September 12, 2012 • 46 mins
In this episode co-hosted by TechStuff's Jonathan Strickland, the focus is on the codes and cryptologists of World War II. Tune in to learn more about the Enigma Machine, Alan Turing, Code Talkers and more in the conclusion of this two-part episode.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Scary Dowdy and I am joined again by Jonathan Strickland.
Hey there, So Jonathan has has joined me as part
(00:21):
of this little series that we're doing while Debilina is
on maternity leave. Um having different podcast co hosts on
the show to talk about their shows specialty. So in
Jonathan's case as the co host of Tech Stuff, that
is of course technology, but we're also going to be
talking about history, So technology in history. And last time
we talked, we were discussing cryptography, specifically cryptography as used
(00:46):
by the Axis Powers during World War Two. That's correct, yes,
And we were really focusing mainly on the Enigma machine,
which I think everyone would say is probably the most
famous machine as far as cryptography goes. It's one of
those that a lot of people, even if they don't
really know a lot about cryptography, often they'll say Enigma machine.
That sounds familiar. Wellen Alan Turing is so big these days, right,
(01:08):
He's finally getting the credit that was long due, and
he is so closely connected to the Enigma machine and
breaking that code that Yeah, a lot of people have
heard about it recently. Definitely, definitely, and hopefully they don't
think that it was a device used by the Riddler.
Different Enigma if they've listened, If you guys have listened
(01:28):
to that episode, you already know how that machine works.
And we also talked a little bit about the Japanese
code Purple, which is a very different but also um
a similar more similar to the Enigma than some of
the other codes we're going to be talking about today.
Right now, because some of the stuff we're going to
talk about is related to the Enigma, I was going
(01:50):
to give just a quick overview of the Enigma so
people can remember how that works. It was a machine
that had three or more rotors in it, and those
rotors you would pose Asian in a very particular way
to send a message. The person who's receiving the message
has another Enigma machine. They set their rotors to the
same position that you have yours at, and you would
(02:10):
determine this by a codebook. You would each have a
codebook that would have the date and possibly even the time,
and what setting you needed to have your Enigma machine
set at. Look like a typewriter with a big bunch
of lightbulbs on the other end of it. When you
would press a key, a light bulb would light up,
but it wouldn't be the light bulb that corresponds with
(02:30):
the letter you push never never. That letter would be
determined by the pathway that the electric current takes through
those rotors. The rotors would turn each time you'd press
a key, so that pathway changes each time, introducing an
element of randomness or pseudo randomness into your message. So
that way, as you continue to type out this message,
(02:52):
the key becomes hard to crack. And ideally the only
way you can decode this message is if you have
that Enigma machine or an Enigma machine with the same
rotors set the same position, and the codebooks that you
have everything ready to go. Because with all of these
different combinations, all these possible combinations, you have in turn,
(03:13):
almost an endless possibility of ciphertext that you're going to
be produced. Effectively endless. It is that does have an
end because once you get all the way through all
of the rotors, depending on how many rotors there are
that could be three or four, uh, you do have
a finite number of combinations. But it's such a huge
number as to be astronomical alright, which is pretty tough
(03:35):
if you've got a pencil and paper. And because of that,
because of the astronomical possibilities, the Nazis did consider the
Enigma unbreakable. They did so much so that it's going
to play a big role in part of what we're
gonna talk about. That. Yes, I think it's definitively hubrious.
(03:57):
All right. So now that we've sort of refreshed or
Jonathan has refreshed to you on how the Enigma machine were,
we're going to talk about the Allied version of it,
almost something called the Type X machine. It was the
British variation specifically of the Enigma, and the full name
of it was the ari A Royal Air Force Enigma
with Type X attachment. So they didn't even really bother
(04:20):
changing the name. It is an Enigma, We've just modified it. Yeah,
And it was it was like the big daddy version
of the Enigma. Now, the Enigma could run on battery power.
You could hook up a big battery to the Enigma
and that would power it because really the only power
that needed was to generate this electric current that will
light a light bulb. That's all it was doing. Yeah,
(04:40):
the the Type X not so much. It used a
C power. You had to plug it in because it
was it was a monster huge. You would not move
one of these things, so you couldn't have a lot
of them out in the wild. But it was. It
was built on the same sort of premise as the Enigma,
(05:01):
and it was therefore very secure if you used it properly. Now,
the interesting thing to me about this is not so
much how it was different from the Enigma. It didn't
use light bulbs, for example, use teletype machines, so you
would actually type out your message and a cyphered version
(05:22):
would be uh produced. To the Enigma with a two
man job, right, you had to have one person to
type in the letters and another person watching the light bulbs.
And just like that, on the other side, you had
to have someone type in the ciphered message and the
person looking at the light bulbs would be writing out
the plain text uh. In this case, you would have
(05:42):
this sort of teletype approach, and someone on the other
end would have to feed through the teletype stuff so
that you could get the plain text version out. But
you know, otherwise it's very similar. Just take the light
bulbs out really and and replace it with teletype UM. Again,
very very secure cure. It had five rotors, but only
(06:03):
three of them would rotate. So like the Enigma machine
that would have these rotating rotors that rotate. Usually the
first one on the left would rotate every key stroke,
and then once it made a full rotation to get
back to the starting position, the second rotor would rotate
one and then you could go another full rotation, the
second rotate again. So if you had a really long message,
(06:25):
it would eventually get all three rotors rotating at least
once or twice. In this case, you had three rotors
that could rotate. The last two were just meant to
allow you to create a good starting position, but they
would not rotate. So if you went long enough, those
first three rotors would repeat. Granted that would be a
really long message, but it could happen UM. So that
(06:47):
was another difference. The interesting thing to me two things.
One is that the Germans were so confident that their
Enigma machine was unbreakable, and they knew the TIPEX machine
was based on the Enigma machine, they didn't really bother
to try and break the codes we're talking about. Look,
we know, our codes are amazing. No one could break them,
(07:08):
so including us. We couldn't break our own. They're so
why do you bother? And uh? And they employed probably
about half the number of cryptographers that the British had,
let alone the rest of the Allies, and they there
were a couple other differences with the Type X. But
the other big thing was that the British had an
(07:31):
attitude about using a mechanical device to code things. They
didn't think of it as terribly proper. And also you
have to understand the British Navy has existed for hundreds
of years. Henry the seventh essentially established the British Navy.
This is Jonathan the Admiral getting back into the show.
(07:54):
Here's here's where my world's overlap. Yes, Henry the seventh
began to establish the British Navy, which really he got
its start under Henry the eighth. It didn't under Henry
the seventh. That was about eight votes. By the end
of Henry the Eighth's rain, it was a little bit
better by Elizabeth's rain. It was a force to be
reckoned with, partially because of weather. But this is this
(08:15):
is a this is a storied branch of the British military.
It has hundreds of years of history, and the commanders
of the British Navy sort of looked down upon the
Royal Air Force, which was in their eyes and infant
branch of the military. It was brand new, and no
(08:36):
tiny little branch of the military that's only been around
for a few years could possibly tell a branch that's
been around for centuries what the best way is to
incipher a message that's just being ridiculous, which I think
is quintessentially British. We might get some emails over this one,
(08:56):
but yeah, I mean, you can send those two text
stuff at Discovery dot com. But I think that's that's
a good point too, because if we're talking about this
uh advanced technology, it's obviously got to be accepted and
adopted by everybody who counts to really do its job
like it's supposed to do. It's it's not going to
help if for when, it's not going to help if
(09:19):
you're Germany and you're thinking that it's unbreakable because it's
based off of yours. But it's also not going to
help if if you don't want to use your own
countries code, right, Yes, it's and we have to remember
within all of these countries there are internal politics at
play all the time, and it's very easy for us
(09:39):
to boil down the story of World War Two to
these big, big, big ideas, But when you start looking
into it, you realize that there were no simple and
easy stories here. They're all very, very complex. So even
going forward with a specific technology or approach always had
a lot of back and forth within a country before
(10:01):
anything was done. So it really should come as no surprise.
It's just that, uh, you wonder how things would have
been different had groups acted earlier upon these technologies. So
as the Type X ever broken, if nobody was really
trying to break it, no, not that I can tell
as far as I know. I mean, not that it
(10:23):
was unbreakable. It could have been broken had they taken
the time and effort, and if they had captured codebooks
and devoted to doing it. Now, granted, you're talking about
a machine that's so large that probably wasn't put into
too many areas out in the field, so that's another
thing to think about. This is not necessarily a machine
that would have been easy to capture on a ship,
(10:44):
But what wouldn't have been as vulnerable as the Enigma
machines that were out on out on ships, out on
weather boats, as you're discussing, um, in places where you
could pick one up. So we haven't yet talked about
the codes Americans were using. We've talked about some code
breaking efforts, but the US was using the ether M
(11:05):
Mark two or Cigabra machine, and the patent for that
was filed in nineteen Yes, and it was eventually granted.
