So how did the Navajo code work?

USA Today

Noah Emmerich and Mark Ruffalo star in the film dramatization of how Navajo Indians used their not-very-widely-known language to help crush Japan in World War II. MGM

When a Navajo code talker received a message, he heard a string of unrelated Navajo words. He then translated each word into its English equivalent. The first letters of each word eventually formed the message.

For example, "Navy" in code talk was tsah (needle), wol-la-chee (ant), ah-keh-di-glini (victor) and tsah-ah-dzoh (yucca).

To complicate matters for the enemy, more than one word could be assigned to each letter ("a" could be the Navajo word for ant or the word for apple, be-la-sana).

Further confounding the Japanese was the inventive assignment of Navajo words to a variety of military terms and equipment. For example:

• Besh-lo, or "iron fish," meant submarine.
• Dah-he-tih-hi, hummingbird, was a fighter plane.
• Debeh-li-zine, black street, stood for squad.

"What's most amazing," says code talker historian Zonnie Gorman, "is these codes had to be memorized, because they didn't want any books falling into the wrong hands. These men were literally walking, talking secret weapons."