I expect many Hatters are familiar with the basic story of the use of Navajo as an unbreakable code during WWII, but Yoonji Han’s Insider story has some details that were new to me:
In May 1942, 29 Navajo men arrived at Camp Elliott, the original Marine Corps training base during World War II. Stretching 32,000 acres in San Diego, the base contained encampments, bivouac areas, and 41 firing ranges. But the small unit of Navajo men weren’t there to learn how to fight, at least not with guns. They had instead been tasked with creating an unbreakable code to help defeat enemy forces.
In the early months of the war, Japanese intelligence experts had easily broken every code devised by the US military. A man named Philip Johnston proposed the idea of recruiting Native Americans to develop a code that would be indecipherable to enemies. The son of a Protestant missionary, Johnston had grown up on the Navajo reservation, and realized the language was almost impossible to master without early exposure.
The program proved a success, and expanded to include around 400 Native American code talkers in WWII. […] The US military picked the Navajo as its main source of code talkers since they were “the only tribe in the United States that has not been infested with German students during the past 20 years,” commanding general Clayton Vogel wrote in a March 6, 1942 letter.
After the US successfully used the Choctaw language to transmit secret messages during World War I, Germany and Japan had sent students to the US to study Native American languages. Navajo was one language they did not pick up.
More details (and photos) at the link; I hadn’t been aware of the earlier use of Choctaw or of the students from Germany and Japan. Thanks, Bonnie!
Also, check out WOBO: Words from Old Books, with subsections on Vintage dictionaries of Word, Phrase, and Fable, Thieves’ Cant and Slang, and printing and type, inter alia. Thanks, Stu!
“the language was almost impossible to master without early exposure.”
Wait, it was the sacred mystery of Japanese!!!
My favorite part of the story is how it led to the development of a lot of specialized terminology (especially for military topics, naturally). To maintain the integrity of Navaho as a whole-lexeme substantial cipher, the use of loanwords was discouraged. So the first young men in the program had to develop and standardize a lot of terms for things that would need to communicate about, but which had not been part of the traditional Navaho vocabulary.
It seems a fair enough judgment, at least, that Navajo is not at the easier end for L2 acquirers …
There seem to be only a handful of L2 speakers who have ever acquired much fluency in Navajo.
Gladys Reichard seems to have been one of the few:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/3346644
(A very interesting account of her professional career in general.)
@DE, FSI and DLI also rank Japanese among the harderst (alongside Arabic, so it is not very convincing. No, I’m not fluent but it is not terryifying)….
These days, Navajo has by a substantial amount more speakers than any other “native” language in the U.S. Maybe things weren’t quite as lopsided between the World Wars, but it seems an odd one for German linguistic fieldworkers to have overlooked if in fact they had any pragmatic/military motivations. Presumably someone could factcheck the claim in the article by a survey of German scholarship on indigenous North American languages during the interwar years, but I wonder if maybe the researchers had dopey/idealistic non-military motivations like recreating proto-Algonquin or whatever and had put off digging into Athabaskan languages for another decade or two but then got interrupted by the war. Maybe they figured they were healthy enough they wouldn’t go extinct in the meantime, unlike some others?
The students from Germany and Japan is one of those details that frequently comes up in writings on this subject but is never really sourced—the Wikipedia article even refers to a specific team of thirty German anthropologists, but the linked source makes no mention of it. The book Fellow Tribesmen by Frank Usbeck (on the longstanding German interest in Native Americans) states that German researchers did visit indigenous communities during the ’30s and were regarded with suspicion by U.S. government officials, but it also says there’s nothing to confirm whether those suspicions were correct and that further research is needed in this area. The claim that “Navaho is the only tribe in the United States that has not been infested with German students during the past twenty years” strikes me as a post facto rationalization for using Navajo instead of some other language—in fact Philip Johnston’s original proposal mentioned Sioux, Chippewa, and Oʼodham/Papago-Pima as alternative candidates.
Presumably someone could factcheck the claim in the article by a survey of German scholarship on indigenous North American languages during the interwar years, but I wonder if maybe the researchers had dopey/idealistic non-military motivations like recreating proto-Algonquin or whatever and had put off digging into Athabaskan languages for another decade or two but then got interrupted by the war.
Günter Wagner was probably the most famous German to do fieldwork during the interwar period and his research focused on the Yuchi, who numbered only 216 members per the 1930 census. So pretty safe to say his motivations at least were non-military.