But when was it granted two? So what happened there? Well,
what happens there is if you patent something, you have
to reveal how it works. Okay, nobody wanted to do that.
Why would you do that? Um? I think it's mainly, Ah,
(11:29):
it's a secrecy issue. Now granted, even filing for patents
means that that information gets out there. And when you're
talking about a machine that's designed to cipher things, you
don't necessarily want to reveal to the world. Hey I've
got this great thing that makes unbreakable messages. Let me
tell you how it works. It's kind of the equivalent
of what we discussed in the last episode, the Japanese
(11:50):
annown thing Code Purple, when code red and this machine
again not that much different from the way the Enigma
and Type X machine has worked in the sense that
again it uses rotors to try and randomize connections. Now,
in this case said three banks with five rotors each,
so fifteen rotors total, and it wasn't not all of
(12:13):
those rotors were meant to guide a an electric current
so that you would have a ciphered message on the
other end. But this was a very complex device. Also,
it was again a machine that was not terribly portable.
It was not used a lot in World War Two
for that reason. Um, that was the big drawback to
(12:33):
a lot of these devices is that they because of
their design, they were not easy to deploy in the
field and so they had very limited use. You could
use them for domestic communication, but for something to to
to issue commands and field orders, then you're not going
to get field report. That's right, that's right. So the
(12:53):
United States really didn't use it a lot. They depended
upon an entirely different approach that was absolutely ingenious they did.
And this was one of my favorite code related World
War two stories. It's one that Candith and Jane talked
about before on this show. But we're going to discuss
it some more, really focusing on how the codes were
(13:14):
It's the code talkers, of course, and usually you think
of the Navajo code talkers, although we're going to talk
about a few other Native American tribes that were used
for code purposes during the war. But the decision to
use Native American languages on their own, not just as
a code wasn't anything new. Native American languages had been
(13:36):
used before. That's right. They've been used in wartime before.
And uh, they've been used in World War One. There
were the Choctaw languages used in that in that arena,
but infantry chalk talk, it's it's and it proved to
be a very effective tool. And there are a lot
of different reasons for this, but a big one is
(13:58):
that as a group, the Native American languages are so
far removed from the languages found in the rest of
the world that anyone unfamiliar with them it is very
difficult to understand, especially because within each individual language there
are lots of different dialects, and there are a lot
(14:18):
of different ways of saying the same same group of
phenomes where it means two different things if you depending
on the way you say it, and so it's a
very complex language, and it's not at all as if
you if you know one Romance language, you can kind
of get the hang of another. That's right. In fact,
the last research I read, which was quite some time ago,
(14:39):
said that they're the closest anyone has come so far
is potentially identifying a distant relative of basic native American
languages with a language that originated out of Siberia. But
that was it. It's not that would be quite some
time ago, plenty of time for the language to evolve
(15:00):
dramatically and into all these thousands, and they didn't even
even the report said we can't be sure there's a connection.
It only looks like there's a potential connection, which means
that with it being so alien to the various forces
in the access powers, that's a good place to look
(15:21):
if you want to be able to send messages without
anyone knowing what it is you're saying, so and that's
just we're just discussing the language without any additional securities applied,
just Choctaw in this case, unless you have somebody else
who knows the language, that's going to be a pretty
secure message. But the youth in World War two took
(15:41):
it a step further. It would be a code based
on the language. So another native speaker, another bilingual speaker
wouldn't be able to just read the code and understand
what it was saying. They might recognize the words, but
they couldn't decipher the meaning of the message. First that
I have to learn about the whole reading thing. Because
Navajo is a spoken language, not a written language, they
(16:03):
had to create a phonetic alphabet so that they could
represent the sounds made in the Navajo speech to have
a written version of a text or of of a message,
otherwise it would just be a voice message. And so
that there's that. You've already got to learn the phonetic
alphabet to understand whatever the language is or whatever the messages.
(16:25):
And then on top of that it has this code.
So for an example, I mean, I could come up
to Sarah and just say a string of unrelated words,
which to anyone listening would sound like I had gone crazy,
which we call Wednesday here and how stuff works. But
because Sarah knows the code vocabulary sheet right, then she
(16:47):
can get a meaningful message out of that same sort
of thing here, except with the added complexity of using
a language that no one in Europe or Asia knew
about well. And I'm going to throw in a few
more complexities here. With Vaho, it's tonal, so one spelling
can mean different things. This is something we discussed a
little bit on our Chunk Sisters episode with Vietnamese, which
(17:08):
is also a tonal episode. Um, So you really have
to know what you're talking about if if you're going
to be speaking Navajo and then um, like like you
were saying earlier, it's just not well known. You know,
chances are you're not going to have studied Navajo if
you are a young Japanese person, whereas you very likely
(17:30):
may have attended school in the United States or or
somewhere else or picked up English, and um even you
might know English colloquialism, English slang, have a familiarity with
words that might seem more secure, especially in the in
the thirties or forties than than they would now. But
Navajo is a whole different level from that, right And
(17:52):
it's I'm glad you said Japanese because we hadn't really
pointed it out. But the Navajo code talkers were used
exclusively in the Pacific Theater that that was where the
United States decided to concentrate their efforts, and in fact
they were part of the United States Marine Corps. That
was the branch of the military that employed the Navajo
code talkers. They were not the only Native American speakers
(18:13):
who were used in this capacity in World War Two,
but that again the most famous ones, the Comanches, for instance,
were used in Europe. They were were part of the
army rather than the Marine. Um so different different Indian
Native American tribes used in different theaters, in different branches
(18:33):
of the military for different purposes. But we have to
go back to how somebody decided to do this because
it seems like such an ingenious idea. It seems obvious.
On the one hand, Um, if you have these languages
with very few speakers, they are all in your part
of the world and have traditionally been kind of isolated
(18:56):
or language has been isolated, that seems obvious. But how
do you how do you make that jump to to
create a code based on those languages? Right? And this
comes down to a man named Philip Johnston, who was
the son of a Prosidant missionary and had grown up
on Navajo land and learned the language fluent and he
was fluent, and he also was I believe, a World
(19:19):
War One veteran, and he knew about the use of
Choctaw and so, using his experience both as a veteran
and as someone who had grown up with the Navajo language,
he suggested using Navajo as a means of communicating secret
messages into across different lines. And it was a brilliant idea,
(19:42):
but it wasn't immediately ledged ont it wasn't. He he traveled,
he was in l A. You worked as a civil
engineer and uh in nineteen two he went to Camp Elliott,
which was outside of San Diego, and presented this idea.
But like you said, it wasn't something that was immediately
(20:02):
taken up, partly because it didn't sound flexible. It didn't
sound like the codes we've been talking about earlier, where
you can shift things around and you have a totally
different code. And something that's not flexible, that doesn't have
that random quality that we've been harping on the whole time.
Sounds breakable, right, But because the language was so inscrutable,
(20:24):
it was unbreakable. Yeah, that was better than any series
of five rotors he might have. So um he he
did get a go ahead to look into it a
little bit more, and he recruited for bilingual speakers, guys
who spoke Navajo and English fluently, and he did a
little demonstration. Sometimes the demonstration is the best way to
(20:45):
prove your point. He broke them up into two groups,
and one group of two received a basic sort of
field order in English. They simply translated that order into Navajo.
It was passed onto the other group, who translated it
back into English. And the you know, the fear was
(21:06):
that maybe if you go through I'm sure if you
gave me something to translate in French and then you
tried to translate it back into into English, it wouldn't
be quite right. Well, yeah, if you if you use
even translate translation engines online and you translate translate the
same phrase back and forth between the same two languages,
(21:29):
do it about five times, and what you end up
with is going to be something that's resembles but it's
not identical to your first mome of telephone essentially, and
when you think about military orders, specificity is very important.
But in this case, with this trial example, it just
worked fine. You know, it was exactly the same message.
(21:49):
So camp Elliott's commanding officer was impressed by the demonstration,
and he immediately requested two hundred Navajo translators. He couldn't
get that many there or he was only allowed thirty
for sort of a further pilot project. And of those thirty,
they were ultimately twenty nine that went to basic training
outside of San Diego. And I like the description of
(22:14):
their life there because you think of them, they would
immediately just be sequestered into this little code talker program
and that would be all that they were working on.
But they were very typical Marines in training, and they
did typical marine stuff. I read an article by William R.
