Re: Gone With or Without fanfare
Posted: June 6th, 2014, 10:02 am
Just a few days before the 70th anniversary of D-Day, the last of the Navajo Code Talkers, Chester Nez, passed away.
On this day remembrance for those who fought so valiantly, remembering Chester Nez and all the others.
From the NYTimes:
To the end of his life, Chester Nez recalled the first message he sent over the radio while serving at Guadalcanal: “Enemy machine gun nest on your right. Destroy.”
Receiving the message, American forces eliminated the threat.
Mr. Nez, a former United States Marine who died on Wednesday at 93, had sent the message not in English but rather in a code he had helped create. It originally went much like this: “Anaai (Enemy) naatsosi (Japanese) beeldooh alhaa dildoni (machine gun) nishnaajigo nahdikadgo (on your right flank). Diiltaah (Destroy).”
The code was fashioned from Navajo, the language that Mr. Nez grew up speaking, was later barred from speaking and still later helped craft into a military code so impervious that it helped the United States secure victory in the Pacific in the summer of 1945.
Mr. Nez was the last surviving member of the 29 original Navajo code talkers, who at the urgent behest of the federal government devised an encrypted version of their language for wartime use. They and the hundreds of Navajos who followed them into battle used that code, with unparalleled success, throughout the Pacific theater.
Not fully declassified until 1968, the Navajo code remains the only oral military code that has never been broken.
Mr. Nez’s death, at his home in Albuquerque, was confirmed by Judith Schiess Avila, the co-author of his memoir, “Code Talker,” published in 2011.
For Mr. Nez and his fellows, World War II was quite literally a war of words. Their work, and the safety of tens of thousands of American servicemen, depended crucially on the code that they had created during 13 fevered weeks in 1942, as the prospect of Allied victory in the Pacific seemed increasingly uncertain.
Members of other Native American tribes, including the Comanche, Choctaw and Winnebago, using codes based on their languages, were also recruited for the war effort, serving in Europe and North Africa. But the Navajo, who served in the Pacific, furnished the war’s single largest contingent of code talkers.
About 400 Navajos followed the original 29 to war; of that later group, about 35 are still living, The Navajo Times, a tribal newspaper, reported this week.
Serving on the front lines in the Pacific’s key battles, Mr. Nez and other members of the Marine Corps’s 382nd Platoon — made up entirely of Navajos recruited for their fluency in the language — used the code to relay movements of American and enemy troops, casualty reports, coordinates of strategic targets and other vital intelligence to Marines in the field.
“There were no machines or other devices that could scramble voice communications that could be used on the front lines,” David A. Hatch, the National Security Agency’s historian, said in an interview on Thursday. “What the code talkers did was to provide absolute security for the information we transmitted on the radios, denying to the enemy vital information that we were picking up from their communications.”
In 2001, Mr. Nez and the 28 other creators of the code were awarded the Congressional Gold Medal, most posthumously, by President George W. Bush.
For more: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/06/us/ch ... .html?_r=0
On this day remembrance for those who fought so valiantly, remembering Chester Nez and all the others.
From the NYTimes:
To the end of his life, Chester Nez recalled the first message he sent over the radio while serving at Guadalcanal: “Enemy machine gun nest on your right. Destroy.”
Receiving the message, American forces eliminated the threat.
Mr. Nez, a former United States Marine who died on Wednesday at 93, had sent the message not in English but rather in a code he had helped create. It originally went much like this: “Anaai (Enemy) naatsosi (Japanese) beeldooh alhaa dildoni (machine gun) nishnaajigo nahdikadgo (on your right flank). Diiltaah (Destroy).”
The code was fashioned from Navajo, the language that Mr. Nez grew up speaking, was later barred from speaking and still later helped craft into a military code so impervious that it helped the United States secure victory in the Pacific in the summer of 1945.
Mr. Nez was the last surviving member of the 29 original Navajo code talkers, who at the urgent behest of the federal government devised an encrypted version of their language for wartime use. They and the hundreds of Navajos who followed them into battle used that code, with unparalleled success, throughout the Pacific theater.
Not fully declassified until 1968, the Navajo code remains the only oral military code that has never been broken.
Mr. Nez’s death, at his home in Albuquerque, was confirmed by Judith Schiess Avila, the co-author of his memoir, “Code Talker,” published in 2011.
For Mr. Nez and his fellows, World War II was quite literally a war of words. Their work, and the safety of tens of thousands of American servicemen, depended crucially on the code that they had created during 13 fevered weeks in 1942, as the prospect of Allied victory in the Pacific seemed increasingly uncertain.
Members of other Native American tribes, including the Comanche, Choctaw and Winnebago, using codes based on their languages, were also recruited for the war effort, serving in Europe and North Africa. But the Navajo, who served in the Pacific, furnished the war’s single largest contingent of code talkers.
About 400 Navajos followed the original 29 to war; of that later group, about 35 are still living, The Navajo Times, a tribal newspaper, reported this week.
Serving on the front lines in the Pacific’s key battles, Mr. Nez and other members of the Marine Corps’s 382nd Platoon — made up entirely of Navajos recruited for their fluency in the language — used the code to relay movements of American and enemy troops, casualty reports, coordinates of strategic targets and other vital intelligence to Marines in the field.
“There were no machines or other devices that could scramble voice communications that could be used on the front lines,” David A. Hatch, the National Security Agency’s historian, said in an interview on Thursday. “What the code talkers did was to provide absolute security for the information we transmitted on the radios, denying to the enemy vital information that we were picking up from their communications.”
In 2001, Mr. Nez and the 28 other creators of the code were awarded the Congressional Gold Medal, most posthumously, by President George W. Bush.
For more: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/06/us/ch ... .html?_r=0