Navajo Code Talkers

President Trump recently honored Code Talkers at the White House. The Navajo Code Talkers used their native language to invent a secret military code. Their Navajo language was tricky and was not written down. So the US Marines recruited them to help transmit information. They created more than 200 new Navajo words for military terms and committed them to memory. “I studied on my own at night,” Joe Hosteen Kellwood, one of the code talkers, said of his training. “You had to memorize all the words at the time, 211 words. They were long words. I spelled it. I learned.”The code was vital to the US victory in the Pacific in World War II. The Navajo code proved much faster than the encrypting machines being used at the time. You can read more about the Navajo Code Talkers here.

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