Referring back to the OP, there apparently were more than 400 Navajo code talkers serving everywhere in the Pacific.
Or ‘u’ with ‘v’. I still can easily read ancient Roman inscriptions (read, not translate though).
Yeah, the Navajos used code words in addition to the communications themselves being in Navajo. So for example, a codetalker would refer to a shoe as a [the Navajo words for] “gofaster” or a grenade as a [the Navajo word for] “potato.” Which is why Joe Kieyoomia couldn’t make heads or tales of that Navajo code, despite speaking Navajo.
I was wondering if the Germans did the same thing.
I’ve visited Bletchley Park | Home where the Enigma codebreaking took place. Well worth a visit.
One helpful point was that apparently one German operator used to start his messages with the same greeting each time - which helps decoding considerably…
Absolutely, and they were well aware of the security risk of having so many of them and each had to undergo rigorous training to memorize the codebook.
Later in the war, they were also assigned a personal bodyguard to protect them (sometimes being mistaken for Japanese by less knowledgeable Americans) but also, secretly, to kill them if there was a risk they’d be captured. Fortunately, that did not occur.
Germany produce an order of magnitude more machines than that. It soon becomes unrealistic to rely on large numbers of human beings not only memorizing large codebooks but also avoiding capture.
That’s just face slappingly stupid.
Sort of. A more or less standard procedure would have Engima operators (not just one) repeat the first 3 characters twice as a form of error correction. So, if a message started “PRL”, they would write “PRLPRL”. Good for getting messages through cleanly. Not so great for security. They later stopped this practice for obvious security reasons
Yeah, but that’s still better than starting every time with “Hey y’all, this is a message from Fritz” (exaggerating here of course).
What I read is that they were so sure the cypher was unbreakable that they did not care. And the words that were always repeated were Heil Hitler, where three letters repeat: H, e and i. Yep, dumb beyond measure.
Half-nit-pick: I read that the words were always at the end of the message. May be wrong, but it makes more sense at the end.
It was more along the lines of one remote station often saying “nothing to report”
At least (as far as I’m aware) somebody figured out that starting every message with “Heil Hitler” — which was, strictly speaking, required of all good Germans — would also be, as @EinsteinsHund so elequently put it, “face slappingly stupid.”
That, in itself, wasn’t a problem, because the Enigma machine didn’t always turn the same plain letter into the same code letter. It would have been just as bad if every message contained “Frau Hitler”.
And the code that the Navajo code-talkers used was actually phenomenally stupid. They started with something with near-perfect security, a complex, living language that (almost) nobody in Japan could speak, and “improved” it to the point that a hobbyist could have cracked the messages in a few minutes. What they did was have actual Navajo words stand in for English letters, like the Navajo word for “apple” to mean “A”, and the Navajo word for “dog” to mean “D”. But the problem with this is that you don’t need to know Navajo to crack it: It becomes a simple direct-substitution cipher.
I read about Enigma ages ago, I may be wrong here too, but I believe that Enigma never turned the same plain letter into the same code letter so close to each other in the sequence of the message, which did help marginally.
Almost as bad as XKCD had it
Which is not merely stupid, but hubris. But wait, they were nazis, how could I forget, 
I don’t think that was the case, though I’m no expert on Enigma.
I do know that it never turned a letter into itself, which turned out to be a major aid to the Bletchley Park team. To use a made-up example, if the code starts with QEJFR, you know that the plaintext wasn’t HELLO, because the second letter couldn’t be E.
Come to think of it, you may be right. False hazy memories are a bitch.
I just (re)read “Alan Turing: The Enigma” - the Germans did have a very hard time imagining that Enigma could be broken - so they kept thinking that they had spies instead. But they did pull things that made life very difficult for the code-breakers (map references were randomized, Enigma was re-complicated during the war, etc.). But without understanding the real vulnerabilities of the system, their attempts to make it more secure often did nothing - or made it easier inadvertantly. I think the Heil Hitler thing is a myth, though
Er, four repeated letters, since l (that’s lower-case L, to disambiguate) also repeats between words.
Still poor practice to give away several very common letters. Well, common in English, not sure about German.
Oh, boy, I am really losing my faculties. 