Did you know the Navajo were neither the only nor the first code talkers?

The several hundred Navajo Code Talkers of World War II receive deserved acclaim for their contribution to the war. By translating messages into their own language, unintelligible to and unbreakable by Japanese cryptographers, they could send and receive secure radio transmissions in the Pacific much faster than it was possible with standard machine-aided encryption. But what you might not have known was that they were neither the only ones nor the first to do so.

Code talking began in World War I, when both Cherokee and Choctaw soldiers performed a similar service in Europe, though in smaller numbers and for a shorter time. The practice was revived for World War II, but the Navajo weren't the only First Nations people to help the U.S. war effort with their language. Soldiers from the Assiniboine, Comanche, Crow, Hopi, Lakota, Meskwaki (also known as Fox Indians), Mohawk, Seminole and Creek (speaking the same Muscogee language) and Tlingit nations all lent their services and languages to the same purpose. While not a Native American language, Basque (from Spain) was also considered for the purpose and used in very limited capacity.

Other nations also adopted the technique. Canada had Cree talkers, and Britain developed a system to use Welsh speakers (Welsh is unrelated to Germanic languages and is thus incomprehensible for English and German speakers), but it was not used very widely.

A few other nations continued to copy the practice after World War II, even to this day. During the currently ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine, Ukrainian forces sometimes use ethnic Hungarian soldiers as radiomen who use their own non-Slavic native language to send messages.

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