During World War II, the United States needed a secure and immediate method of communication, or code, that couldn't be figured out or broken by our enemies. The Japanese military had become highly skilled at breaking the United States codes - most of them actually trained in the United States. This gave the Japanese insight into American terminology, slang and train of thought. Because they'd received an education in cryptography on American soil, the Japanese had the ability to break the codes used by the US during the attack on Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941.
A man named Philip Johnston came up with the idea to use the Navajo language as a communication code during World War II. The son of a missionary to the Navajos, Johnston was one of the few non-Navajo people able to fluently speak Navajo, because he'd lived with the Navajos for so many years. Johnston had served in World War I, and because of that military experience, he completely understood the need for secure, quick and unbreakable modes of communication. There had been previous attempts to use a Native American language as a communication code, but those attempts had failed due to the fact that the Indian language didn't contain words which related to "airplane", "tank", or "admiral". .
Johnston then came up with replacing these types of words with things that the Navajos could relate them to like "bird" for airplane and "turtle" for tank. After all the work Philip presented the idea to Colonel James E. Jones, to use the Navajo language as a way of secure communication. An exhibition of the Navajo code was then offered to General Vogel and Colonel Wethered Woodward. In this exhibition four Navajos were given combat messages which they had to broadcast to one another and decipher the message from English to Navajo and back to English. The Navajos were able to encode, transmit, and decode a three line message in English in under 20 seconds.