Wilson in American History and and he said that a
writer for the Marine Corps Chevron reported that quote at
(22:36):
present their typical marine outfit of butting specialists, the gripe
about the things that all marines gripe about, liberty chow
and the San Diego weather. I have to take exception
to this, having been to San Diego. The weather there
I can describe as nice. You know. I was going
to say, like, these guys are the Comanche code talkers
(22:58):
I read about were stationed at Fort Benning in Georgia.
So yeah, forbidding, I could definitely understand if you had complaints.
Humidity alone would be enough. But but San Diego, maybe
they were sad they couldn't go out and enjoy it.
Maybe maybe I also have always said that San Diego
has essentially to weather seasons which is not on fire
and on fire. Well, so regardless of how the weather
(23:22):
was in San Diego at the time, they were doing
basic training activities. But of course their main job was
to develop a code. Because this wasn't just going to
be Navajo. Messages were laid entirely in Navajo. There would
be extra complications in there, and it ultimately had two parts.
There was a twenty six letter phonetic alphabet which used
(23:45):
Navajo words to represent letters, and then there were a
few non Navo words thrown in there. I'm guessing this
is because these letters wouldn't be represented by words in Navajo.
That was my understanding of it at least. But you'd have,
for instance, ice where the letter I think for the
letter z um to make this less obvious to break,
(24:07):
really frequently repeated letters, vowels or frequently repeated consonants would
have more than one code word. Associated with them, right,
which we sort of talked about in our last episode.
So it's the same sort of idea. And I also
like that they came up with other words to describe
things that would not appear in the Navajo language. The
(24:29):
Navajo did not have a word example, for example, for
a grenade. Yeah, so this was the second, the second
layer of this code that you'd have this alphabet, but
then you'd also have a vocabulary sheets sort of code
words of military terms English military terms that needed direct
Navajo translations. And um, this would make it so much
(24:50):
faster too, if you're sending a message, to just have
words that equal other words, right, and as opposed to
having to spell everything out with this phonetic alphabet exactly. Um,
but yeah, you were about to start talking about the
words military terms that clearly don't have a Navajo precedent.
R Grenades became potatoes. I think that's my favorite was
(25:13):
dive bomber. My favorite is the one for Adolf Hitler. Okay,
so you know you can't just have Adolf Hitler, so
you've got to describe the man. Yeah. So in Navajo
they use the phrase mustache smeller and then MUSLINI is
pretty good to Big Gorge China. There might have been
a a slight opportunity to to uh poke some fun
(25:34):
at the enemy and thus uh turned them into something
that would be less menacing in their memorial boosting yea, um,
but it is. It is certainly colorful, and a lot
of the stories about the Navajo code talkers there are
these examples of fun or I don't know, mischievous behavior
(25:55):
on the Yeah, there's um the more stories are, the
more I'm thinking these men were not just brave but
also a little crazy. Yeah yeah, to to go out there, well,
I mean, we're going to talk about that more. Um So.
The first thing to do, though, once they developed this
code was tested against other bilingual Navajo. So you're gonna
(26:18):
assume that if you only speak English, or you speak
Japanese and English, it's going to be pretty hard to break.
But what if the enemy gets a hold of a Navajo,
a Navajo soldier who's not a code talker. Would that
Navajo soldier be able to break this code? And they
tested that, and bilingual Navajo speakers could not break the code.
(26:40):
So it had enough complexity in its own right two
be unbreakable. It's being right, So just understanding what the
words we weren't enough to understand what the message was exactly.
So the first Navajo code talkers reported to Guadalcanal. Ultimately
there were more than four, which makes them the largest
(27:01):
group of Native American code talkers during World War two. Um,
and they really accomplish a lot of important things during
the war. Not just being able to send and receive
messages so quickly, which is something we've talked about earlier.
This is taking time, machines being really hard to carry around,
(27:22):
user error. Yeah, if those problems are eliminated, that opens
up a lot of new possibilities. But they orchestrated that.
You a GiMA landing, They sent and received about eight
hundred messages in the two days after that landing, something
I thought was particularly impressive. And the Japanese first, they
picked up on the code pretty fast, so it wasn't
(27:44):
just like they weren't aware of it, and that's why
it remained unbroken. Unbroken. They did know that something was happening.
They knew there was communication, but they could not, for
the life of them, figure out what that communication was.
They just knew that someone was talking to someone else
and it didn't make any sense. And and there was
a great article about the code talkers by Lynn Askew
(28:06):
in History Today, and she described one code talker hearing
of Japanese soldier come on the frequency and ask in English,
who is this? Who's this? Um? And the Navajo guys
would speak in English and usually just cuss the guy
out get off the line, something like that, yeah, your exactly. Um.
(28:32):
We did mention though that there are a lot of
a lot of hazards, you know. He said that you'd
have to be almost crazy. I mean you could think
of that in a different way that they probably knew
they were going to be drafted anyway. And this is
at least something it's a really it's a way to
use a language that you've probably been forbidden from using
for a lot of your life in government run schools. Um,
(28:53):
a way to be with your family members and your
friends who you've grown up with. But it was really dangerous,
and part of that is misidentification, right. It wasn't just
the normal dangers of war, which are varied and great, um,
great as in huge, not as in wonderful. Uh. And
(29:13):
they had to deal with that, but also the very
real possibility that they would be misidentified as a Japanese
soldier by Americans who just didn't know any better, and
so very often they had to have a white escort
to go with them so that there was someone to
identify them as this guy's a Navajo code talker, he's
(29:35):
on our side. And kind of another scary element of
that is sometimes those escorts were charged with killing the
soldier should he fall into enemy hands, and I don't
know if that ever actually had to happen. Um I
did read one account of a Navajo, a Navajo soldier
who was not a code talker, being captured by the
(29:57):
Japanese but because the code was strong, saying okay, I
can read these words, but they don't make any sense
to me. Um I didn't see anything about one of
the code talkers being captured, but those were those were
the orders. They didn't want this unbreakable code to be
broken by a prisoner. It's just like when we were talking,
well not just like, but it's similar to when we
were talking about how codebooks could fall into the wrong
(30:19):
hands and that compromises a code. In this case, the
codebook is a person man, and so it's a it's
it's a very real risk of war. And so that
was a grim but uh necessary reality for the soldiers
in the Pacific theater was that if we want to
keep this this code secure, a code that millions of
(30:41):
people are going to depend upon, then that's a measure
we have to take. It's a it's a scary thought
to think about. UM. So you know, we've we've discussed
the Navajo, and and we mentioned the Comanche. We should
say they're also Lakoda code talkers to hope, and um,
other Native American tribes as well. So, UM, it wasn't
(31:05):
just about one tribe. It wasn't just Philip Johnson's idea. Um,
A lot of people were thinking of this. But the
reason why the Navajo code talker story or part of
the reason why their story is so much better known
one reason they were just the larger group, you know,
four hundred guys. Um. But it also kind of comes
down to something that got Johnson court martialed the government
(31:28):
because they were so concerned about this code and and
just the Japanese figuring out that Navajo was even the
basis for it. That they weren't allowing the code talkers
letters to their families to go home and Um. Finally, Johnson,
back in the United States, was approached by the Navajo
Indian Affair superintendent representing some families who hadn't heard from
(31:50):
their sons for a long time, asking if they knew
what might be going on, if he knew what was
going on. He didn't go into too many details, but
he did explain that the boys were on this top
secret project. Word about that eventually got published, it got out,
and he was court martial But on his very last
day of work, he stole all of the code talker
(32:13):
documents because he was afraid, kind of rightly so or
legitimately that maybe after the war this would all just
be sort of forgotten, partly out of security, but maybe
maybe partly just in the tradition of of not giving
Native Americans a fair shake. Um, he was afraid that
nobody would know that this had ever happened, and he
(32:35):
felt that this was a very important historical moment, an
important part of American history right that we needed to know,
and so he took it upon himself to make sure
that story got told. It reminds me again when we
talked in the last episode about Ultra and about how
top secret it was, and that there were people who
lost their jobs because they maintained that level of secrecy
(32:59):
uh from members of government that we're not not privy
to the to ultra that you know, they suffered the
consequences and they did it in order to maintain that security. Um.
You can see, this is serious stuff, very serious business,
and it makes sense to try and protect it as
(33:19):
much as you can. With the approach with the Navajo
code talkers, it's a little different than the mechanical approach
that we saw with the other attempts at cryptography, and
that to be able to become a Navajos speaker is
no small task. It's not a group that you could
(33:40):
easily assimilate yourself into. One thing. Yeah, we've got to
talk about the Germany anthropologists right well when we segue
right into that. So there had been attempts in the
twenties by the Germans to you know, the knowing about
the what was the earlier the Choctaw use in U,
(34:04):
the earlier war, to pick up some of these Native
American languages, and to do that through the ruse of
being a German anthropologist who goes in and studies languages
with the tribe. It was a pretty transparent plot, co
parent idea. The communities were we're wary of the outsiders
(34:26):
in general, not saying, but it also seen no one.
