Re: Carl Gorman Navajo Code Talker War photo [more material re Windtalkers film]

[Louis Proyect <vze47t8m@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

NY Times, June 15, 2002

When Navajos Fought Japanese for Ne-He-Mah
By DAVID KAHN

It is the most romantic story in American cryptology. To keep the 
Japanese from getting American secrets in World War II, Navajos ? 
among the original Americans ? spoke over the radio in their native 
tongue.

The new film "Windtalkers," which opened nationally yesterday, 
celebrates these Marine Corps codetalkers with typical Hollywood 
overstatement. The idea that each codetalker had a bodyguard who was 
to kill him if he was in danger of being captured never happened. 
(Marines don't kill other marines.) And the claim that the Navajo 
code "was ultimately the only one never broken" isn't true either. 
Actually most American cryptograms were not solved by the Japanese, 
who read at best a couple of antiquated diplomatic codes and some 
low-level military cryptosystems.

But the history of the real codetalkers is no less remarkable. The 
idea of using Navajos to conceal the content of Marine messages came 
from Philip Johnston, a missionary's son who grew up on their 
reservation speaking the language. Of course, people have long spoken 
in foreign languages when they didn't want eavesdroppers to 
understand them. In World War I, eight Choctaws manned trench 
telephones for the Army's 36th Division. According to an article in 
the scholarly quarterly Cryptologia by Stephen Huffman, trials were 
made during World War II with Comanches, Ojibwas, Oneidas, Sac-Foxes 
and Muskogees.

But Mr. Johnston saw that the 50,000-member Navajo tribe offered a 
sufficiently large pool of English- and Navajo-speaking young men. 
And he knew that no Germans, Japanese or Italians had studied the 
language, whose complexities defy both interception and 
interpretation. It includes sounds that don't exist in German, 
Italian, Japanese or English. For example, the word doc pronounced 
with a low tone means "not"; with a high tone, it means "and." And 
while English and Navajo distinguish between unvoiced and voiced 
consonants (f is unvoiced, v is voiced), Navajo also has ejective 
consonants, expressed with a burst of breath. An enemy wanting to 
decode messages in Navajo would first have to transcribe those 
unfamiliar sounds. But would the decoder know what to listen for and 
how to notate them?

Full: http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/15/movies/15CODE.html

-- 
Louis Proyect, vze47t8m@xxxxxxxxxxx on 06/15/2002

Marxism list: http://www.marxmail.org



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