Native American Code Talkers Made World War 1 Interesting
During World War 1, there were many strategies and techniques that were first introduced. In particular, code talkers are people who use their knowledge of unknown Native American languages to secretly communicate messages. Because of communication failures, a U.S commander suggested using Choctaw Native Americans to secretly transmit messages. Before this suggestion, Germans were able to wiretap the U.S allies’ conversations; they then cracked their codes which were based off of European languages. Despite the benefits of this communication method, it also caused an uproar for Native American rights. World War 1 had a great communication method of using Native American code talkers,
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Although, this method became a controversial topic. Based on their knowledge of European languages, Germans were able to infer and understand the meaning of their codes. As a result of that, using Native American code talkers became an idea and a solution to the problem. It was evident that this method was very useful when, “A captured German later admitted that his side couldn’t make heads or tails of the Choctaw speakers, whom Allen credited with likely bringing about an earlier end to the war and saving hundreds of thousands of lives” (Greenspan 1). Therefore, this statement demonstrates the efficiency of this method as the German hostage admits how they were confused about what Americans were saying. When the German says that they couldn’t make heads or tails of what they were saying, they were not even able to infer what the code talkers were discussing. Interestingly, when this method had first been proposed, the topic of Native American rights had been brought up. When the United States had entered the war “it had not yet granted citizenship to all Native Americans, and government-run boarding schools were still largely attempting to stamp out their languages and cultures. Nonetheless, several thousand Native Americans enlisted in the armed forces to fight the Central Powers” (Greenspan 1). Despite the fact that the United