USA HISTORY

AMERICAN IMPERIALISM(1890 1919)

THE UNITED STATES IN WORLD WAR I

[SOURCES]
This minority group served in the US military as “code breakers”

(A) German Americans

(B) Japanese Americans

(C) Mexican Americans

(D) ** Navajo

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.

Concept note-2: -Navajo Code Talkers also grew, from 29 in 1942 to over 400 by the end of WWII in 1945. Navajo Code was only used in the Pacific War. Japanese tried to break the code, but were unsuccessful. USMC tell us that Navajo Code was the only military code, in modern history, never broken by an enemy.

Concept note-3: -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. Philip Johnston initiated the Marine Corps’s program to enlist and train Navajos as messengers.

Concept note-4: -Most people have heard of the famous Navajo (or Diné) code talkers who used their traditional language to transmit secret Allied messages in the Pacific theater of combat during World War II.

Concept note-5: -The idea to use the Navajo language as the basis of a secure radio code was proposed to the Marine Corps by Philip Johnston, a veteran of World War I who had spent much of his childhood on the Navajo Reservation where his parents worked as missionaries.