In early June of 1942, six months after Pearl Harbor formally jolted the U.S. into World War II, the Japanese mounted another surprise bombing attack—this time, on Dutch Harbor in the remote Aleutian Islands of Alaska.
After U.S. forces drove out the Japanese, it became clear to military leadership that the vast and forbidding 6,640-mile coastline of northwest Alaska needed to be patrolled for the duration of the war. Turning to the Indigenous communities for help, they soon found volunteers from local villages willing to join the newly formed Alaska Territorial Guard
More than 6,300 Indigenous men and women, ages 12 to 80, stepped up. These unpaid sentries became the eyes and ears of the U.S. military in western Alaska.
When the United States entered World War I in April 1917, several thousand Native Americans enlisted in the armed forces to fight the Central Powers.
One main problem for the Allies was the Germans’ ability to listen in on their communications and to break their codes, which were generally based on either European languages or mathematical progressions. But an overheard conversation between two Choctaw soldiers led to a new code that confounded German forces.
Code talkers made an even bigger impact during World War II, when the U.S. government specifically recruited Comanche, Hopi, Meskwaki, Chippewa-Oneida and Navajo tribal members for such work.
Meet the Navajo Code Talkers—young men from government-run reservations called upon to fight for the nation that killed many of their grandparents. These World War II soldiers devised the only unbreakable code in modern military history.
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