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
It was a poorly documented language with no speakers in Germany or japan. It had multiple encryption layers – it was not just English encoded in another language. To translate it, first you needed the vocabulary. Then you needed to understand the grammar – to understand whether “boy dog bite” means the boy bit the dog or the dog bit the boy. Then there was the idioms – the code talkers were all from the same community and talked to each other like native speakers from the same neighbourhood. You would need to understand that sayings like “we are going to make a few omelettes” meant things were going to get messy and not that they were making breakfast. And lastly, they did word substitutions – so even when you got through all of that, you would need to know that (for example – I don’t know the actual code words) “orange mushroom” meant “the president”.
In many ways, it was a very robust encryption technique, the only risk being if the enemy had a native Navaho speaker that the allies didn’t know about.
Edit: Thank you kind stranger for the gold.
Latest Answers