And that's why, for instance, that's why Comanche was one
of the languages used, because, um, it seemed like the
Comanche had had less contact with outsiders, including Germans posing
as anthropologists, than certain other tribes and might have a
(34:48):
better protected language. But it seemed a little hard to
believe that you could think you could just visit a
tribe for a while and pick up one of the
most complicated languages in the world. I think it's I
think it just bespeaks this idea that perhaps the language
would have been more closely aligned with other known languages,
(35:08):
and the fact is that's not the case. And because
it is so different, it is a real challenge for
someone who has not brought up in that community to
learn the language, particularly since there weren't a whole lot
of people willing to teach it. So that was there
was a different, a totally different scene with the code
(35:28):
talkers than it was with the cryptography machines. Now, I
thought I might wrap all this up by talking about
how this cryptography kind of affects us today. This sort
of things that were invented during the Second World War. Um,
so you know, we we send email back and forth.
(35:51):
That email, usually if you're using a good email system,
is encrypted, meaning that anyone who intercepts that message should
receive just a bunch of gibberish and they have no
idea what the content of that message is. It's very
important for privacy and for security. It's one of the
reasons why, uh, people will insist on you only sending
(36:15):
them encrypted messages. There's certain people who have have famously
put that in blog posts. I'm thinking specifically of a
Will Wheaton, former former star of Star Trek the Next Generation.
But he says, if you want to email me using
encryptid email, because I don't want messages going back and
forth in plain text that some third party could intercept. Well,
(36:37):
the way we encrypt messages is very similar to the
way that we were encrypting messages during World War Two.
We're using software to do it now. We're not using
big electro mechanical devices, little numbers, right right, there's no
little machines that go ping. As Chris would like to say, Uh,
it's it's all done in software. But the idea is
(36:58):
that you take a key that turns the message into
what looks to be just random letters, numbers, and characters,
and then the person receiving the message has an identical
key and that decodes the message. And it gets a
little more complicated than that the keys there's like public
keys versus private keys. But the idea is that, uh,
(37:22):
this is the same sort of approach to obvious skate.
What a message is meaning is from anyone that it
was not intended to go to. Same thing for passwords. Uh. Now,
of course with software we're able to get way more
sophisticated than we could during World War two, and so
the software might create a hash, which is the product
(37:43):
of running a message or a password through a key
that turns that into an incredibly long string of letters, numbers,
and characters. So, for example, your eight character password that
you create so that you can log into your email
within the email administrator's database, that password could be hashed
(38:04):
into a message that is fifty characters long or longer,
depending upon what they use. But it's using the same
principles of cryptography that we're developed during World World War two. Okay,
so it's um history applied to your devices and your
internet used today. Yes, yeah, if you're using bank accounts,
(38:27):
if you're using email addresses, you're listening to this podcast.
If you're not, then I guess I don't know who
I'm talking to. And I mean we were we were
discussing a little bit before we recorded this, what must
the cryptography systems for actual I mean we're just talking
about emails. You know, you don't want your you don't
(38:48):
want your bank information to get out, certainly you don't
want your emails to be read, but actual government, military
related stuff. I mean, it's it's almost hard to imagine.
And if if these machines from the thirties, forties, well
actually twenties and then seem fairly complicated to me at least,
(39:08):
I can't even wrap my mind around what a level
of of of cryptography must be today. It's it's pretty
it's pretty intense. And on the flip side, code breaking
has become just as sophisticated. In particular, once the development
of multi core processors happened, which I'm not going to
(39:29):
get too don't worry, don't worry, don't panic. I'm not
going to get too involved here, But in general, the
way a code breaking system works is it starts if
you're using a brute force attempt, which is where you're
just trying every combination you can think of in order
to try and break a code. Uh, depending on how
many characters there are. That's that's a lot of potential combinations,
(39:52):
and a regular processor is going through each one of
those one at a time. Now, I might be doing
that at an incredible rate of speed, but still one
at the time, even super fast is going to take
ages to crack. Multi core processors made that easier by
dividing the problem up into separate problems. Each core could
take a bank of variations and run it through, So
(40:15):
you've just cut down the amount of time it takes
to break a code. Well, be be aware that usually
a code breaker, in order for them to really get
through tough crypt encryption, normally has to have some basis
to work from. So, for example, with passwords, um, you
don't want to use common words, you don't want to
(40:37):
use you don't even want to use common names or
anything like that. You want to try and use as
as random a string of letters and numbers as you
possibly can without it getting too difficult to remember and
as many Yeah, you don't want to use the same
one for multiple accounts. And the reason for that is
that code breakers have broken into databases where companies did
(40:58):
not store the passwords in an cryptid file, which means
they had the plain text passwords. So often if you
see enough of those plain texts, and this is this
applies to code breaking across the board. You look at
the plain text, it's not just a list. You group
those names together, so you look for frequencies how many
people are using specific words as passwords, because then you know, well,
(41:23):
these are the these are the words I should concentrate
on when I'm trying to break a new system, because
I know, based upon this frequency analysis, this is what
people tend to pick for their password. A lot of
times that happens to be password. Don't do that. So
the same sort of approaches were used in World War Two.
I mean that to tie it back together, when we
(41:45):
were talking about common salutations and common ways of ending
a message, that's the same thing. You're taking that frequency
that this particular phrase or word will show up, and
you're measuring that against all the intercepted messages you have
and you're trying to break that code. The same thing
happens today. So moral of the story. This has been
(42:06):
our lesson of the day Jonathan of Texta about protecting
your passwords. Um, but it was interesting for me to
learn more about all of this. I have to say.
The code talkers really speaks more to me. There's a
human story there, there is a story, and of course
there's a story with Leshley Park too and code breakers
(42:29):
around the world. But UM, I don't know. Maybe I'm
just more of a language person, so it speaks to
me for that reason I am. I am more more
of a language person than a rotor person, I suppose. Um.
But it did remind me a little bit of an
article I read not too long ago in National and
(42:49):
Geographic that was about languages that only had a few
speakers left. And I thought about how, just how we
think of, um, of endangered plants or something could have
enormous potential value for some medicinal purpose we don't know
of yet. There's a value and language that goes clearly
outside of its cultural value and its historical value. It's
(43:11):
something that you don't often think of, but there's something
to it. Yeah, I can have real utility outside of
areas that you would you know, think of as being obvious.
You suddenly think that's exactly what Johnston was saying, was
that we used it before we could develop the system further,
and it's unbreakable, and he was right right. I like
(43:32):
that this was the last one we discussed and and
it's really the only unbreakable code. Um. So that's probably
a good place to to wrap this pull thing up.
So if you guys want to share your thoughts on
World War two and code breaking and language in general,
you can email us. We are at History podcast at
(43:53):
how Stuff Works dot com. We are on Facebook, and
we are on Twitter at Misston History. That might be
a Facebook and Twitter. It seemed like an appropriate place
to continue this discussion. So you can also drop Jonathan
a line too if you want to discuss more of
the technological aspects of it with him. That's right tech
(44:14):
Stuff at Discovery dot com. And we'll be having more
of these guest host appearances with some other podcasts later
on in September while Deeplina is finishing out her leave.
But thank you so much for joining me for this
two part ter Jonathan, and for thinking of this great
idea too. This is something that UM I certainly would
(44:35):
have liked to talk about, but I would be concerned
about describing um the nitty gritty of purple or enigma.
It was my pleasure. And it's funny because it was
my second choice of topic. My first choice had nothing
to do with technology whatsoever? Was it? Renaissance space is
the fields of cloth and gold? Yet? Oh yeah, well,
(44:56):
you know, hey, maybe that can be I expect that
appearance to be done by the Admiral. Yes, I'll get
him out of storage. He's in the closet right now,
but I can. I can easily break him out. So
do you have any other code related articles? I think,
I think, I am well, I will say we have
some great articles on our site that have have to
(45:17):
do with code breaking, and one of them, you know,
I mentioned the multi core approach. One that is not
directly related to cryptography, but is important is how quantum
computers work. Because ideally a quantum computer is such a
parallel machine that it could run millions of different variations
of a of a of an encryption through it at
(45:39):
once and come up with an answer very quickly. So
if we ever do create a quantum computer that is
workable and is scalable. Then we have to totally rethink
how we encrypt things. All right, So, if you are
tired of thinking about all things historical and are ready
to look to the future, you can check out that
article and find it on www. Dot how stuff works
(46:03):
dot com MH for more on this and thousands of
other topics. Because it how stuff Works dot com. M H,
(46:29):
M M
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Scary Dowdy and I am joined again by Jonathan Strickland.
