Navajo knew that cactus plant had water, they used this knowledge and
were fine when morning approached. Many men thought the Navajo were
superhuman because of thing like this. Overall boot camp was not
as difficult for then as the adapting to the white man’s way of life.
III. Developing the Code
After boot camp the Navajo’s were sent to Camp Pendleton,
near San Diego. Here they would develop and learn the code that they
would be using in combat. They were trained in Morse code, semaphore
signals, techniques of military message writing, wire lying, pole climbing
and communication procedures and trained in operation of radios that would
be used in combat zones. Many Navajos had no experience in electronics
yet they had to learn how to take apart and put back together these radios.
They were also taught how to care for the radios so that they didn’t malfunction.
The first biggest task that these 30 Navajo’s had
was that they were given about 200 of the most used military terms and
they had to come up with Navajo equivalent for each term. The
code talkers used the following four basic rules when creating a code word.
1) The code would have to have some logical connection to the actual
word.
2) In order to make memorization easier the code word should be unusually
descriptive or creative.
3) The code word should be something short.
4). Must avoid words that would be confused with other
words, because of static in the radios.
The Navajo had to keep all of these four basic
rules in mind when creating the code word for all of the military
terms. The Navajos also had to make everything as easy as could be for
themselves because they were expected to memorize the code and be able
to remember everything on the battlefield.
A lot of the terms were obvious, like airplanes
were given birds names, boat were given fish names and more things like
that. The Navajo’s also gave different Marine corps unit’s different
clans names to which the Navajos belonged. They were also creative with
the code word for some things. For example, the code for bombs was
eggs because the airplanes delivered these bombs and airplanes were birds
and eggs come from birds.
They also used some word association to code
words. Some examples are periodic- period ice cat, bull dozer-bull
sheep, belong-long bee, colon-two spots, dispatch-dog is patch, and district-deer
is strict.
Locations were also coded. Some examples
are American-our mother, as in obviously our mother country and South America-
south of our mother. Africa was Blackies, and Alaska was with winter.
Some other examples were China -braided hair and Japan- slant eye.
These 200 words were not enough though. They
needed a way to communicate other things to each other. They needed
an alphabet so that they could spell things to each other.
They developed a way of using an alphabet. They came up with the
idea of using words instead of actually letters. They would
first come up with an English word that would represent a letter, for example
“ant” would be “a”, then would use the Navajo word for ant which is Wol-La-Chee.
So when you heard Wol-La-Chee you would know that it was “a”.
After developing the code the Navajo were
put in battle situations were they would have practice using the code.
While they were in training using the code, code-crackers were trying to
decipher the code. None of the code-crackers even understood what
was going on. They said that it sounded like gibberish. Some
Navajo’s were also sitting in with these code-crackers and tried to see
if they could make sense of the code. Neither was able to decipher the
messages.
Since the pilot program went so well they
recruited more men for the code talker program. Once again, some were turned
down because of language barrier. They also pulled men from other
areas of the armed forces and put them in the code talker program.
A total of 450 men were recruited for the program, and only 30 failed to
meet the requirements of the course.
IV. Using the Code
The Navajo were then ready for battle.
At first the Navajo’s were not used very much just for the fact that people
didn’t know much about what was going on. The Code Talker Program
was top secret and outside of the Navajo’s that were involved and a few
in the military no one else knew anything about what was going on in California.
The code talkers were often mistaken for sounding
like the Japanese. When some Americans heard the code talkers they
thought that the Japanese had taken over and were using their radios.
This was not the only difficulty that the Navajo’s encountered. Many
Americans felt that there was nothing wrong with the system as it was.
Time and time again the Navajo were asked to prove that their code was
more efficient and faster.