Private Willard Oliver -- The TelegraphPrivate Willard Oliver, who died on October 14 aged 88, was one of some 400 Navajo Indians employed by the Americans during the Pacific War to confound the Japanese by transmitting coded radio messages from the front in their Diné language.
Choctaws and Cherokees had carried communications messages in the First World War. A veteran who had been partly brought up on a Navajo reserve in northern New Mexico remembered this, and suggested that the Navajo would be ideally suited for the task in a new theatre; they had a highly complex, unwritten language, thought to be known only to some 30 non-Navajos. Although the idea encountered initial scepticism, a trial was staged in California under simulated combat conditions in early 1942.
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My Comment: One of many incredible stories of the Second World war. Read it all.
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