So in very large measure the Navajo codetalkers were one of modern history’s few successful implementations of “security by obscurity”.
And probably one of the very last ever. At least before the fall and later rebirth of human civilization. If that is to be our destiny.
I suppose someone could try Basque.
Snopes is wrong on this one.
We had a discussion on this issue before and traced the story back to original German cites from during the war. Somebody really did mistakenly translate Casablanca as White House and the Germans really did think Roosevelt and Churchill were meeting in Washington.
Can you still find that discussion? I tried searching for “casablanca white house” but found nothing useful.
Follow the replies, there is a whole chain of them.
One reason that the Germans studied the languages of Native Americans in the period between World War I and World War II is that modern linguistics was invented by academics in Germany and the nearby countries of Europe around that time. Modern linguistics began with the publication in 1916 of the book Cours de linguistique générale (Course in General Linguistics) by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. Before then there was some study of the history of particular languages. However, linguists didn’t spend much time trying to understand the structure of languages with little contact with European people. They didn’t try to understand the languages of North American, South American, African, Asian, Australian, New Zealander, and Pacific Islander countries. Often they would colonize those countries and try to eliminate the speaking of the native languages of those places by their own people.
They believed that Latin and Greek were the ideal languages and modern European languages were close to it. They didn’t really understand how to understand the structures of other languages. In the early twentieth century they finally began trying to understand the native languages of other peoples of the world. They began to realize that their structures were vastly different. They began to understand the vast numbers of structures that existed in the vast number (perhaps about 7,000) of languages in the world.
Another, more trivial, reason was that westerns were surprisingly popular in Germany. German authors like Karl May, Friedrich Gerstacker, and Balduin Mollhausen wrote popular adventure novels centered around American Indians. Hitler, among others, was a fan.
Thanks!
This is quite off-topic now, but it seems most of the thread has left the OP behind….
I’m not convinced by those posts. There are two supposed sources:
The first is an indirect citation of the book “Roosevelt and Churchill : men of secrets” by David Stafford which contains this claim of mistranslation but doesn’t give a source for it.
The second are the diaries of Joseph Goebbels, who does indeed complain on the 28th of January 1943 that the “Nachrichtendienst” was unable to ascertain the place of this meeting beforehand, and states that it had been expected to take place in Washington. However, he crucially does not mention the White House or an error in translation. Given that he writes voluminously and twice in that entry abuses the Nachrichtendienst for being expensive and useless, I think he would have mentioned it.
To me, it seems much more likely that Washington / the White House is an obvious, logical place for such a meeting and someone later confabulated a translation error to match the trope of the stupid Nazis.
Especially since that was where the previous one took place.
I am currently reading “My Secret War” by R V Jones, in which he describes how he and others fought a metaphorical duel with the Germans over RADAR.
There was much resistance to using countermeasures like “Windows” on the grounds that they would find a countermeasure, making it ineffective. There was also considerable concern about not revealing that we could decode their communications - both army and naval.
BTW, Professor Newton-John, Olivia Newton-John’s father (Olivia of Grease, Xanadu fame),
was at Bletchley Park to read/translate/advise on the Deutsch vernacular in use in the messages.
And her mother Irene Helene Born was the daughter of a winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics.
I’m assuming you meant Most Secret War. That is an all time favourite. The TV series of the same name and content was broadcast in the 70’s and was also superb.
The issue about any hint that codes were being broken leaking was a thorny one. Little mentioned at the time, the entire reason the Germans developed such sophisticated encryption technology was that Churchill had revealed that the British had broken the German codes during WW1 in his memoirs.
History is written by the victors. If the allies had lost, history would record that Churchill had been incredibly stupid and the Germans had succeeded in developing such superior encryption that it took insane effort, time and technological advances to crack.
The Germans were clearly very wary about the possibility of Enigma being cracked. The whole saga of the naval machines having an additional rotor (and taking a full year of more work to crack) is one part. Development of the Lorentz cipher machines for the high command another.
The Most Secret War book and series came about before the declassification of the Colossus machines and the breaking of the Lorentz ciphers. But there were hints around. This time there was an understanding that post war it would be a good idea to let other nations think that similar machines were secure, unaware that the capability to crack them existed.
At the end of the war most of the Colossus machines were smashed up, burnt and buried. But one or two were trucked out of Bletchley Park and no doubt installed in a new location and role, watching Cold War traffic. I would love to think that at least one still survives, perhaps in a classified museum.
The National Museum of Computing, located at Bletchley Park, has a rebuilt Colossus machine in the National Museum of Computing.
Another museum is this:
I know. It still isn’t a real one. Fabulous that they could find enough documentation to get it done. But it breaks my heart that they deliberately destroyed the originals.
On the subject of the Navajo Code Talkers using real Navajo but in a nonsensical way, I learned recently that the Japanese did something quasi similar. They had their own “code talkers” who spoke in a northern dialect that’s impenetrable to even other Japanese speakers. So the Americans who spoke Japanese couldn’t make heads or tails of it.
You re-used a crib in your plaintext, there: That’s bad for security.
Yeah, that’s a fascinating place to visit
Now the forces of Ignorance will break our codes! May be that’s why it’s taking longer than we thought.