Navajo Code Talkers earned their day

Let’s be honest, nearly every “National Day” is something of an excuse.

Now, I’m not against people looking for creative and quirky reasons to celebrate things. But while pet and health awareness days and very distinct cultural days all seem perfectly reasonable, others feel contrived and almost disruptive.

Take today’s “National Creamsicle Day,” which is not only wholly unnecessary, it detracts from two other, historically significant days.

You may already realize this weekend is V-J — Victory over Japan — Day, commemorating the end of World War II with Japan’s surrender to the Allies. What some forget is that today also commemorates a specific group of heroes from the same war, the Navajo Code Talkers.

As you may remember from high school history books, the Navajo Code Talkers were a group of 32 Diné men, as the Navajo Tribe call themselves (including three Navajo Marine recruits sometimes left out of a miscount of 29) who used the Navajo language, Diné Bizaad, to create a code that no opposing nation would be able to crack.

The code was simple in its brilliance. Simply by equating a Navajo word for every military tactic as well as one for every letter in English, translation back into English was quick and painless after practice. This cut the time to interpret key communication dramatically: while other codes could take a half hour to interpret by machine at the time, a few Code Talkers could easily read a short message in under a minute.

Despite its relative simplicity and the fact that it wasn’t the first time the U.S. military received tribal assistance in communication (from the Choctaws and Cherokees in the World War I), the Navajo-based code truly was unbreakable.

No one outside of the U.S. would be likely to recognize Diné Bizaad, particularly as the language was unwritten and is often considered a fairly complex language to learn. Published and widely available information on the language was sparse.

The structure of the language is also different from that of most Indo-European languages (like English, German, or French) and includes multiple tones. If and when your pitch rises or falls can change the word and meaning used, even if the vowel and consonant sounds are all the “same” (we English speakers have trouble understanding or recognizing this, but in tonal languages, speakers do not consider these sounds to be the same at all, because they are used to listening for pitch).

As one of the Code Talkers, Chester Nez, has been quoted as saying, “English can be spoken sloppily and still be understood. Not so with the Navajo language.”

Although breaking half of the code representing the English alphabet could have been fairly simple — some newspaper readers undergo a similar exercise with daily cipher puzzles, it would take time to accumulate enough samples of intercepted communication (all kept strictly oral). Working out a key would also require learning a few answers the hard way; only after a location was attacked, for example, would code breakers have a chance to work backwards and attempt to identify it in previous communication.

But the other half of the code involved knowing some 200 assigned words. Code Talkers like Nez have since explained that the thought process was logical, but also metaphorical. After mutual discussion among them it would be simple for the men to remember that a “fighter plane” was best represented by the Diné word for hummingbird, da-he-tih-hi.

Anyone else, however, would have to guess which of many flying objects might be likened to the softly buzzing creature. If you worked backwards with no information, you could easily seize on the wrong characteristic. How many of us would focus on size and wonder if ‘hummingbirds’ stood for grenades or other small missiles? That’s the difference between a land or air attack.

There’s much more to this story than savvy code-making, war-winning efforts, and bravery. Not least of which is the difficult fact that after being forced into “Indian schools” which punished the use of native languages, these Marine recruits were then required to use the disparaged language for the good of the country that had made it happen.

So while you’re celebrating victories today, you may take time to reflect on the many casualties involved, within and outside of the war effort. It isn’t as fun and frivolous as a creamsicle, but it is important.