo soldiers delivered messages in plain voice that baffled the Japanese who were listening in. The Navajo soldiers in this special unit received many commendations, and retired as heroes.
My question: since many of the words used in military communications (e.g. “tank”, “Machine gun”, “artillery”, etc.) did not exist as words in the Navajo language (the men invented words for them… for example, “tank” became “slow turtle”), even if the Japanese had located a Japanese university linguist, he/she would have had no idea what the soldiers were talking about. Would this have been the case?
Incidentally, do Navajo children today speak the language? Or is it dying out?
If the Japanese had a Navajo linguist, they could easily have figured out the new words. Most would be obvious, like your example. The rest could easily be deduced from context and hindsight.
Actually, the number of Navajo speakers is increasing. 168,000+ as of 2005.
It adds another level of code to break, at least, because even if you understand the language, you still then have to break the code, and in fact, that’s what they couldn’t do. The Japanese had actually captured a Navajo speaker, a soldier named Joe Kieyoomia, who was part of an anti-aircraft unit in the Philippines. When they found out he was Navajo (they originally thought he was Japanese),they tortured him until he translated the code for him, but because the code was encrypted, he couldn’t understand it, and like your hypothetical Japanese linguist, had no idea what the marines were talking about. Incidentally, Kieyoomia ended the war in a POW camp in Nagasaki, but survived the nuclear blast, survived the war, and finally died in 1997 at 78.
i believe the Marines used Navajo speaker, the Army used other tribes.
some jarhead would likely be offended with the mixup.
We just lost one of the 29 original code talkers several weeks ago in Arizona. According to the article only 2 others are still alive.
IIRC, part of the research before the program was implemented determined that there were no German or Japanese linguists that knew Navajo
this is no different than eavesdropping on any other military intelligence—whether coded in navajo ,or coded in modern language.
If you eavesdrop on a modern army, you might hear “send foxtrot to alpha and 15 betas to gamma, while delta waits with 20 eagles at xulu”.
Kinda makes “slow turtles” sound poetic 
scr4, I am absolutely stunned that your XKCD link did not link to the one about “Bobby Tables”, which would certainly be a really cool name for a Navajo kid.
ralph124c, you might want to get the movie “Windtalkers”, which covers this subject. I have no idea how accurate the movie is, but it is still a pretty good movie.
The XKCD link is actually pretty close to the mark, in one respect: For anything for which they didn’t have a code word (which was a lot of things), they spelled it out using an alphabet constructed of Navajo words (for instance, the code word for ‘D’ was the Navajo word for “dog”). But that just reduces the problem to a simple substitution-cipher, which amateurs routinely solve in the Sunday newspaper for fun. You don’t need to know that that word is the Navajo word for “dog” to be able to deduce that it stands for the English letter ‘D’.
Really, the biggest value of the code talkers was not in encryption, but in authentication. If your ship was getting friendly fire from another American ship, you could put your code talker on the radio with their code talker, and just let them chat in conversational Navajo (without the code), to verify to them that you’re on their side and they should stop shelling you.
As I understand it though, Navajo code talkers didn’t merely speak plain messages in Navajo, there was an added layer of code either before or after it (that is to say, either the plain English meaning was masqueraded as “the eagle squats over the chinchilla nest, repeat…” or the Navajo version was). It wasn’t just a matter of Babelfishing the radiotalk to Navajo, even if that in itself would have posed a problem back in the 40s
Right. The codetalkers didn’t communicate in clear. The messages were still coded. Communicating in Navajo just added an extra layer. The Marines also used Basque speakers for the same purpose, although to a lesser extent.
As I said in the previous thread on Navajo codetalkers, here is the best article about Navajo codetalking available anywhere on the Internet:
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3926/is_200010/ai_n8914162/?tag=content;col1
Notice that the article is split up into 19 webpages and you have to page through it to read it all.
What the codetalkers were talking in was not Navajo. It was a code that used Navajo words to express the words of English. The codetalkers had to memorize several hundred Navajo words or phrases which were used to translate all the standard military terms in English. Each time they wanted to say that English-language military term, they instead said the Navajo word or phrase that they had (somewhat arbitrarily) decided would be used for that English-language military term. When they wanted to say a word that didn’t happen to be one of those military terms, they would spell it out. For this purpose, they memorized a spelling code. Each letter of the English alphabet had a Navajo word (or perhaps several possible Navajo words) which would be used to spell that letter.
Note that it says in the article the Japanese did have a Navajo speaker. He was a prisoner of war that they had earlier captured. They played for him a recording of some of the codetalking. All he could say was that it was Navajo words, but they were thrown together at random as far as he could tell. That was the beauty of the code. Even a Navajo speaker, if he hadn’t been trained in the code, couldn’t understand what was being said.
yeah but like the example given…slow turtle…and…mini big gun, are somewhat easy just to guess, I would think the military would go with something way off like calling a tank a sunset or something but slow turtle really?
ChrisBooth12, what you’re saying is that this isn’t really a great code. And you’re right. With more time, with more Navajo speakers, and with more skilled codebreakers, the Japanese could have figured it out.
It didn’t matter. Perfect codes are not necessary. All that is necessary is a code that is good enough for the circumstances. The U.S. could have created a better code if they had had enough time and cared enough. They didn’t. Navajo codetalking was just hard enough to be unbroken during World War II.
My question is: How in God’s name did the Japanese even know that the coded language they were listening to was Navajo so as to begin looking for Navajo POW’s to torture and make translations?
Except the coding didn’t add an extra layer of security; it removed security. If they had just had them speaking Navajo, it would have been essentially impossible to crack, since you’d need someone fluent in Navajo (natural languages are much more complicated than codes). With the coding, though, it essentially became no more difficult than any other code of the same complexity. And it wasn’t a very complex code: A skilled cryptographer could have cracked it in an afternoon, with the right techniques.
bardos, read the article that I linked to in my post. It says there why the Japanese were able to deduce that it was Navajo that was being used (as the underlying language). There were a number of ways that the U.S. failed to keep the origins of the code as secure as it should have been. It is now clear, for instance, that because the codetalkers were broadcasting on the same frequencies as other U.S. military personnel and because other U.S. military radio operators didn’t realize that the transmissions were the codetalkers, some of those radio operators would scream on the radio at the codetalkers to get off their frequency, accusing them of being Japanese. The codetalkers would scream back that they were Navajo, not Japanese.
Chronos, read the article that I linked to in my post. A cryptographer who didn’t know Navajo would have had a lot of problems trying to decrypt the codetalking. It’s very difficult to accurately transcribe an exotic language that one doesn’t know. It takes a field linguist, not a cryptographer, to do that, and it takes a lot of work. (A field linguist is someone who can visit the speakers of a previously unknown language and figure out the rules of that language. Work of that sort takes training in linguistics and then further training to specialize in field linguistics.) Furthermore, if the Japanese had assembled a team of cryptographers and field linguists to understand Navajo codetalking, it would have meant that some Japanese soldiers would have had to spend a lot of time during battle recording large amounts of the codetalking. These recordings would have had to been brought back to Japan for the team of cryptographers and field linguists. It would have been rather difficult, in fact.
On the other hand, if the codetalkers had just used Navajo instead of Navajo codetalking, all it would have taken was for the Japanese to find one Navajo speaker who they could force to translate. Navajo codetalking was far from a perfect code. Any account of it that describes it as unbreakable is nonsense. It was just good enough for the purposes that it was used for.
If the Japanese had a Navajo linguist, he could also have translated just ordinary speaking in Navajo.