A garbled radio net. A pinned patrol. Then a burst of language the enemy can’t read, and the ridge breathes again.

In this episode of Naked History, Dyllan traces how Indigenous languages became wartime armor: from WWI trench telephones with Choctaw and Cherokee speakers to the Marine Corps’ WWII Navajo/Diné code. An elegantly simple, two-layer system (alphabet stream + word list) built for speed under fire. We break down how the code actually worked (in plain English), why seconds beat cipher wheels, and what it looked like on Bougainville, Saipan, Tinian, Iwo Jima, and on D-Day with the Comanche net at Utah Beach.

Then: the long silence after victory, declassification, uneven recognition, and the present-tense work inside Native nations to teach, archive, and live these languages. No gadget worship, just people, memory, and design choices that saved lives.

Tease: Next main: Saints, Krampus & Coca-Cola: how Saint Nicholas sails from Myra to Manhattan and ad men wrap December in velvet.

Music Credit:

• "In The West" Kevin MacLeod (⁠⁠⁠incompetech.com⁠⁠⁠)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License⁠⁠⁠http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/⁠⁠

• Music track: lavender by massobeats Source: ⁠⁠⁠https://freetouse.com/music ⁠⁠⁠Royalty Free Music for Video (Safe)