The Navajo Code Talkers, Part 2

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Anything You Want to Talk About?

(No.)

Grading Deadline

Last reminder: all grading meetings must be finished by 5:00 PM on December 21 (next Tuesday). The reflective essay has to be shared with me or emailed to me by that evening.

There are no grading meetings for the reflective essay.

Code-Talkers

Follow-up discussion of experiences using the Navajo code on Friday.

Experience

How easy or hard did you find it to use the Navajo code? Did you encounter any pitfalls with it? Comments on the racial imagery on the cover of the dictionary? Other thoughts or reactions?

Having to spell parts of a message makes the system harder to use for both encryption and decryption, but having codes for entire words helps.

Looking things up in the dictionary takes time. But in actual use, the code talkers memorized that dictionary, so look-up was presumably less of a problem.

The picture on the cover of the dictionary generated interesting ideas.

• On the one hand, the picture appears to show racist caricatures of Native Americans very parallel to the caricatures of African Americans we talked about earlier: they speak broken English, wear stereotypical clothing and carry stereotypical weapons, etc. These caricatures are particularly ironic because the dictionary itself is about a “primitive” Native American language playing a key role in a vital national effort.
• Another reading was that the cover shows White marines imitating Native Americans in honor of their contributions to the war. This may change the nature of the caricatures, but raises questions of cultural appropriation. The question of whether imitating characteristics of another culture is a form of flattery or of mockery is still very real today, and very dangerous — imitation tends to be seen as mockery regardless of how it’s meant.

Evaluation

What do you think of this as a cryptosystem? What do you see as its strengths? Its weaknesses? Other thoughts?

The fact that the code was spoken rather than written probably made it stronger in some ways, e.g., the spoken language has nuances that don’t come across in writing but that might matter to meaning.

The code might be better for communicating short-lived secrets than long-lived ones, i.e., even if the Japanese had broken it, the time required to translate from Navajo to English and then to Japanese orders might have been too long for many purposes. This is consistent with a talk I once heard a code talker veteran give, in which he talked about using the code for things like requesting artillery support for units fighting on the ground, with turn-around times of 5 minutes or so.

Some aspects of the code are rather naive. For example, being a substitution cipher with a limited number of possible substitutions for each letter means that breaking individual letters in one message provides useful clues for recognizing those letters elsewhere in the same message or in future ones.

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