When the United States entered World War II, military codes kept getting broken. Then a Marine named Philip Johnston had an idea. He had grown up on a Navajo reservation and knew that Navajo was an incredibly complex language spoken almost nowhere outside the Navajo Nation. Could it be used as the basis for a code?
The Marines recruited about 400 Navajo men as “Code Talkers.” They built a secret system on top of their language. Common military words got Navajo nicknames. A submarine was an “iron fish.” A fighter plane was a “hummingbird.” A bomber was a “buzzard.” Code talkers passed messages by radio in seconds, while older codes took machines hours to scramble.
Japanese codebreakers were excellent - but they never broke this one. The Navajo Code Talkers helped the U.S. win major battles in the Pacific, including Iwo Jima. Their work stayed classified until 1968, so for over 20 years after the war these heroes weren’t allowed to tell anyone what they’d done.
