Introduction Members of the Navajo Nation in the American Southwest played an important role in World War II They created a code based on their own language They then used this code to quickly encode send and decode secret messages These messages helped US commanders coordinate troops and warn them of danger The Navajo did this even though the US government had tried to destroy them and their language in the past The Navajo Code was impossible for the enemy to decipher It was kept secret until 1968 It was only then that the Navajo who worked with the code got the honor they deserved Life as a Navajo Code Talker in World War II
Native American Marines in the Navajo Code Talker unit rest at a shelter in Guam
This infantry radio team works at a station in the Philippines in 1945
Chapter 1 The Need for a Code During World War II American forces used codes to send messages to each other This was so the enemy would not understand the messages The soldiers used special machines to encode and decode the messages There were two problems with these codes One was that the enemy often cracked the codes This meant they could read the messages Another was that it took American soldiers a long time to encode and decode the messages This put military actions at risk In 1942 a man named Philip Johnston had an idea to solve these problems His idea was to create a code based on the Navajo language Johnston thought the Navajo language would be a good code for three reasons The first was that the The Need for a Code
