Sunday 19 August 2018

Navajo Code Talkers by Nathan Aaseng - Book Review




A few years ago, after watching the Nicholas Cage movie ''The wind talkers'' i had come to learn about the diminutive coloured Navajo tribe for the first time. The Navajos are the ancient tribal people living in the United States of America over long long years, whose origin is quite difficult to find out. The book 'Navajo code talkers' provides the readers valuable information about the past tragic history as well as the age old culture of the Navajo tribe . In the later chapters of the book the outstanding achievement of the Navajo code talkers in the pacific theater of war has been vividly described by the author. While the US marines confronted directly with the ferocious Japanese soldiers island by island, the Navajo warriors added impetus to the US war effort by transmitting valuable information to the front line in a coded language, which even the most intelligent Japanese code experts could not decipher. The Navajo's work in the battlefield was held in such cocoon of secrecy that even long years after the end of World War 2 , their contribution to the pacific victory was not deliberately recognized. 







This is how the author describes the worth of the Navajo code in time of dire need : ''A good code is like a well-crafted component of an automobile engine. The contributions of the individual engine parts are seldom appreciated until the car breaks down at a crucial time. In the same way, the code talkers’ role consisted, for the most part, of reliable performing a routine job. The tremendous contribution of the Navajo code can best be understood by considering what happened to the Japanese when their codes broke down.'' At least ten thousands of marines' lives were saved due to the sacrifice of the Navajo code talkers. The Navajos had to work under the constant threat of being caught alive by the Japanese. The Japanese tried most of the times to catch the Navajos alive in order to extract information about the mysterious code language from them by applying unimaginable brutal physical torture . Yet not a single Navajo did yield to the enemy. They proved their caliber and mettle from Guadalcanal to Tarawa, from Guam to Saipan, from Iwojima to Okinawa again again, far surpassing the merit and efficiency of the conventional US code talkers each time.




                                                                                                                                                                  Despite the long history of shameless racial discrimination and exploitation of the Navajo tribe by the U.S. government , they never showed reluctance when their nation had felt their need in history's darkest hour. They had promptly responded to the call of duty and eventually had become an inseparable part of US military. Out of 10000 Navajo code talkers nearly 3600 were killed or wounded in the battlefield reminding the world once again the famous quote by Winston Churchill, ''Never was so much owed by so many to so few.''  







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