e up with, but not the Navajo code.
Navajo is a spoken language handed down orally from generation to generation. The Code Talkers created a system of native words to represent characters of the English alphabet, so that they could spell out English words that had no Navajo equivalent. They also assigned their own expressions, like "iron-fish" to mean submarine, for over 400 important military terms. Each Code Talker memorized these special words. There were no written materials that could be captured.
Joe Kieyoomia, a Navajo soldier who was not trained as a Code Talker, was captured and survived the Bataan Death March, only to be tortured into trying to decode intercepted Marine communications. Left standing naked in the snow, feet frozen to the parade ground, he couldn't confess to what he didn't understand. The secret code made no sense, even to another Navajo.
It was said by high military officers that the Marines would never have taken Iwo Jima without the Navajo Code Talkers, and World War II might have had a different outcome without their contribution.
The 400 Navajos who were recruited and served as Code Talkers came home from the war and went through special native ceremonies called the "Enemy Way" to exorcise them of the painful memories of hand to hand combat and ghosts of the dead.
Incredibly, one of America's most valuable secret weapons had been developed thousands of years before there even was a United States....
It was the power of the Native American Language.
The Navajo Code