World War II Database

Contributor: C. Peter Chen

In WW2, the United States Marine Corps used Native Americans for tactical communications; the United States Army also made some attempts, though the scale of effort was much smaller. With Native American languages already being an infrequently-spoken language, the USMC Native American code talkers further secured the communications by devising code words in the native languages, thus achieving a code-within-a-code system.

Most of the USMC code talkers employed were of of the Navajo tribe. When a Navajo code talker received a message to be decrypted, he would relay the message to the Navajo code talker on the other end by translating the English words into pre-defined code words. For example, the word for the warship "cruiser" would be spoken as "LO-TSO-YAZZIE". If the message was intercepted, however, even if the enemy had the knowledge of the Navajo language, "LO-TSO-YAZZIE" would only mean "small whale". This two-level of complexity was the code-within-a-code system that made the code so difficult to break. While "cruiser" was coded as "small whale", there were many words that were not specifically coded. In those cases, words were spelled out by the letters of the alphabet, which was also coded. To prevent the enemy from deciphering the code by the frequency of each letter, multiple versions of each letter were introduced to thwart decrypting efforts.

Below is the United State Navy Navajo Code dictionary as of 15 Jun 1945. This code was declassified per US Department of Defense Directive 5200.9 in 1968.

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