Hey there, So Jonathan has has joined me as part
(00:21):
of this little series that we're doing while Debilina is
on maternity leave. Um having different podcast co hosts on
the show to talk about their shows specialty. So in
Jonathan's case as the co host of Tech Stuff, that
is of course technology, but we're also going to be
talking about history, So technology in history. And last time
we talked, we were discussing cryptography, specifically cryptography as used
(00:46):
by the Axis Powers during World War Two. That's correct, yes,
And we were really focusing mainly on the Enigma machine,
which I think everyone would say is probably the most
famous machine as far as cryptography goes. It's one of
those that a lot of people, even if they don't
really know a lot about cryptography, often they'll say Enigma machine.
That sounds familiar. Wellen Alan Turing is so big these days, right,
(01:08):
He's finally getting the credit that was long due, and
he is so closely connected to the Enigma machine and
breaking that code that Yeah, a lot of people have
heard about it recently. Definitely, definitely, and hopefully they don't
think that it was a device used by the Riddler.
Different Enigma if they've listened, If you guys have listened
(01:28):
to that episode, you already know how that machine works.
And we also talked a little bit about the Japanese
code Purple, which is a very different but also um
a similar more similar to the Enigma than some of
the other codes we're going to be talking about today.
Right now, because some of the stuff we're going to
talk about is related to the Enigma, I was going
(01:50):
to give just a quick overview of the Enigma so
people can remember how that works. It was a machine
that had three or more rotors in it, and those
rotors you would pose Asian in a very particular way
to send a message. The person who's receiving the message
has another Enigma machine. They set their rotors to the
same position that you have yours at, and you would
(02:10):
determine this by a codebook. You would each have a
codebook that would have the date and possibly even the time,
and what setting you needed to have your Enigma machine
set at. Look like a typewriter with a big bunch
of lightbulbs on the other end of it. When you
would press a key, a light bulb would light up,
but it wouldn't be the light bulb that corresponds with
(02:30):
the letter you push never never. That letter would be
determined by the pathway that the electric current takes through
those rotors. The rotors would turn each time you'd press
a key, so that pathway changes each time, introducing an
element of randomness or pseudo randomness into your message. So
that way, as you continue to type out this message,
(02:52):
the key becomes hard to crack. And ideally the only
way you can decode this message is if you have
that Enigma machine or an Enigma machine with the same
rotors set the same position, and the codebooks that you
have everything ready to go. Because with all of these
different combinations, all these possible combinations, you have in turn,
(03:13):
almost an endless possibility of ciphertext that you're going to
be produced. Effectively endless. It is that does have an
end because once you get all the way through all
of the rotors, depending on how many rotors there are
that could be three or four, uh, you do have
a finite number of combinations. But it's such a huge
number as to be astronomical alright, which is pretty tough
(03:35):
if you've got a pencil and paper. And because of that,
because of the astronomical possibilities, the Nazis did consider the
Enigma unbreakable. They did so much so that it's going
to play a big role in part of what we're
gonna talk about. That. Yes, I think it's definitively hubrious.
(03:57):
All right. So now that we've sort of refreshed or
Jonathan has refreshed to you on how the Enigma machine were,
we're going to talk about the Allied version of it,
almost something called the Type X machine. It was the
British variation specifically of the Enigma, and the full name
of it was the ari A Royal Air Force Enigma
with Type X attachment. So they didn't even really bother
(04:20):
changing the name. It is an Enigma, We've just modified it. Yeah,
And it was it was like the big daddy version
of the Enigma. Now, the Enigma could run on battery power.
You could hook up a big battery to the Enigma
and that would power it because really the only power
that needed was to generate this electric current that will
light a light bulb. That's all it was doing. Yeah,
(04:40):
the the Type X not so much. It used a
C power. You had to plug it in because it
was it was a monster huge. You would not move
one of these things, so you couldn't have a lot
of them out in the wild. But it was. It
was built on the same sort of premise as the Enigma,
(05:01):
and it was therefore very secure if you used it properly. Now,
the interesting thing to me about this is not so
much how it was different from the Enigma. It didn't
use light bulbs, for example, use teletype machines, so you
would actually type out your message and a cyphered version
(05:22):
would be uh produced. To the Enigma with a two
man job, right, you had to have one person to
type in the letters and another person watching the light bulbs.
And just like that, on the other side, you had
to have someone type in the ciphered message and the
person looking at the light bulbs would be writing out
the plain text uh. In this case, you would have
(05:42):
this sort of teletype approach, and someone on the other
end would have to feed through the teletype stuff so
that you could get the plain text version out. But
you know, otherwise it's very similar. Just take the light
bulbs out really and and replace it with teletype UM. Again,
very very secure cure. It had five rotors, but only
(06:03):
three of them would rotate. So like the Enigma machine
that would have these rotating rotors that rotate. Usually the
first one on the left would rotate every key stroke,
and then once it made a full rotation to get
back to the starting position, the second rotor would rotate
one and then you could go another full rotation, the
second rotate again. So if you had a really long message,
(06:25):
it would eventually get all three rotors rotating at least
once or twice. In this case, you had three rotors
that could rotate. The last two were just meant to
allow you to create a good starting position, but they
would not rotate. So if you went long enough, those
first three rotors would repeat. Granted that would be a
really long message, but it could happen UM. So that
(06:47):
was another difference. The interesting thing to me two things.
One is that the Germans were so confident that their
Enigma machine was unbreakable, and they knew the TIPEX machine
was based on the Enigma machine, they didn't really bother
to try and break the codes we're talking about. Look,
we know, our codes are amazing. No one could break them,
(07:08):
so including us. We couldn't break our own. They're so
why do you bother? And uh? And they employed probably
about half the number of cryptographers that the British had,
let alone the rest of the Allies, and they there
were a couple other differences with the Type X. But
the other big thing was that the British had an
(07:31):
attitude about using a mechanical device to code things. They
didn't think of it as terribly proper. And also you
have to understand the British Navy has existed for hundreds
of years. Henry the seventh essentially established the British Navy.
This is Jonathan the Admiral getting back into the show.
(07:54):
Here's here's where my world's overlap. Yes, Henry the seventh
began to establish the British Navy, which really he got
its start under Henry the eighth. It didn't under Henry
the seventh. That was about eight votes. By the end
of Henry the Eighth's rain, it was a little bit
better by Elizabeth's rain. It was a force to be
reckoned with, partially because of weather. But this is this
(08:15):
is a this is a storied branch of the British military.
It has hundreds of years of history, and the commanders
of the British Navy sort of looked down upon the
Royal Air Force, which was in their eyes and infant
branch of the military. It was brand new, and no
(08:36):
tiny little branch of the military that's only been around
for a few years could possibly tell a branch that's
been around for centuries what the best way is to
incipher a message that's just being ridiculous, which I think
is quintessentially British. We might get some emails over this one,
(08:56):
but yeah, I mean, you can send those two text
stuff at Discovery dot com. But I think that's that's
a good point too, because if we're talking about this
uh advanced technology, it's obviously got to be accepted and
adopted by everybody who counts to really do its job
like it's supposed to do. It's it's not going to
help if for when, it's not going to help if
(09:19):
you're Germany and you're thinking that it's unbreakable because it's
based off of yours. But it's also not going to
help if if you don't want to use your own
countries code, right, Yes, it's and we have to remember
within all of these countries there are internal politics at
play all the time, and it's very easy for us
(09:39):
to boil down the story of World War Two to
these big, big, big ideas, But when you start looking
into it, you realize that there were no simple and
easy stories here. They're all very, very complex. So even
going forward with a specific technology or approach always had
a lot of back and forth within a country before
(10:01):
anything was done. So it really should come as no surprise.
It's just that, uh, you wonder how things would have
been different had groups acted earlier upon these technologies. So
as the Type X ever broken, if nobody was really
trying to break it, no, not that I can tell
as far as I know. I mean, not that it
(10:23):
was unbreakable. It could have been broken had they taken
the time and effort, and if they had captured codebooks
and devoted to doing it. Now, granted, you're talking about
a machine that's so large that probably wasn't put into
too many areas out in the field, so that's another
thing to think about. This is not necessarily a machine
that would have been easy to capture on a ship,
(10:44):
But what wouldn't have been as vulnerable as the Enigma
machines that were out on out on ships, out on
weather boats, as you're discussing, um, in places where you
could pick one up. So we haven't yet talked about
the codes Americans were using. We've talked about some code
breaking efforts, but the US was using the ether M
(11:05):
Mark two or Cigabra machine, and the patent for that
was filed in nineteen Yes, and it was eventually granted.
