Code talker
A code talker was a person employed by the military during wartime to use a little-known language as a means of secret communication. The term is most often used for United States service members during the World Wars who used their knowledge of Native American languages as a basis to transmit coded messages.
There were approximately 400 to 500 Native Americans in the United States Marine Corps whose primary job was to transmit secret tactical messages. Code talkers transmitted messages over military telephone or radio communications nets using formally or informally developed codes built upon their indigenous languages.
The code talkers improved the speed of encryption and decryption of communications in front line operations during World War II and are credited with some decisive victories. Their code was never broken.
Methods
There were two code types used during World War II.- Type one codes were formally developed based on the languages of the Comanche, Hopi, Meskwaki, and Navajo peoples. They used words from their languages for each letter of the English alphabet. Messages could be encoded and decoded by using a simple substitution cipher where the ciphertext was the Native language word.
- Type two code was informal and directly translated from English into the Indigenous language. Code talkers used short, descriptive phrases if there was no corresponding word in the Indigenous language for the military word. For example, the Navajo did not have a word for submarine, so they translated it as iron fish.
Training
The use of Native American communicators pre-dates World War II. Early pioneers of Native American-based communications used by the US military included the Cherokee, Choctaw, and Lakota peoples during World War I. Today the term code talker includes military personnel from all Native American communities who have contributed their language skills in service to the United States.
Native languages
Other Native American communicators—now referred to as code talkers—were deployed by the United States Army during World War II, including Lakota, Meskwaki, Mohawk, Comanche, Tlingit, Hopi, Cree, and Crow soldiers; they served in the Pacific, North African, and European theaters.Assiniboine
Native speakers of the Assiniboine language served as code talkers during World War II to encrypt communications. One of these code talkers was Gilbert Horn Sr., who grew up in the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation of Montana and became a tribal judge and politician.Basque
In November 1952, Euzko Deya magazine reported that sometime in May 1942, upon meeting a large number of US Marines of Basque ancestry in a San Francisco camp, Captain Frank D. Carranza had thought of using the Basque language for codes. His superiors were concerned about risk, as there were known settlements of Basque people in the Pacific region, including 35 Basque Jesuits in Hiroshima, led by Pedro Arrupe; a colony of Basque jai alai players in China and the Philippines; and Basque supporters of Falange in Asia. Consequently, the US Basque code talkers were not deployed in these theaters; instead, they were used initially in tests and in transmitting logistics information for Hawaii and Australia.According to Euzko Deya, on August 1, 1942, Lieutenants Nemesio Aguirre, Fernández Bakaicoa, and Juanana received a Basque-coded message from San Diego for Admiral Chester Nimitz. The message warned Nimitz of Operation Apple to remove the Japanese from the Solomon Islands. They also translated the start date, August 7, for the attack on Guadalcanal. As the war extended over the Pacific, there was a shortage of Basque speakers, and the US military came to prefer the parallel program based on the use of Navajo speakers.
In 2017, Pedro Oiarzabal and Guillermo Tabernilla published a paper refuting Euzko Deyas article. According to Oiarzabal and Tabernilla, they could not find Carranza, Aguirre, Fernández Bakaicoa, or Juanana in the National Archives and Records Administration or US Army archives. They did find a small number of US Marines with Basque surnames, but none of them worked in transmissions. They suggest that Carranza's story was an Office of Strategic Services operation to raise sympathy for US intelligence among Basque nationalists.
Cherokee
The US military's first known use of code talkers was during World War I. Cherokee soldiers of the US 30th Infantry Division fluent in the Cherokee language were assigned to transmit messages while under fire during the Second Battle of the Somme. According to the Division Signal Officer, this took place in September 1918 when their unit was under British command.Choctaw
During World War I, company commander Captain Lawrence of the US Army overheard Solomon Louis and Mitchell Bobb having a conversation in Choctaw. Upon further investigation, he found eight Choctaw men served in the battalion. The Choctaw men in the Army's 36th Infantry Division were trained to use their language in code. They helped the American Expeditionary Forces in several battles of the Meuse-Argonne Offensive. On October 26, 1918, the code talkers were pressed into service and the "tide of battle turned within 24 hours... and within 72 hours the Allies were on full attack."Comanche
German authorities knew about the use of code talkers during World War I. Germans sent a team of thirty anthropologists to the United States to learn Native American languages before the outbreak of World War II. However, the task proved too difficult because of the large array of Indigenous languages and dialects. Nonetheless, after learning of the Nazi effort, the US Army opted not to implement a large-scale code talker program in the European theater.Initially, 17 code talkers were enlisted, but three could not make the trip across the Atlantic until the unit was finally deployed. A total of 14 code talkers using the Comanche language took part in the Invasion of Normandy and served in the 4th Infantry Division in Europe. Comanche soldiers of the 4th Signal Company compiled a vocabulary of 250 code terms using words and phrases in their own language. Using a substitution method similar to that of the Navajo, the code talkers used descriptive words from the Comanche language for things that did not have translations. For example, the Comanche language code term for tank was turtle, bomber was pregnant bird, machine gun was sewing machine, and Adolf Hitler was crazy white man.
Two Comanche code talkers were assigned to each regiment, and the remainder were assigned to the 4th Infantry Division headquarters. The Comanche began transmitting messages shortly after landing on Utah Beach on June 6, 1944. Some were wounded but none killed.
In 1989, the French government awarded the Comanche code talkers the Chevalier of the National Order of Merit. On November 30, 1999, the United States Department of Defense presented Charles Chibitty with the Knowlton Award, in recognition of his outstanding intelligence work.
Cree
In World War II, the Canadian Armed Forces employed First Nations soldiers who spoke the Cree language as code talkers. Owing to oaths of secrecy and official classification through 1963, the role of Cree code talkers was less well-known than their US counterparts and went unacknowledged by the Canadian government. A 2016 documentary, Cree Code Talkers, tells the story of one such Métis individual, Charles "Checker" Tomkins. Tomkins died in 2003 but was interviewed shortly before his death by the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian. While he identified other Cree code talkers, "Tomkins may have been the last of his comrades to know anything of this secret operation."Hungarian
In 2022 during the Russo-Ukrainian War, the Hungarian language is reported to be used by the Ukrainian army to relay operational military information and orders to circumvent being understood by the invading Russian army without the need to encrypt and decipher the messages.Ukraine has a sizeable Hungarian population of over 150,000 people who live mainly in the Kárpátalja or Zakarpatska Oblast division of Ukraine, adjacent to Hungary. As Ukrainian nationals, men of enlistment age are also subject to military service, hence the Ukrainian army has a Hungarian-speaking capability. It is one of the most spoken and official languages of this region in present-day Ukraine. The Hungarian language is not an Indo-European language like the Slavic Ukrainian or Russian, but a Uralic language. For this reason, it is distinct and incomprehensible for Russian speakers.