Can you imagine fighting a war for a country that removed you from the land your ancestors lived on

for centuries? A country currently actively trying to erase your language and culture. That's exactly

what the Navajo code-tokers did in World War II. The Navajo code-tokers took part in every assault

the US Marines conducted in the Pacific from 1942 to 1945. They served in all six marine divisions,

marine radar battalions and marine parachute units transmitting messages by telephone radio

in their native language. A code that the Japanese never broke. The idea to use Navajo for secure

communications came from Philip Johnston, the son of a missionary to the Navajo's and one of the

few non-navajos on Earth who spoke their incredibly complicated language fluently. Johnston reared on

the Navajo reservation was a World War I veteran who knew of the military search for a code that would

withstand all attempts to decipher it. He also knew that native languages, notably Choctaw, had been used

in World War I to encode messages successfully before. And these languages had recently nearly

been wiped out by the US government in an assimilation attempt to force natives to adopt American

mainstream culture at the expense of their own traditions. And now that same government would be

using these languages to help the World War II war effort. While some tribes were still sending

their children to boarding schools where students were punished for speaking in their mother tongues,

soldiers were using those same languages to outmaneuver the Japanese in the South Pacific.

How ironic. Despite these circumstances, the Navajo code talkers still fought. They still wanted to

make their country proud. They also wanted to make their parents and communities proud by using

the Navajo language to contribute to the war effort. These brave meat sacks built an unbreakable

code from the language they'd been forbidden to speak in their childhood. The inspirational story

of the Navajo code breakers, a deep dive into the Pacific theater of World War II. And of course,

so much more today on TimeSuck.

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