But when was it granted two? So what happened there? Well,
what happens there is if you patent something, you have
to reveal how it works. Okay, nobody wanted to do that.
Why would you do that? Um? I think it's mainly, Ah,
(11:29):
it's a secrecy issue. Now granted, even filing for patents
means that that information gets out there. And when you're
talking about a machine that's designed to cipher things, you
don't necessarily want to reveal to the world. Hey I've
got this great thing that makes unbreakable messages. Let me
tell you how it works. It's kind of the equivalent
of what we discussed in the last episode, the Japanese
(11:50):
annown thing Code Purple, when code red and this machine
again not that much different from the way the Enigma
and Type X machine has worked in the sense that
again it uses rotors to try and randomize connections. Now,
in this case said three banks with five rotors each,
so fifteen rotors total, and it wasn't not all of
(12:13):
those rotors were meant to guide a an electric current
so that you would have a ciphered message on the
other end. But this was a very complex device. Also,
it was again a machine that was not terribly portable.
It was not used a lot in World War Two
for that reason. Um, that was the big drawback to
(12:33):
a lot of these devices is that they because of
their design, they were not easy to deploy in the
field and so they had very limited use. You could
use them for domestic communication, but for something to to
to issue commands and field orders, then you're not going
to get field report. That's right, that's right. So the
(12:53):
United States really didn't use it a lot. They depended
upon an entirely different approach that was absolutely ingenious they did.
And this was one of my favorite code related World
War two stories. It's one that Candith and Jane talked
about before on this show. But we're going to discuss
it some more, really focusing on how the codes were
(13:14):
It's the code talkers, of course, and usually you think
of the Navajo code talkers, although we're going to talk
about a few other Native American tribes that were used
for code purposes during the war. But the decision to
use Native American languages on their own, not just as
a code wasn't anything new. Native American languages had been
(13:36):
used before. That's right. They've been used in wartime before.
And uh, they've been used in World War One. There
were the Choctaw languages used in that in that arena,
but infantry chalk talk, it's it's and it proved to
be a very effective tool. And there are a lot
of different reasons for this, but a big one is
(13:58):
that as a group, the Native American languages are so
far removed from the languages found in the rest of
the world that anyone unfamiliar with them it is very
difficult to understand, especially because within each individual language there
are lots of different dialects, and there are a lot
(14:18):
of different ways of saying the same same group of
phenomes where it means two different things if you depending
on the way you say it, and so it's a
very complex language, and it's not at all as if
you if you know one Romance language, you can kind
of get the hang of another. That's right. In fact,
the last research I read, which was quite some time ago,
(14:39):
said that they're the closest anyone has come so far
is potentially identifying a distant relative of basic native American
languages with a language that originated out of Siberia. But
that was it. It's not that would be quite some
time ago, plenty of time for the language to evolve
(15:00):
dramatically and into all these thousands, and they didn't even
even the report said we can't be sure there's a connection.
It only looks like there's a potential connection, which means
that with it being so alien to the various forces
in the access powers, that's a good place to look
(15:21):
if you want to be able to send messages without
anyone knowing what it is you're saying, so and that's
just we're just discussing the language without any additional securities applied,
just Choctaw in this case, unless you have somebody else
who knows the language, that's going to be a pretty
secure message. But the youth in World War two took
(15:41):
it a step further. It would be a code based
on the language. So another native speaker, another bilingual speaker
wouldn't be able to just read the code and understand
what it was saying. They might recognize the words, but
they couldn't decipher the meaning of the message. First that
I have to learn about the whole reading thing. Because
Navajo is a spoken language, not a written language, they
(16:03):
had to create a phonetic alphabet so that they could
represent the sounds made in the Navajo speech to have
a written version of a text or of of a message,
otherwise it would just be a voice message. And so
that there's that. You've already got to learn the phonetic
alphabet to understand whatever the language is or whatever the messages.
(16:25):
And then on top of that it has this code.
So for an example, I mean, I could come up
to Sarah and just say a string of unrelated words,
which to anyone listening would sound like I had gone crazy,
which we call Wednesday here and how stuff works. But
because Sarah knows the code vocabulary sheet right, then she
(16:47):
can get a meaningful message out of that same sort
of thing here, except with the added complexity of using
a language that no one in Europe or Asia knew
about well. And I'm going to throw in a few
more complexities here. With Vaho, it's tonal, so one spelling
can mean different things. This is something we discussed a
little bit on our Chunk Sisters episode with Vietnamese, which
(17:08):
is also a tonal episode. Um, So you really have
to know what you're talking about if if you're going
to be speaking Navajo and then um, like like you
were saying earlier, it's just not well known. You know,
chances are you're not going to have studied Navajo if
you are a young Japanese person, whereas you very likely
(17:30):
may have attended school in the United States or or
somewhere else or picked up English, and um even you
might know English colloquialism, English slang, have a familiarity with
words that might seem more secure, especially in the in
the thirties or forties than than they would now. But
Navajo is a whole different level from that, right And
(17:52):
it's I'm glad you said Japanese because we hadn't really
pointed it out. But the Navajo code talkers were used
exclusively in the Pacific Theater that that was where the
United States decided to concentrate their efforts, and in fact
they were part of the United States Marine Corps. That
was the branch of the military that employed the Navajo
code talkers. They were not the only Native American speakers
(18:13):
who were used in this capacity in World War Two,
but that again the most famous ones, the Comanches, for instance,
were used in Europe. They were were part of the
army rather than the Marine. Um so different different Indian
Native American tribes used in different theaters, in different branches
(18:33):
of the military for different purposes. But we have to
go back to how somebody decided to do this because
it seems like such an ingenious idea. It seems obvious.
On the one hand, Um, if you have these languages
with very few speakers, they are all in your part
of the world and have traditionally been kind of isolated
(18:56):
or language has been isolated, that seems obvious. But how
do you how do you make that jump to to
create a code based on those languages? Right? And this
comes down to a man named Philip Johnston, who was
the son of a Prosidant missionary and had grown up
on Navajo land and learned the language fluent and he
was fluent, and he also was I believe, a World
(19:19):
War One veteran, and he knew about the use of
Choctaw and so, using his experience both as a veteran
and as someone who had grown up with the Navajo language,
he suggested using Navajo as a means of communicating secret
messages into across different lines. And it was a brilliant idea,
(19:42):
but it wasn't immediately ledged ont it wasn't. He he traveled,
he was in l A. You worked as a civil
engineer and uh in nineteen two he went to Camp Elliott,
which was outside of San Diego, and presented this idea.
But like you said, it wasn't something that was immediately
(20:02):
taken up, partly because it didn't sound flexible. It didn't
sound like the codes we've been talking about earlier, where
you can shift things around and you have a totally
different code. And something that's not flexible, that doesn't have
that random quality that we've been harping on the whole time.
Sounds breakable, right, But because the language was so inscrutable,
(20:24):
it was unbreakable. Yeah, that was better than any series
of five rotors he might have. So um he he
did get a go ahead to look into it a
little bit more, and he recruited for bilingual speakers, guys
who spoke Navajo and English fluently, and he did a
little demonstration. Sometimes the demonstration is the best way to
(20:45):
prove your point. He broke them up into two groups,
and one group of two received a basic sort of
field order in English. They simply translated that order into Navajo.
It was passed onto the other group, who translated it
back into English. And the you know, the fear was
(21:06):
that maybe if you go through I'm sure if you
gave me something to translate in French and then you
tried to translate it back into into English, it wouldn't
be quite right. Well, yeah, if you if you use
even translate translation engines online and you translate translate the
same phrase back and forth between the same two languages,
(21:29):
do it about five times, and what you end up
with is going to be something that's resembles but it's
not identical to your first mome of telephone essentially, and
when you think about military orders, specificity is very important.
But in this case, with this trial example, it just
worked fine. You know, it was exactly the same message.
(21:49):
So camp Elliott's commanding officer was impressed by the demonstration,
and he immediately requested two hundred Navajo translators. He couldn't
get that many there or he was only allowed thirty
for sort of a further pilot project. And of those thirty,
they were ultimately twenty nine that went to basic training
outside of San Diego. And I like the description of
(22:14):
their life there because you think of them, they would
immediately just be sequestered into this little code talker program
and that would be all that they were working on.
But they were very typical Marines in training, and they
did typical marine stuff. I read an article by William R.
