Is this the hardest code to crack?
Welcome back to the Learn English Podcast, the podcast teaching English in context so you can learn naturally.
It is Veterans Day this week here in the United States.
Veterans Day is a day that we have as a national holiday and it is a day that we use to really celebrate and honor people who have served in the United States military.
I've done episodes on Veterans Day before.
I did an episode on the history of Veterans Day.
And then I did an episode on the 442nd Regimental Combat Team during World War II.
And on today's episode, I want to do another episode from that World War II era.
In honor of Veterans Day, I wanted to talk about the Navajo Code Talkers.
Have you heard of them before?
If you haven't, you definitely aren't alone.
What they did was so secretive and so important that it wasn't known for decades afterwards, after the end of World War II.
So, on today's episode, I want to talk about who these code talkers were, why they were used and why they were so important.
If you want to learn more about these Navajo code talkers while, of course, practicing your listening comprehension and building your English vocabulary, then follow along, because we're about to begin.
Before we get started, I want to remind you to look at the description of this podcast episode.
There you will find the list of the words and phrases that I used in the episode, so you can take them, study them and continue to build your English vocabulary.
Now let's talk about the Navajo Code Talkers.
A little bit about who the Navajo are.
The Navajo are a Native American tribe here in the United States and they're one of many Native American tribes.
Their land is called Navajo Nation, and it is in Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah.
So when we say Navajo, we can be talking about Navajo Nation, the Navajo people also called Diné, or the Navajo language.
The Navajo language is an indigenous language to the Navajo people and it is considered to be one of the most difficult languages to learn.
If you are someone who likes watching YouTube videos and likes people talking about language learning, I'll leave a link.
There is a YouTuber named Xiaoma, or that's his YouTube name, I should say.
And he's someone who likes to study languages and tries talking with people in their language.
He did a episode or maybe even a few episodes about trying to learn Navajo.
He speaks really, really good Mandarin.
He speaks some other languages to different levels, varying levels of fluency.
But he made a comment about how Navajo is one of the most difficult languages that he has ever tried to learn.
And that really is its reputation, that it is incredibly complex language.
So of all the languages I've ever studied, the hardest has not been Chinese, Arabic or Korean, but in fact Navajo.
Navajo verbs change like a Rubik's Cube, depending on seven different modes, 12 aspects, and 10 sub-aspects, which mix and match to generate different forms like a giant timetable.
Navajo verbs are, as one scholar describes them, a hopeless maze of irregularities, so you'll have to just learn each verb one by one.
I'm actually going to play a clip of someone speaking Navajo so you can hear it for yourself what the language sounds like.
This is actually part of a weather report that was played on the radio in Navajo Nation, and you can hear this speaker speaking Navajo.
Navajo Nation.
Sadly, it is one of the languages that not a lot of people speak, because in the history of the United States there was a time period where Navajo children were forced to go to boarding schools where they were not able to speak their language.
They were actually abused.
They were beaten or punished if they spoke Navajo.
And that was really a horrible time in American history.
I know very similar things happened in Canada and Australia with their native populations.
It was a way of really destroying, or trying to destroy, the Navajo culture and other Native American cultures.
For that reason, the language was almost lost.
There is an effort to try to revitalize it, to try to save it and get more people to speak it.
But it is difficult because, like I said, it is an extremely difficult language to learn if you did not grow up learning it or speaking it at home.
However, the difficulty of the Navajo language actually became a benefit to the United States during World War II.
I'm going to be focusing on the Navajo Code Talkers, but there actually was another tribe called the Choctaw.
The Choctaw helped the United States military during World War I and they had a code that they would send messages back and forth that the German forces could not understand, because Choctaw is not a language that is really known in Europe.
That was a very important effort during World War I and that's what really brought up this idea of having Navajo help during World War II.
During World War II, the United States military was fighting the Japanese and German forces, and those two militaries were really good at cracking codes.
What we mean by cracking code is that you're able to decipher what a message says.
You're able to determine what the hidden meaning is.
And that was happening.
These military forces were trying to crack the codes or break the code to understand what the opposing military was doing.
Of course, that's a huge asset when you are in battle, if you know your enemy's battle plans.
There's a man called Philip Johnson.
Philip Johnson was a World War I veteran, and he had also spent some time living in Navajo Nation.
Because of his time living with Navajo people, he actually spoke fluent Navajo, which was not very common for someone who is not Navajo to do.
And he therefore knew how difficult the language was and how hard it was for someone who did not have experience with the Navajo language to understand what was being said.
If you think of romance languages, for example, like Spanish or French Italian Portuguese, there is some crossover.
You can maybe understand some of what someone is saying if you know one of those romance languages.
But with Navajo, if you don't know Navajo, you have no idea what someone is saying.
Johnson's idea to the United States Marines was that Navajo people become the code talkers.
Code talkers means that they are the people who pass messages back and forth and relay battle plans to each other.
In 1942, Johnson arranged a demonstration of this in Camp Ellis, which is near San Diego, and he had Navajo people relay messages back and forth and decode them.
They were actually faster than other codes or other machines that were being used at the time, and it really showed how valuable they could be in relaying messages.
The program was approved and 29 Navajo men were recruited and sent to Camp Pendleton, which is another military base here in Southern California.
