I had always just believed it was because they were isolated, but I’d been thinking about it lately and that just doesn’t hold up. Can someone familiar with code breaking and encryption help me understand why they were nearly impossible to understand, while almost every other cipher was eventually cracked? Thank you!
In: Mathematics
One of the challenges was that it was used for fast, tactical communication.
If you decrypt an Enigma message two hours later, an U-Boot is probably going to have a bad day.
If you manage to painstakingly translate a code talker message two hours later… doesn’t matter, your troops are already dead.
So even if the Japanese somehow managed to reverse-engineer a foreign language for which they had no native speakers, no textbooks, no written texts in the language, no Rosetta Stone style examples that “X means Y”… that would still not be enough. They’d have to train many people to be able to fluently understand it.
Also, it’s a language, so unlike a code where you have well defined, clear numbers or symbols to work with, it’s a stream of fast-paced, hard-to-understand utterances. And the clock is ticking, doesn’t do you much good if you figure it out in 1945 just as the nuke is falling over Nagasaki.
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