Wilson in American History and and he said that a
writer for the Marine Corps Chevron reported that quote at
(22:36):
present their typical marine outfit of butting specialists, the gripe
about the things that all marines gripe about, liberty chow
and the San Diego weather. I have to take exception
to this, having been to San Diego. The weather there
I can describe as nice. You know. I was going
to say, like, these guys are the Comanche code talkers
(22:58):
I read about were stationed at Fort Benning in Georgia.
So yeah, forbidding, I could definitely understand if you had complaints.
Humidity alone would be enough. But but San Diego, maybe
they were sad they couldn't go out and enjoy it.
Maybe maybe I also have always said that San Diego
has essentially to weather seasons which is not on fire
and on fire. Well, so regardless of how the weather
(23:22):
was in San Diego at the time, they were doing
basic training activities. But of course their main job was
to develop a code. Because this wasn't just going to
be Navajo. Messages were laid entirely in Navajo. There would
be extra complications in there, and it ultimately had two parts.
There was a twenty six letter phonetic alphabet which used
(23:45):
Navajo words to represent letters, and then there were a
few non Navo words thrown in there. I'm guessing this
is because these letters wouldn't be represented by words in Navajo.
That was my understanding of it at least. But you'd have,
for instance, ice where the letter I think for the
letter z um to make this less obvious to break,
(24:07):
really frequently repeated letters, vowels or frequently repeated consonants would
have more than one code word. Associated with them, right,
which we sort of talked about in our last episode.
So it's the same sort of idea. And I also
like that they came up with other words to describe
things that would not appear in the Navajo language. The
(24:29):
Navajo did not have a word example, for example, for
a grenade. Yeah, so this was the second, the second
layer of this code that you'd have this alphabet, but
then you'd also have a vocabulary sheets sort of code
words of military terms English military terms that needed direct
Navajo translations. And um, this would make it so much
(24:50):
faster too, if you're sending a message, to just have
words that equal other words, right, and as opposed to
having to spell everything out with this phonetic alphabet exactly. Um,
but yeah, you were about to start talking about the
words military terms that clearly don't have a Navajo precedent.
R Grenades became potatoes. I think that's my favorite was
(25:13):
dive bomber. My favorite is the one for Adolf Hitler. Okay,
so you know you can't just have Adolf Hitler, so
you've got to describe the man. Yeah. So in Navajo
they use the phrase mustache smeller and then MUSLINI is
pretty good to Big Gorge China. There might have been
a a slight opportunity to to uh poke some fun
(25:34):
at the enemy and thus uh turned them into something
that would be less menacing in their memorial boosting yea, um,
but it is. It is certainly colorful, and a lot
of the stories about the Navajo code talkers there are
these examples of fun or I don't know, mischievous behavior
(25:55):
on the Yeah, there's um the more stories are, the
more I'm thinking these men were not just brave but
also a little crazy. Yeah yeah, to to go out there, well,
I mean, we're going to talk about that more. Um So.
The first thing to do, though, once they developed this
code was tested against other bilingual Navajo. So you're gonna
(26:18):
assume that if you only speak English, or you speak
Japanese and English, it's going to be pretty hard to break.
But what if the enemy gets a hold of a Navajo,
a Navajo soldier who's not a code talker. Would that
Navajo soldier be able to break this code? And they
tested that, and bilingual Navajo speakers could not break the code.
(26:40):
So it had enough complexity in its own right two
be unbreakable. It's being right, So just understanding what the
words we weren't enough to understand what the message was exactly.
So the first Navajo code talkers reported to Guadalcanal. Ultimately
there were more than four, which makes them the largest
(27:01):
group of Native American code talkers during World War two. Um,
and they really accomplish a lot of important things during
the war. Not just being able to send and receive
messages so quickly, which is something we've talked about earlier.
This is taking time, machines being really hard to carry around,
(27:22):
user error. Yeah, if those problems are eliminated, that opens
up a lot of new possibilities. But they orchestrated that.
You a GiMA landing, They sent and received about eight
hundred messages in the two days after that landing, something
I thought was particularly impressive. And the Japanese first, they
picked up on the code pretty fast, so it wasn't
(27:44):
just like they weren't aware of it, and that's why
it remained unbroken. Unbroken. They did know that something was happening.
They knew there was communication, but they could not, for
the life of them, figure out what that communication was.
They just knew that someone was talking to someone else
and it didn't make any sense. And and there was
a great article about the code talkers by Lynn Askew
(28:06):
in History Today, and she described one code talker hearing
of Japanese soldier come on the frequency and ask in English,
who is this? Who's this? Um? And the Navajo guys
would speak in English and usually just cuss the guy
out get off the line, something like that, yeah, your exactly. Um.
(28:32):
We did mention though that there are a lot of
a lot of hazards, you know. He said that you'd
have to be almost crazy. I mean you could think
of that in a different way that they probably knew
they were going to be drafted anyway. And this is
at least something it's a really it's a way to
use a language that you've probably been forbidden from using
for a lot of your life in government run schools. Um,
(28:53):
a way to be with your family members and your
friends who you've grown up with. But it was really dangerous,
and part of that is misidentification, right. It wasn't just
the normal dangers of war, which are varied and great, um,
great as in huge, not as in wonderful. Uh. And
(29:13):
they had to deal with that, but also the very
real possibility that they would be misidentified as a Japanese
soldier by Americans who just didn't know any better, and
so very often they had to have a white escort
to go with them so that there was someone to
identify them as this guy's a Navajo code talker, he's
(29:35):
on our side. And kind of another scary element of
that is sometimes those escorts were charged with killing the
soldier should he fall into enemy hands, and I don't
know if that ever actually had to happen. Um I
did read one account of a Navajo, a Navajo soldier
who was not a code talker, being captured by the
(29:57):
Japanese but because the code was strong, saying okay, I
can read these words, but they don't make any sense
to me. Um I didn't see anything about one of
the code talkers being captured, but those were those were
the orders. They didn't want this unbreakable code to be
broken by a prisoner. It's just like when we were talking,
well not just like, but it's similar to when we
were talking about how codebooks could fall into the wrong
(30:19):
hands and that compromises a code. In this case, the
codebook is a person man, and so it's a it's
it's a very real risk of war. And so that
was a grim but uh necessary reality for the soldiers
in the Pacific theater was that if we want to
keep this this code secure, a code that millions of
(30:41):
people are going to depend upon, then that's a measure
we have to take. It's a it's a scary thought
to think about. UM. So you know, we've we've discussed
the Navajo, and and we mentioned the Comanche. We should
say they're also Lakoda code talkers to hope, and um,
other Native American tribes as well. So, UM, it wasn't
(31:05):
just about one tribe. It wasn't just Philip Johnson's idea. Um,
A lot of people were thinking of this. But the
reason why the Navajo code talker story or part of
the reason why their story is so much better known
one reason they were just the larger group, you know,
four hundred guys. Um. But it also kind of comes
down to something that got Johnson court martialed the government
(31:28):
because they were so concerned about this code and and
just the Japanese figuring out that Navajo was even the
basis for it. That they weren't allowing the code talkers
letters to their families to go home and Um. Finally, Johnson,
back in the United States, was approached by the Navajo
Indian Affair superintendent representing some families who hadn't heard from
(31:50):
their sons for a long time, asking if they knew
what might be going on, if he knew what was
going on. He didn't go into too many details, but
he did explain that the boys were on this top
secret project. Word about that eventually got published, it got out,
and he was court martial But on his very last
day of work, he stole all of the code talker
(32:13):
documents because he was afraid, kind of rightly so or
legitimately that maybe after the war this would all just
be sort of forgotten, partly out of security, but maybe
maybe partly just in the tradition of of not giving
Native Americans a fair shake. Um, he was afraid that
nobody would know that this had ever happened, and he
(32:35):
felt that this was a very important historical moment, an
important part of American history right that we needed to know,
and so he took it upon himself to make sure
that story got told. It reminds me again when we
talked in the last episode about Ultra and about how
top secret it was, and that there were people who
lost their jobs because they maintained that level of secrecy
(32:59):
uh from members of government that we're not not privy
to the to ultra that you know, they suffered the
consequences and they did it in order to maintain that security. Um.
You can see, this is serious stuff, very serious business,
and it makes sense to try and protect it as
(33:19):
much as you can. With the approach with the Navajo
code talkers, it's a little different than the mechanical approach
that we saw with the other attempts at cryptography, and
that to be able to become a Navajos speaker is
no small task. It's not a group that you could
(33:40):
easily assimilate yourself into. One thing. Yeah, we've got to
talk about the Germany anthropologists right well when we segue
right into that. So there had been attempts in the
twenties by the Germans to you know, the knowing about
the what was the earlier the Choctaw use in U,
(34:04):
the earlier war, to pick up some of these Native
American languages, and to do that through the ruse of
being a German anthropologist who goes in and studies languages
with the tribe. It was a pretty transparent plot, co
parent idea. The communities were we're wary of the outsiders
(34:26):
in general, not saying, but it also seen no one.
