Dipy: Interesting story
Unsung Heroes -- Talk Code and Break Balls
Navajo Code Talkers.
In some of the toughest battles
of the South Pacific, 400 of these men -- most of them barely out of high
school on the reservation just north of here, part of it in New Mexico and
part in Arizona -- transmitted thousands of radio messages in a code
based on their intricate and unwritten language, in which fighter planes
became "hummingbirds," dive bombers "chicken hawks" and submarines
"iron fish."
Though the Japanese repeatedly broke other American military codes,
they never came close to cracking the Navajos', which remains one of
the handful of codes in military history that were never deciphered.
In fact, the Navajos' secret was considered so valuable that it was kept
classified until 1968. And their singular contribution to the wartime efforts
of what has been called "the greatest generation" went largely unheralded.
Fewer than half the code talkers are still alive. But suddenly, it seems,
their story is popping up everywhere.
It was the subject of a recent documentary on television's History
Channel. It is celebrated in "The Code Book" (Doubleday, 1999), Simon
Singh's history of cryptography. The Smithsonian Institution has asked for
help in putting together a display about the code talkers in its new
museum of Indian history on the Mall in Washington.
Not one but two Hollywood films are in the works. One is being
developed in cooperation with the code talkers by a group of Native
American filmmakers and Gale Anne Hurd, the producer of the
"Terminator" movies and "Armageddon." The other is being developed
by John Woo, the action-adventure director from Hong Kong.
"Now that they've seen these documents, everyone wants to interview
code talkers," said Samuel Billison, president of the Navajo Code
Talkers Association and a member of his tribe's governing council, who
fought at Iwo Jima. "There's a lot of interest, and not just in the United
States. I just got a call from Italy the other day."
The code talkers' achievements are the stuff of high drama. Their work
was the brainchild of Philip Johnston, a World War I veteran and
engineer who had grown up as the son of missionaries on the Navajo
reservation and learned the language as a child. In 1942, he persuaded
Marine officers in San Diego to test the idea, and after a period of
bureaucratic indecision, 29 initial recruits were inducted and began
training.
From the beginning, the idea was not simply to transmit messages in
Navajo, a singsong and subtly inflected descendant of northern Asian
languages that is easily susceptible to mispronunciation, but to create a
unique code based on Navajo words. Military terminology created a
special challenge; hence the avian equivalents for aircraft. |