It's near San Diego as well.
It was there that they developed the code.
They took Navajo words and made them a reference to a particular item or situation.
For example, the Navajo word for mockingbird became the word that they used for airplane.
The Navajo word for tortoise was the word that they used for tank.
I'm now going to play you a clip from an actual Navajo code talker His name is Peter McDonald Sr.
He's going to describe to you what I just said.
He's going to talk about how this code was developed.
I'm going to leave a link to the interview in the episode description.
The interview does have subtitles, so if you do have any difficulty understanding him, you can check that out.
Like, hand grenade, for instance.
We've never seen that before.
So the code word for hand grenade was hand. nomasi.
Nomasi in Navajo means potato.
Hand grenade looks like a potato.
Again, only those of us who went through the code school know, when we hear the code word coming through the air, say nomasi, we write down hand grenade.
But another Navajo out here hear us say nomasi.
They think we're talking about French fries or something like that.
This meant that the code was two layered.
Even if someone understood Navajo, they wouldn't understand what these particular people were talking about.
They would hear words that were in Navajo, but they wouldn't know the meaning behind those words.
And that's really where they got the name from.
Code talkers wasn't actually a military term, but it was used because these Navajo men were talking in code.
They were talking in this two layered code. and the name Code Talker really just stuck.
It was a good description of what they were doing.
It was a way of talking about this particular system that they had used, and that's how you still hear them referred as the Navajo Code Talkers.
The Navajo Code Talkers served in some of the most dangerous battles in World War II, especially in the South Pacific in Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima and Okinawa.
At Iwo Jima.
Six Navajo Code Talkers relayed over 800 messages in just two days and did not have a single error.
Here's another clip of Peter McDonald talking about the importance of the Code Talkers during the Battle of Iwo Jima.
I will leave a link to this clip as well.
It does have subtitles and in another part of this interview he actually repeats the messages that were passed between the Code Talkers during this battle.
Company commander wrote down a message asking for help. handed to a Navajo code talker.
This message took 20 seconds.
Without Navajo, Marines would never have taken the island of Iwo Jima.
The Navajo code talkers were actually so important that they actually got assigned bodyguards.
So that way it was to prevent any injuries happening.
And, of course, from them being captured.
The United States military really did not want this code broken.
And it actually never was broken.
It was such a good code and such an unknown language that the code itself was never broken during World War II.
461 Navajo Marines served as code talkers in World War II.
And of those, sadly, 13 were killed in action.
After the war, the Navajo code talkers returned home.
And instead of being celebrated, they were met with silence.
When they returned to states like New Mexico and Arizona, they were not even allowed to vote.
They returned to face the same poverty and racism that they had experienced before the war, and they weren't able to tell people what they had actually done.
What they did was classified.
It was so secretive and so important that no one was allowed to talk about it.
It wasn't until 1968 that what they did was actually declassified.
That was more than two decades after the war ended.
Since then, there has been an effort to try to recognize and honor what they did.
In 2001, President George W Bush presented the original 29 Code Talkers the Congressional Gold Medal.
Other Navajo Code Talkers also got the Silver Medal.
And that same year, monuments were starting to be built across the United States.
In 2008, the Code Talkers Recognition Act honored all Native American Code Talkers, which included the Navajo, but also members of other tribes such as the Choctaw and Comanche.
Every year on August 14th, we also honor National Code Talker Day.
If you are ever in the United States and want to learn more about Navajo culture, you can go and visit places in Navajo Nation.
And if you want to know more about the Code Talkers themselves, There's a number of different museums you can go to.
One of them is in Gallup, New Mexico.
This is the Navajo Code Talker Museum in the Gallup Cultural Center.
It has exhibits of uniforms, medals, photos, and storyboards about the Code Talkers.
In Tuba City, Arizona.
You can also find the Navajo Code Talker exhibit at the Explore Navajo Interactive Museum.
This is a smaller museum.
It's only a one-room exhibit, but it does have artifacts, photos and original gear from the Code Talkers.
And one of the most important museums in the country is the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C.
In the Smithsonian Museum, there is the National Museum of the American Indian.
This has exhibits on Native American Code Talkers with documents, images, and stories.
If you're not planning on visiting the United States anytime soon, you can also visit the Smithsonian online.
I will leave a link to their exhibit, but they do have an online exhibit and it has digitized artifacts, resources and teaching materials about the Code Talkers.
In 2002 there was also a major motion picture.
Nicolas Cage starred in the movie Windtalkers, which was a dramatic retelling.
It is fictionalized so it's not 100 accurate, but it does show the process of Navajo men going and joining the military and becoming code talkers.
And they also have been in the news recently.
The United States military this past year actually removed the websites that talked about the Navajo code talkers.
There was a lot of outrage here in the United States.
A lot of people were very upset that the military had removed webpages about them.
And these pages were restored because of the outcry and how mad people were.
Like I said, the Navajo Code Talkers were extremely important.
It took a long time for them to get the recognition that they deserved.
So it was very important that the webpage was restored.
I hope you enjoyed this episode.
I hope you learned a little bit about the Code Talkers, especially if you hadn't heard about them before.
If you liked this episode.
If you want me to do more like these in the future, please leave a comment and let me know.
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Until then.
Keep learning English.