And that's why, for instance, that's why Comanche was one
of the languages used, because, um, it seemed like the
Comanche had had less contact with outsiders, including Germans posing
as anthropologists, than certain other tribes and might have a
(34:48):
better protected language. But it seemed a little hard to
believe that you could think you could just visit a
tribe for a while and pick up one of the
most complicated languages in the world. I think it's I
think it just bespeaks this idea that perhaps the language
would have been more closely aligned with other known languages,
(35:08):
and the fact is that's not the case. And because
it is so different, it is a real challenge for
someone who has not brought up in that community to
learn the language, particularly since there weren't a whole lot
of people willing to teach it. So that was there
was a different, a totally different scene with the code
(35:28):
talkers than it was with the cryptography machines. Now, I
thought I might wrap all this up by talking about
how this cryptography kind of affects us today. This sort
of things that were invented during the Second World War. Um,
so you know, we we send email back and forth.
(35:51):
That email, usually if you're using a good email system,
is encrypted, meaning that anyone who intercepts that message should
receive just a bunch of gibberish and they have no
idea what the content of that message is. It's very
important for privacy and for security. It's one of the
reasons why, uh, people will insist on you only sending
(36:15):
them encrypted messages. There's certain people who have have famously
put that in blog posts. I'm thinking specifically of a
Will Wheaton, former former star of Star Trek the Next Generation.
But he says, if you want to email me using
encryptid email, because I don't want messages going back and
forth in plain text that some third party could intercept. Well,
(36:37):
the way we encrypt messages is very similar to the
way that we were encrypting messages during World War Two.
We're using software to do it now. We're not using
big electro mechanical devices, little numbers, right right, there's no
little machines that go ping. As Chris would like to say, Uh,
it's it's all done in software. But the idea is
(36:58):
that you take a key that turns the message into
what looks to be just random letters, numbers, and characters,
and then the person receiving the message has an identical
key and that decodes the message. And it gets a
little more complicated than that the keys there's like public
keys versus private keys. But the idea is that, uh,
(37:22):
this is the same sort of approach to obvious skate.
What a message is meaning is from anyone that it
was not intended to go to. Same thing for passwords. Uh. Now,
of course with software we're able to get way more
sophisticated than we could during World War two, and so
the software might create a hash, which is the product
(37:43):
of running a message or a password through a key
that turns that into an incredibly long string of letters, numbers,
and characters. So, for example, your eight character password that
you create so that you can log into your email
within the email administrator's database, that password could be hashed
(38:04):
into a message that is fifty characters long or longer,
depending upon what they use. But it's using the same
principles of cryptography that we're developed during World World War two. Okay,
so it's um history applied to your devices and your
internet used today. Yes, yeah, if you're using bank accounts,
(38:27):
if you're using email addresses, you're listening to this podcast.
If you're not, then I guess I don't know who
I'm talking to. And I mean we were we were
discussing a little bit before we recorded this, what must
the cryptography systems for actual I mean we're just talking
about emails. You know, you don't want your you don't
(38:48):
want your bank information to get out, certainly you don't
want your emails to be read, but actual government, military
related stuff. I mean, it's it's almost hard to imagine.
And if if these machines from the thirties, forties, well
actually twenties and then seem fairly complicated to me at least,
(39:08):
I can't even wrap my mind around what a level
of of of cryptography must be today. It's it's pretty
it's pretty intense. And on the flip side, code breaking
has become just as sophisticated. In particular, once the development
of multi core processors happened, which I'm not going to
(39:29):
get too don't worry, don't worry, don't panic. I'm not
going to get too involved here, But in general, the
way a code breaking system works is it starts if
you're using a brute force attempt, which is where you're
just trying every combination you can think of in order
to try and break a code. Uh, depending on how
many characters there are. That's that's a lot of potential combinations,
(39:52):
and a regular processor is going through each one of
those one at a time. Now, I might be doing
that at an incredible rate of speed, but still one
at the time, even super fast is going to take
ages to crack. Multi core processors made that easier by
dividing the problem up into separate problems. Each core could
take a bank of variations and run it through, So
(40:15):
you've just cut down the amount of time it takes
to break a code. Well, be be aware that usually
a code breaker, in order for them to really get
through tough crypt encryption, normally has to have some basis
to work from. So, for example, with passwords, um, you
don't want to use common words, you don't want to
(40:37):
use you don't even want to use common names or
anything like that. You want to try and use as
as random a string of letters and numbers as you
possibly can without it getting too difficult to remember and
as many Yeah, you don't want to use the same
one for multiple accounts. And the reason for that is
that code breakers have broken into databases where companies did
(40:58):
not store the passwords in an cryptid file, which means
they had the plain text passwords. So often if you
see enough of those plain texts, and this is this
applies to code breaking across the board. You look at
the plain text, it's not just a list. You group
those names together, so you look for frequencies how many
people are using specific words as passwords, because then you know, well,
(41:23):
these are the these are the words I should concentrate
on when I'm trying to break a new system, because
I know, based upon this frequency analysis, this is what
people tend to pick for their password. A lot of
times that happens to be password. Don't do that. So
the same sort of approaches were used in World War Two.
I mean that to tie it back together, when we
(41:45):
were talking about common salutations and common ways of ending
a message, that's the same thing. You're taking that frequency
that this particular phrase or word will show up, and
you're measuring that against all the intercepted messages you have
and you're trying to break that code. The same thing
happens today. So moral of the story. This has been
(42:06):
our lesson of the day Jonathan of Texta about protecting
your passwords. Um, but it was interesting for me to
learn more about all of this. I have to say.
The code talkers really speaks more to me. There's a
human story there, there is a story, and of course
there's a story with Leshley Park too and code breakers
(42:29):
around the world. But UM, I don't know. Maybe I'm
just more of a language person, so it speaks to
me for that reason I am. I am more more
of a language person than a rotor person, I suppose. Um.
But it did remind me a little bit of an
article I read not too long ago in National and
(42:49):
Geographic that was about languages that only had a few
speakers left. And I thought about how, just how we
think of, um, of endangered plants or something could have
enormous potential value for some medicinal purpose we don't know
of yet. There's a value and language that goes clearly
outside of its cultural value and its historical value. It's
(43:11):
something that you don't often think of, but there's something
to it. Yeah, I can have real utility outside of
areas that you would you know, think of as being obvious.
You suddenly think that's exactly what Johnston was saying, was
that we used it before we could develop the system further,
and it's unbreakable, and he was right right. I like
(43:32):
that this was the last one we discussed and and
it's really the only unbreakable code. Um. So that's probably
a good place to to wrap this pull thing up.
So if you guys want to share your thoughts on
World War two and code breaking and language in general,
you can email us. We are at History podcast at
(43:53):
how Stuff Works dot com. We are on Facebook, and
we are on Twitter at Misston History. That might be
a Facebook and Twitter. It seemed like an appropriate place
to continue this discussion. So you can also drop Jonathan
a line too if you want to discuss more of
the technological aspects of it with him. That's right tech
(44:14):
Stuff at Discovery dot com. And we'll be having more
of these guest host appearances with some other podcasts later
on in September while Deeplina is finishing out her leave.
But thank you so much for joining me for this
two part ter Jonathan, and for thinking of this great
idea too. This is something that UM I certainly would
(44:35):
have liked to talk about, but I would be concerned
about describing um the nitty gritty of purple or enigma.
It was my pleasure. And it's funny because it was
my second choice of topic. My first choice had nothing
to do with technology whatsoever? Was it? Renaissance space is
the fields of cloth and gold? Yet? Oh yeah, well,
(44:56):
you know, hey, maybe that can be I expect that
appearance to be done by the Admiral. Yes, I'll get
him out of storage. He's in the closet right now,
but I can. I can easily break him out. So
do you have any other code related articles? I think,
I think, I am well, I will say we have
some great articles on our site that have have to
(45:17):
do with code breaking, and one of them, you know,
I mentioned the multi core approach. One that is not
directly related to cryptography, but is important is how quantum
computers work. Because ideally a quantum computer is such a
parallel machine that it could run millions of different variations
of a of a of an encryption through it at
(45:39):
once and come up with an answer very quickly. So
if we ever do create a quantum computer that is
workable and is scalable. Then we have to totally rethink
how we encrypt things. All right, So, if you are
tired of thinking about all things historical and are ready
to look to the future, you can check out that
article and find it on www. Dot how stuff works
(46:03):
dot com MH for more on this and thousands of
other topics. Because it how stuff Works dot com. M H,
(46:29):
M M
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