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. In particular, 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 a number of decisive victories. Their code was never broken.
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. If there was no corresponding word in the Indigenous language for the military word, code talkers used short, descriptive phrases. For example, the Navajo did not have a word for submarine, so they translated it as iron fish.
The term Code Talker was originally coined by the United States Marine Corps and used to identify individuals who completed the special training required to qualify as Code Talkers with their service records indicating "642 – Code Talker" as a duty assignment. Today, the term Code Talker is still strongly associated with the bilingual Navajo speakers trained in the Navajo Code during World War II by the US Marine Corps to serve in all six divisions of the Corps and the Marine Raiders of the Pacific theater. However, the use of Native American communicators pre-dates WWII. Early pioneers of Native American-based communications used by the US Military include 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.
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.
Languages
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 in May of that year, 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 being 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.