Like I said before - they didnt.
This is weird. My post (that’s now numbered #20) was in reply to a post that came right after my post #19. That post has disappeared since I wrote post #20. The post was asking what would have happened if the Japanese had a Navajo linguist.
Can one delete one’s one post? Don’t see that option.
bardos, were you the poster who wrote the post that I was replying to (in what is now post #20)?
No,it wasn’t me.
To keep it clear, the Japanese did have a Navajo speaker, Sgt. Joe Kieyoomia, a POW who was unable to translate the code.
Although it adds little to the discussion, the Army also used other Native speakers including the Choctaw. At least that’s what the Nation says on local TV.
[ D E L E T E D • D U E • T O • U S E • O F • C L A S S I F I E D • C O D E ]
Sorry, we were using an Omaha Code Talker on that post. I guess the War Department doesn’t want us to use them for “frivolous” purposes.
Again, read the website that I linked to in my post. It talks about Joe Kieyoomia. It talks about all of the other American Indian languages that the U.S. military used in World Wars I and II. It explains that the U.S. military knew perfectly well that Navajo codetalking was to be used strictly for tactical situations. That is, they knew that codetalking was only to be used in the middle of battles, where the messages sent by it only related to events during those battles. It was never used, and was never intended to be used, to send messages with any strategic importance. The idea was that it wouldn’t help the Japanese to decrypt the messages sent by codetalking days (or even hours) later. Even if the Japanese military had soldiers who recorded all the messages and sent them back to Japan, even if they had been able to find a person who could translate Navajo, even if they had broken the code, it wouldn’t have helped them. Messages with only tactic importance are of no use if decrypted hours later.
The website I lined to in my post discusses everything we’ve talked about in this thread in more detail.
Note added - Choctaw codetalkers were used in WWI so it wasn’t a WWII original idea.