The Code Japan NEVER Cracked Was a Language America Tried to Erase

Japan broke almost every American code in the war. Except one. And it was a language the US had tried to stamp out.

As children, Navajo boys were sent to government boarding schools and punished for speaking their own language. A generation later, the Marines came asking them to use it.

Navajo is fiendishly complex and was almost never written down. So the Marines built a secret code on top of it, using Navajo words for military terms. Hundreds of Navajo men, the Code Talkers, relayed orders by radio in the heat of battle, faster than any machine.

At Iwo Jima, six Code Talkers sent over 800 messages in two days without a single error. A Marine officer said flatly: without the Navajos, the Marines would never have taken Iwo Jima. Japan's code breakers, who cracked the US Army, never broke a word of it.

The only unbreakable code of the war came from the very people America had once tried to silence.

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