USA HISTORY

AMERICAN IMPERIALISM(1890 1919)

THE UNITED STATES IN WORLD WAR I

[SOURCES]
How did the Navajo men help during the war?

(A) They fought very hard.

(B) ** They created a secret code.They joined the Navy.

(C) They joined the Navy.

EXPLANATIONS BELOW

Concept note-1: -The U.S. Marines knew where to find one: the Navajo Nation. Marine Corps leadership selected 29 Navajo men, the Navajo Code Talkers, who created a code based on the complex, unwritten Navajo language. The code primarily used word association by assigning a Navajo word to key phrases and military tactics.

Concept note-2: -Their code book used one to three Navajo words for each alphabet letter, which consisted of animal names and short words used to spell vital information about the locations of the Japanese military and U.S. soldiers, to say where to position artillery, and to relay wartime communication.

Concept note-3: -In 1942, Philip Johnston – a son of missionaries who grew up on the Navajo Nation – came up with the idea for the Navajo Code Talker program after reading a news article about Native American soldiers delivering messages during Army training exercises in their mother tongues.

Concept note-4: -Code talkers didn’t speak plain language in Navajo, but rather encoded the messages in a phonetic code and incorporated other vocabulary adaptations to meet the needs of modern warfare. Thus, anyone seeking to intercept the messages would have to know both the Navajo language and the codebook.

Concept note-5: -During World War II, sending and receiving codes without the risk of the enemy deciphering the transmission required hours of encrypting and decrypting the code. The U.S. Marine Corps, in an effort to find quicker and more secure ways to send and receive code, enlisted Navajos as code talkers.