During World War II, an elite team of Navajos left their homes to join the US Marine Corps and solve a communications challenge. In the Pacific, many of the US combat codes had been cracked by the Japanese army and navy, leaving US troops vulnerable to attack by Axis forces. But in 1942, the first 29 Navajo recruits helped develop a new undecipherable code. They used common words and phrases from their tribal language to convey some messages and created special codes to describe military terms; for instance, various weapons of war were assigned Navajo bird names. Code Talkers could encode, send, and decode a three-line English message text, without error, in roughly 20 to 150 seconds. It took machines of the day at least 30 minutes, sometimes longer, to do the same thing.
Some say the US might not have prevailed in the fiercely fought Battle of Iwo Jima had it not been for the achievements of the Navajo Code Talkers. And yet, their contributions would go unknown until the program was finally declassified in 1968. Since 1982, August 14 is celebrated as Navajo Code Talkers Day to commemorate the elite team as well as other Native Americans and First Nations people who had developed codes used in WWII and other conflicts.
Navajo Code Talkers - US Marine Corp - First 29 Sworn In At Camp Wingate, NM - 1942
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