What were the circumstances for many Navajo Code Talkers after returning to reservation life? During the war, the Navajo had become used to life off the reservation. Navajos on the reservation could not vote and were not considered equal to US citizens.

Navajo had no words to describe modern warfare. Instead the Code Talkers took inspiration from familiar sights from the Navajo reservation back home.

The Navajo Code Talkers were successful because they provided a fast, secure and error-free line of communication by telephone and radio during World War II in the Pacific. The 29 initial recruits developed an unbreakable code, and they were successfully trained to transmit the code under intense conditions.

Answer Expert Verified Native Americans who could speak Navajo had to go back to their regular lives which often weren’t very good because all of their wartime efforts were highly classified.

The Navajo Code Talkers were a group of Native Americans who served in the United States Marine Corps during World War II. Their mission was to send and receive secret coded messages that the enemy could not understand. The job of these brave Marines was critical to the American victory over Japan.

The one unbreakable code turned out to be a natural language whose phonetic and grammatical structure was so different from the languages familiar to the enemy that it was almost impossible to transcribe much less translate. The unbreakable code was coded Navajo spoken by native speakers of Navajo.

The Navajo Code was never used in a written form. If it had been, it could have been subjected to the same methods of code breaking that the world was using on operational and strategic codes like Enigma. The Navajo code was far less complex than Enigma and would not have held up well to such attacks.

The difficult consonants, vowels, and the tonal structure made it impossible for most untrained people to even transcribe. The Japanese had been good at breaking every code before that. It used no code book and was entirely memorized. For each English letter three possible Navajo words were used.

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Most people have heard of the famous Navajo (or Diné) code talkers who used their traditional language to transmit secret Allied messages in the Pacific theater of combat during World War II.

On July 26, 2001, the original 29 Code Talkers were awarded the Congressional Gold Medal, while the remaining members were awarded the Silver Medal, during a ceremony at the White House. Of the roughly 400 code talkers who served during World War II, 13 were killed in action.

More than 400 Navajo men were recruited as Code Talkers. Only four are still alive — Thomas H. Begay, John Kinsel Jr., Samuel Sandoval and Peter MacDonald Sr.

29 Code Talkers

In addition to the dangers of war, the code talkers faced other challenges. Because of their skin color and facial features, which resemble the Japanese, the Navajos were often mistaken for the enemy and challenged by their own troops.