Navajo Code Talkers

New York, NY: Walker & Company, 2000. Fourth Printing [stated]. Trade paperback. Very good. Glued binding. 96 p. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Foreword by Roy O. Hawthorne. Navajo Code Talkers tells the story of this special group, who proved themselves to be among the bravest, most valuable, and most loyal of American soldiers during World War II. On the Pacific front during World War II, strange messages were picked up by American and Japanese forces on land and at sea. The messages were totally unintelligible to everyone except a small select group within the Marine Corps: the Navajo code talkers-a group of Navajos communicating in a code based on the Navajo language. This code, the first unbreakable one in U.S. history, was a key reason that the Allies were able to win in the Pacific. From Wikipedia: "Code talkers are people in the 20th century who used obscure languages as a means of secret communication during wartime. The term is now usually associated with the United States soldiers during the world wars who used their knowledge of Native American languages as a basis to transmit coded messages. In particular, there were approximately 400-500 Native Americans in the United States Marine Corps whose primary job was the transmission of secret tactical messages. The name code talkers is strongly associated with bilingual Navajo speakers specially recruited during World War II by the Marines to serve in their standard communications units in the Pacific Theater. Other Native American code talkers were deployed by the United States Army during World War II, including Lakota, Meskwaki, and Comanche soldiers. Soldiers of Basque ancestry were also used for code talking by the U.S. Marines during World War II."