NAVAJO COUNTY, Ariz. — I guess it goes back to the first time I ever heard of the Code Talkers.
Every time I see the word “Navajo,” I think of those brave men.
We blazed through Navajo County today on our way home and the thought of the Code Talkers came pouring through.
Equally compelling, in my view, is thinking of the individual who conceived the mission our armed forces handed these brave Americans. Credit for employing the Navajo Code Talkers has gone to Philip Johnston, a civil engineer for the city of Los Angeles. He was raised on the Navajo reservation as the son of missionaries … and spoke the language fluently.
The Navajo weren’t the first Native Americans to answer the call to become Code Talkers. Their language is believed to be the only one the enemy neverĀ decoded.
The mission handed to Navajo Indians was to devise a code that would baffle the Japanese in the Pacific Theater of World War II.
Someone in the War Department figured that the enemy couldn’t possibly understand what was being said between Americans who spoke a language that was as unique as any on the planet.
Japanese cryptographers were able to decipher some coded messages during the war. So, to get around their knowledge of how to break our codes, U.S. war planners devised a code using the Navajo language.
Imagine sitting in a JapaneseĀ communications monitoring station, listening to individuals speaking to each other in a language you’ve never heard. You cannot identify it as, say, French, Russian or Spanish — let alone English.
That was the work of the Code Talkers. They’re all gone now. They were heroes in the absolute truest sense of the word.
https://highplainsblogger.com/2014/06/04/r-i-p-heroic-american/
I’ve long honored them for the heroism they performed. I also have honored Philip Johnston, who concocted this crazy notion of employing a language the enemy couldn’t decipher.
Brilliant, I tell you. Brilliant.