The Code That Was Never Broken

During World War II, the U.S. Marine Corps needed a code the enemy couldn't crack. They found their answer in a brilliant group of young Navajo men. These Marines used their deeply complex, unwritten native language to build the only military code in modern history that was never broken.

The code talkers built a brilliant two-layer puzzle. The first layer was a clever alphabet. To spell out English names, they used Navajo words. For example, the letter A was "ant" and B was "bear." To spell the name Bob, they would simply say "Bear-Owl-Bear" over the radio.

The second layer was a secret dictionary of over 400 military words. A submarine became an "iron fish." A fast fighter plane became a "hummingbird." The enemy could easily listen to the radio, but all they heard were highly confusing sentences about bears, ants, and hummingbirds.

While machines took hours to unscramble messages, the Navajo code talkers could translate and send a top-secret battle command in just two and a half minutes. Thanks to their linguistic genius, thousands of lives were saved.