Political Quotes

“Mr. Speaker, thank you for joining me this evening to talk about a very special group of veterans, the Navajo Code Talkers. Tonight, my colleagues and I are going to share their stories and highlight the amazing accomplishments of this group of warriors. Their contribution to the Allied effort during World War II is widely credited with winning the Battle of Iwo Jima and making majors gains in the Pacific. During the early months of World War II, Japanese intelligence experts broke every code the U.S. forces devised. The Japanese were able to decode and intercept communications with ease. To combat this, increasingly complex codes were initiated that sometimes took hours at a time simply to decipher one message. Guadalcanal in 1942 was a turning point for the Allied military forces, who realized that the military communications needed a new direction, and new inspiration. Fortunately, an innovative citizen named Philip Johnston had the answer. As the son of a Protestant missionary, Johnston had grown up on the Navajo reservation and was one of less than 30 non-Navajos fluent in the unique Navajo language. He realized that since it had no alphabet and was almost impossible to master without early exposure, the Navajo language was a perfect choice to form a new, impenetrable military code. In 1942, Johnston completed an impressive demonstration of the Navajo language to the Commanding General of the Pacific fleet headquartered in San Diego.…”