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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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. 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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. 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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, 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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, 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 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 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. 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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. 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 dot com MH for more on this and thousands of other topics. Because it how stuff Works dot com. M H, 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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. 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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. 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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, 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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, 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 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 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. 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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. 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 dot com MH for more on this and thousands of other topics. Because it how stuff Works dot com. M H, M M