The claim that “Navaho is the only tribe in the United States that has not been infested with German students during the past twenty years” strikes me as a post facto rationalization for using Navajo instead of some other language—in fact Philip Johnston’s original proposal mentioned Sioux, Chippewa, and Oʼodham/Papago-Pima as alternative candidates.
That makes a lot of sense.
Hmm. And German wikipedia indicates that Wagner was if anything more of an Africanist than Americanist, although he did take “eine Studienreise zur Erforschung des Peyote-Kults” (not that there’s anything wrong with that).
An anthropologist rather than a linguist, too, by the look of it (though you might hope that a quondam disciple of Boas would be a bit of both.)
Obligatory xkcd: https://m.xkcd.com/257/
The idea of malicious German scholars looks like a conspiracy theory that nominally can be true.
Cf. Wehr’s dictionary (funded as a part of an effort to translate Mein Fampf).
Some 10 years ago the pro-government line (I mean what pro-government people said) about any protests in Moscow was that several million dollars were invested in changing our regime. Nominally, likely true. But I know why people protest (and no, they don’t receive any money), and some here likely have “several millions”.
The encrypted communications of the Irish army’s UNIFIL detachment in South Lebanon have an Irish base text. This may deter opportunist eavesdropping but not professionals. Anything that opens a new market for Irish textbooks is good.
And someone in Ireland is giving online Irish lessons to Mossad and Hezbollah members…
“The Type 1 code consisted of 26 Navajo words that stood for individual English letters. For example, the Navajo word for “ant,” “wo-la-chee,” was used to represent the letter “a” in English. To speed up transmissions, the code talkers then developed the Type 2 code, which included a dictionary of 411 terms for military words that didn’t exist in the Navajo language.”
How is this an unbreakable code? Type 1 is just a 1 to 1 substitution of the letters of the alphabet! The Navajo substitutes for T H E must have been used, in order, with sufficient frequency to get an English-speaking decoder started. Type 2 is just 1 to 1 substitutions of words for commonly used words, also not the greatest challenge. Did they also mix in Navajo syntax?
Granted, it helped that decoders had only intercepted verbal exchanges to work from, the native Navajo speakers presumably could talk very fast, and the decoders may not have been fully proficient in English. Still.
@drasvi, I vaguely recall reading claims (have not investigated the matter in any detail) that Wehr was perhaps not so much malicious as opportunistic, i.e. he deliberately invented a regime-friendly potential application for a project he wanted to do anyway for other reasons in the hope that that would get him funding from the (malicious at the very least) regime in question, not to mention other benefits, e.g. if you’re working on a Strategically-Important Dictionary that presumably provided some protection from being shipped off to the Eastern Front as cannon fodder.
I wonder if the people who found those German anthropologists/linguists suspicious were the same ones who decided that small time bankrobbers like John Dillinger and Clyde Barrow were far more dangerous than powerful bosses of organized crime like Joe Bonanno and Charlie Luciano.
@arthur: My understanding is that, in a lot of situations, the radio operators just spoke Navaho to each other, with the added Type 2 vocabulary when needed. A lot of radio communications, even in challenging military situations, give the person making the transmission wide latitude to phrase their message as they please. These communications were essentially in a whole-lexeme substitution* cipher (to say nothing of the grammar), which is obviously very difficult to break. However, the Type 1 coding of the alphabet was also needed for certain situations—in particular, when messages needed to be sent verbatim; or when they needed to send a word that was not part of their established (standard Navaho plus Type 2 cipher) vocabulary and needed to spell it out. When they switched to the alphabetic cipher, they obviously lost a great deal of security—although to break the Type 1 code would still be a challenge because of the way it was intermixed with the natural language encoding. And, indeed, it seems that nobody ever came close to cracking any meaningful part of the cipher.
* Typing on my phone, I used the wrong (“substantial”) word here in a previous comment.
We discussed Wehr back in 2018, though we don’t seem to have come to any conclusions about his degree of Nazification.
Linguistics in the benefit of war was, understandably, never limited to one side. James Matisoff wrote:
Ah, the oldest occupation of the scientist.
(Seriously, for a decade after 9/11, every NSF application in shouting distance of biology claimed to have an application in the prevention of or defense against “bioterrorism”.)
Then again, the Nazis may just have liked Wehr’s name. It means “defense” in the appropriate literary/poetic register needed to glorify war, as in Wehrmacht “defense force”.
(…It also means “weir”, but never mind.)
Yep. And for a long part of the 2000s IIRC, far too many applications to document small/endangered languages put in some boilerplate about how understanding language diversity will potentially result in better natural language processing. And botanists are probably still bound to mention the potential for drug discovery.
