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Navajo code talkers
A spoken code the enemy never broke
The US Marine Corps recruited Navajo speakers to send secret messages in a code based on their language. Japan never broke it, and the code talkers served in the Pacific during World War II.
The first group of Navajo recruits arrived at Camp Elliott near San Diego in May 1942, and 29 completed the first training. The idea is credited to Philip Johnston, a missionary's son who had grown up on the Navajo reservation and knew the language was unwritten and little known outside it.
The code combined plain Navajo with a system of substitute words. Recruits assigned Navajo terms to military items, for example bird names for aircraft, and the vocabulary grew from about 200 to over 400 terms. A separate alphabet code spelled out words with no Navajo equivalent. Messages that took a cipher machine around half an hour could be sent in a couple of minutes.
About 400 Navajos served as code talkers during the war. They worked in every major Marine operation in the Pacific. At Iwo Jima in 1945, six code talkers reportedly sent over 800 messages without error. The program stayed classified until 1968, and the talkers were not widely honoured until later decades. Other Native American groups, including the Comanche, also served as code talkers in both world wars.