A Puzzle Never Solved: The Navajo Code
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Japanese cryptographers in World War II's Pacific theatre had run smack into a brick wall. Though highly proficient at breaking codes, they had begun to intercept American Marine Corps communications that meant nothing to them. As the tide of the war turned, the Japanese desperately needed the tactical information contained in those transmissions. Their intelligence corps threw all of its resources at the problem.
And failed.
Long denied recognition by the classified nature of their mission, "code talkers" recruited from among ordinary citizens of the Navajo Nation of the American Southwest played a pivotal role in the war. About 450 Marines from this desert culture parlayed their native Dineh, an Athapaskan language closely related to subarctic Canada's Déne, into the most successful military cipher ever.
Like most New World aboriginal languages, Dineh is rich and intricate, and linguistic minutiæ notwithstanding, unrelated to any Old World tongue. But the frequent attempts to explain the code talkers' success by citing these facts, plus the inaccurate contention that Dineh is unalphabetised, miss the point: no language can be "broken." No matter how long you listen to a foreign language, it will never become intelligible. Only when learned by association, relating its symbols or sounds with images and concepts, can a language be mastered. Unlike codes, which merely rearrange the sounds or symbols of an existing language, other languages feature entirely independent cognitive patterns that can't be deduced mathematically.
Thus, any language on earth would have fooled the Japanese, as long as they had no translators. Navajo was ideal for the job, because Japanese access to dinephones was virtually nil. For similar reasons, the American military employed Choctaw signalmen in WWI and British units prized Welsh radiomen during recent service in Yugoslavia.
Still, the obscure-language strategy isn't infallible. Users must face all the usual translation challenges, which can prove fatal in battle. Also, the signalmen themselves are susceptible to capture, after which they may be tortured into translating for the enemy. This very fate befell a Navajo soldier captured at Bataan. However, try as he might, prodded by the continual sins of his tormentors, he could make no sense of his tribesmen's transmissions. The reason why is the essence of code talker brilliance. In order to beat translation snafus, they created a dialect that had a word-for-word correspondence to English. In practice, this dialect is, in the words of the unlucky Bataan veteran, "crazy Navajo," largely gibberish to speakers of the standard language. Throw in code names and the jargon endemic to military endeavours, and you have a code within a language, within another code, within another language. Once fluent in this impossibly intricate system, Navajo code talkers could converse freely, secure in the knowledge that no uninitiated listener could ever eavesdrop.
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