AZ: The History of Arizona podcast · David Rookhuyzen

Episode 247: The Code Talkers, Part I: 356,000 Ways to Say Go

·33 min·3 clips
Navajo Code Talkers transmitted military messages in 40 seconds, while standard methods took an hour.
This episode explores the origins of the Navajo Code Talkers in World War II, starting with earlier uses of Amerindian languages in WWI. It details how Philip Johnson proposed using Navajo to create an unbreakable code, the recruitment and training of the first 29 men, and the linguistic and cultural factors that made Navajo ideal for this secret mission.

As heard by us

A careful setup for the code talker story, with enough historical context to make the groundwork matter.

Episode 247 works as a measured setup for the Navajo Code Talkers story. It explains why Navajo made sense for code work: the Germans had overlooked it after World War I, it was not written down, it had resisted English borrowings, and only about 30 non-Navajo were thought to…

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Why you'd press play

You want the origin story before the code becomes a battlefield weapon.

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