Sorta, but it’s not as though there were tons of options for affordable, near-realtime communications then. It’s also hard to overstate how obscure Navajo was.

Sorta, but it’s not as though there were tons of options for affordable, near-realtime communications then. It’s also hard to overstate how obscure Navajo was. Young and Morgan developed a writing system for it in 1937, and the first dictionary was developed as part of the war effort (and thus not publicly available) in the 1940s. The Navy estimated that ~30 non-Navajos spoke the language at the time. It’s thus pretty unlikely that “this is Navajo” would have been an Axis analyst’s first guess—-and even if it were, there were minimal resources available. The language is pretty far from Japanese or German, which also doesn’t help. On top of all that, the messages being sent weren’t literal Navajo—-there was sort of a substitution code that used common Navajo words to stand in for military items. The Japanese actually captured a [Navajo solider](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Kieyoomia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Kieyoomia) but he could not undertatand the transmitted messages.