My earlier comment may indeed have been motivated by vague memories of that 2018 thread.
German WP has a lot more details on Wehr, including details on the contributions of the Jewish scholar Hedwig Klein, whose work on Wehr’s dictionary temporarily saved her from state murder.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedwig_Klein
Wehr appears to have exploited this in his de-Nazification hearings after the war.
You should click on that 2018 LH link.
“exploited”
I have no single reason to think bad about Hans Wehr.
You should click on that 2018 LH link
Yes: in traditional LH fashion, I had forgotten all about it. But who needs a memory, when we have LH?
@Arthur, Brett
I knew that the Navajo code talkers were, basically, speaking Navajo except using code words instead of all the words that would be borrowed words in actual Navajo. Which in the context would be a lot of words. I did not know, though, what they did if they encountered something that there wasn’t a Navajo word for nor a code word. Having a alphabetic code in Navajo makes a lot of sense. And if the letter based type 1 code is mixed in with speaking in Navajo and type 2 code, then listeners who don’t know Navajo wouldn’t pick out the type 1 code from the rest.
re: wehr: here’s a fairly engaging talk on the parallel case of nazi linguist franz beranek, and his postwar attempts to launder his reputation.
@David Eddyshaw: An anthropologist rather than a linguist, too, by the look of it (though you might hope that a quondam disciple of Boas would be a bit of both.)
Unfortunately Wagner’s linguistics work never saw the light of day, with the exception of a Yuchi grammar that appeared in the third volume of the Boas-edited Handbook of American Indian Languages. But he certainly did a fair amount, completing a Yuchi dictionary that was never published (I suspect for lack of interest) and leaving behind a collection of notebooks relating to his studies of the Bukusu and Logooli languages—he had intended to use these for a book but died before he could get around to it.
And since the subject has come up, Wagner had his own history with Nazism, spending the war years on the payroll of the Goebbels-sponsored “Institute for the Study of the Jewish Question” (not to be confused with the Rosenberg-sponsored “Institute for Research on the Jewish Question”), possibly in connection with the shelved plan to deport European Jews to Madagascar.
I think this bit from the article is clearly nonsense:
both because the first sentence is untrue (see below) and also because putting the second sentence after the first kind of implies a connection: e.g., Philip Johnston proposed his idea because he somehow knew about Japanese breaking of American codes. Even if the first sentence were true, how would people in the US know, especially in early 1942? (Worrying about the possibility was certainly possible and sensible, of course.)
This discussion of Japanese codebreaking efforts in the 1920s-1940s notes successes in breaking US diplomatic codes. The biggest success against US military codes was by the Japanese Army against the US Army’s main M-209 cipher, but that came late in the war: “Apart from low level codes the M-209 cipher machine was successfully analyzed and decoded in late 1944.” And the separate Japanese Navy efforts were less successful: “During the Pacific war most US military codes proved secure. There was only limited success with the US Navy’s CSP-642 strip cipher.”
Looking at the references in the Insider article, it seems Yoonji Han is relying uncritically on — and occasionally plagiarizing from — a speech by Arizona congressman Paul Gosar, not exactly someone I would trust as an accurate source.
In addition to Choctaw code talkers, there were also code talkers using Cheyenne, Cherokee, Comanche, Ho-Chunk, Osage, and Yankton Sioux during WW1.
@Josh Martin:
Thanks indeed for that link: it’s thoughtful and very interesting (in a melancholy way.)
It’s nice to imagine that one would have been braver and more principled than Wagner in his shoes, though also all too easy to delude oneself. It occurred to me recently that, at the time these scholars made their odious compromises with Nazism, they had no way of knowing that its reign would be (relatively) short, as we do with hindsight. Still …
I note the references to Wagner’s children and to his wife’s poor health, too. The Kusaasi say:
Zʋwɔk daan pʋ gaŋid bugumm “One with a long tail does not jump over a fire.”
Peter Erwin: Thanks for that much-needed correction!
Navajo codetalking was used for tactical comms, so the application of ordinary cryptanalysis was more or less irrelevant: if you can’t decode it in real time, you might as well not try. Among its advantages were that it did not require any equipment or codebooks (all in the head); another is that it was highly resistant to forged messages, as a non-native Navajo accent would be instantly detectable by the codetalker at the other end.
The Japanese eventually did figure out that the code was based on Navajo; they captured a Navajo and forced him to translate the messages under torture, but of course they were still gibberish at the semantic level due to the word substitutions.