Try putting together a guy's/girl's night when no on has a phone. Where do you meet, when, where? Imagine trying to move thousands of troops and resources around without constant communication. Well that whole thing had been figured out way before WW2. But what do you do when that life line of communication starts to work against you because your enemy is listening in and knows everything you're doing. The Pacific Theater was basically a series of islands being fought over at different times. Coded communication from ships to shore, and on the battlefield were being intercepted by the Japanese and decoded almost as fast as the codes could be created. One code went the entire war never being broken. The Navajo Code. The Navajo soldiers at the center to our episode were men that during childhood in white-run Indian schools were punished for using their native language. We pretty much did everything we could to kill their culture. Well once WW2 rolled around a man with knowledge of the Navajo Language recommended it to the U.S. Marine Corp due to its insane complexity, small number of people fluent, and the fact it didn't have written counterpart that made it indecipherable to the Japanese. Find out about the Navajo men who created the code and fought on the front lines providing the communications that helped win the war in the Pacific.  

Support the show