Living Tongues: reading informational text; The Code that Was Never Broken 7

The Code That Was Never Broken

1. During war, things change quickly on the battlefield. Troops need to be able to send messages to one another and to the military leaders who are making fundamental decisions. Enemy advancing by foot—1 day away. Submarines spotted off the northern coast—deploy available resources. All supplies destroyed by drone strikes. One well-timed message may signify success or failure, victory or defeat.
2. Of course, the enemy is always listening for military secrets. How do militaries send messages that the enemy can’t understand? They use secret codes!
3. During World War II, the United States fought against Germany, Italy, and Japan; also known as the Axis Powers. Early on in the war, the United States developed several secret codes, but the Japanese were always able to break them. By having their messages intercepted and correctly decoded, the US military was constantly exposed. The Japanese forces knew where US troops were and what they were doing.
4. Then, late in 1942, everything changed. The United States developed a new coding strategy. They started employing an elite group of soldiers that were able to communicate messages using a truly unique code. The Japanese had their best codebreakers working overtime to crack the code. They also called in professors of linguistics—people who study languages in a systematic, scientific way—but not even these experts could make sense of the messages. In fact, the Japanese were never able to break the code. Thanks to the soldiers sending and receiving these uniquely coded messages, the United States was able to win key battles. So who were these heroes?
5. The Navajo code talkers!
6. At the start, 29 Native American men from the Navajo nation were recruited by the United States Marines to develop and learn, an unbreakable code, and bring it to the battlefield. The men selected were especially suited for the job because they spoke both English and Navajo. Navajo is the language of the Navajo Nation, a Native American people from what is now the southwestern United States. The Navajo code talkers could communicate with their fellow soldiers but use a code that incorporated words and phrases from a language that no one except Navajo speakers understood. The Navajo language is very complex and can be tough to learn for people who don’t grow up speaking it. Plus, at this point, no one had written the language down—it was only spoken. Even if the Japanese discovered that the code used Navajo words and phrases, they couldn’t just go to the store and buy a Navajo dictionary.
7. Over the course of the war, more than 400 men from the Navajo nation bravely served as code talkers. The code they developed during World War II is the only unbroken code in the history of modern war. Today, the Navajo language thrives. The 2010 US census found that there were just under 170,000 Navajo speakers in the country, making it one of the most widely-spoken Native American languages in the USA today.

Practice questions

Part A

Part B