With Navajo being so complex and the Code Talkers being such a small group, they recognized and knew each other during transmissions. And once attached units also recognized this, Code Talkers messages were treated as critically important, the Japanese couldn’t falsely transmit them.
Why might the Japanese military have been unable to break the Navajo Code Talkers’ Code? They were not familiar with the Navajo language and could not easily learn it as adults. a reputation for evil/criminal deeds.
The Navajo Code Talkers participated in all assaults the U.S. Marines led in the Pacific from 1942 to 1945, including Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Peleliu and Iwo Jima. The Code Talkers conveyed messages by telephone and radio in their native language, a code that was never broken by the Japanese.
The Navajo code was completely oral and never written down. As a result, each code talker, of which there were more than 400 by the end of World War II, had to know every code word by memory. This was not difficult for the Navajos since their language lacked a written script.
One reason that Navajo Code Talkers were not recognized until much later is because the program was secret and classified by the military. … The military did not order the Comanche Code Talkers to keep silent about their jobs in the war.
The Japanese Military had cracked every code the United States had used through 1942(1). The Marines in charge of communications were getting skittish([1]).
He was not trained in the memorized code that had been developed in San Diego in 1942. There were only 421 Navajo were trained in the code. There were thousands who served in the military. They tortured him, and that ended any attempt to really break the code.
Howard Cooper, a signal officer commanding the Code Talkers, saying, “Were it not for the Navajos, the Marines would never have taken Iwo Jima.” … Of the roughly 400 code talkers who served during World War II, 13 were killed in action.
Were any Code Talkers killed?
The last of the original 29 Navajo code talkers who developed the code, Chester Nez, died on June 4, 2014. Four of the last nine Navajo code talkers used in the military died in 2019: Alfred K. Newman died on January 13, 2019, at the age of 94.
These codes used by the Navajo code talkers, which included word substitutions for wartime vehicles and other war-oriented implements, are the only code in wartime history, never to have been broken. …
During the war, the Navajos had bodyguards charged with protecting them from capture by the Japanese, with standing orders to kill them if necessary to protect the code, though none ever had to.
More than 400 qualified Navajo Code Talkers served during WWII and only four are still living. Marine Corps Veteran Peter MacDonald (pictured above) is one of those four. He continues to share his story and experience as a Navajo Code Talker.
For example, the word for the warship “cruiser” would be spoken as “LO-TSO-YAZZIE”. If the message was intercepted, however, even if the enemy had the knowledge of the Navajo language, “LO-TSO-YAZZIE” would only mean “small whale”.
Thus, anyone seeking to intercept the messages would have to know both the Navajo language and the codebook. Long after the war, code talker Peter MacDonald Sr. recorded a sample of Navajo code for the Department of Veterans Affairs.
At Iwo Jima, Major Howard Connor, 5th Marine Division signal officer, declared, “Were it not for the Navajos, the Marines would never have taken Iwo Jima.” The code was never cracked by the Japanese; it is the only oral code in history never broken. Chester Nez said, “The Japanese tried, but they couldn’t decipher it.