#War In The Pacific

[theworldatwar]

A US Marine helps his comrade with a head injury to go and get some medical attention - Iwo Jima 1945

[dronescapesvideos]

Hangar deck of the USS Yorktown CV-10 in the Pacific Ocean, 1944. Bombs are being prepared for the F6F Hellcats while the rest of the crew is watching a movie in the background.

➤PACIFIC WAR VIDEO: https://youtu.be/hdAz_qjBT78

➤HD IMAGE: https://dronescapes.video/Yorktown

[ode-on-a-grecian-butt]

one of my most popular posts on here is a quora answer about the Navajo code talkers from WW2 by Erik Painter. Its long but a really great read that explains how the code worked. link

[walkingthroughthisworld]

Sherman in action. Iwo Jima 1945.

[nerds-yearbook]

The war anthology comic All Out War concluded with issue 6#, cover date August, 1980. ("A War Without A Name!", "Hard-Hat Heroes", and "Brother's On A Bull's-Eye", All Out War 6#, DC Comic Event)

[pedroam-bang]

Battlefield V: War In The Pacific (2019)

[misforgotten2]

Special delivery for Tojo.

Reader's Digest November 1974

[piedpip3rrr]

Cringe but free

[eltristanexplicitcontent]

Week 311 - The US drops two atomic bombs on Japan - WW2 - August 10, 1945

[theworldatwar]

The Battle ship USS West Virginia targets enemy positions as US marines head to shore - Okinawa, April 1945

[dronescapesvideos]

PBY Catalina: An Unsung Hero of the Pacific War | WWII History | Upscaled Footage

[conservativebabymillennial]

My class just got done talking about WW2 in the pacific and I feel I did not impress enough the absolute brilliance of using Navajo since the sounds can be so confusing, and on top of that you’ve added another layer of encryption by assigning a different meaning to those word. Next year I for sure will.

I saw this on quora and thought it was cool and wanted to share it on here.  Its a long read but crazy.  Its from Erik Painter

They did try. And they did capture Navajo men. However, they were unsuccessful in using them to decipher the code. The reason was simple. The Navajo Code was a code that used Navajo. It was not spoken Navajo. To a Navajo speaker, who had not learned the code, a Navajo Code talker sending a message sounds like a string of unconnected Navajo words with no grammar. It was incomprehensible. So, when the Japanese captured a Navajo man named Joe Kieyoomia in the Philippines, he could not really help them even though they tortured him. It was nonsense to him.

The Navajo Code had to be learned and memorized. It was designed to transmit a word by word or letter by letter exact English message. They did not just chat in Navajo. That could have been understood by a Navajo speaker, but more importantly translation is never, ever exact. It would not transmit precise messages. There were about 400 words in the Code.

The first 31 Navajo Marines created the Code with the help of one non-Navajo speaker officer who knew cryptography. The first part of the Code was made to transmit English letters. For each English letter there were three (or sometimes just two) English words that started with that letter and then they were translated into Navajo words. In this way English words could be spelled out with a substitution code. The alternate words were randomly switched around. So, for English B there were the Navajo words for Badger, Bear and Barrel. In Navajo that is: nahashchʼidí, shash, and tóshjeeh. Or the letter A was Red Ant, Axe, or Apple. In Navajo that is: wóláchííʼ, tsénił , or bilasáana. The English letter D was: bįįh=deer, and łééchąąʼí =dog, and chʼįįdii= bad spiritual substance (devil).

For the letter substitution part of the Code the word “bad” could be spelled out a number of ways. To a regular Navajo speaker it would sound like: “Bear, Apple, Dog”. Or other times it could be “ Barrel, Red Ant, Bad Spirit (devil)”. Other times it could be “Badger, Axe, Deer”. As you can see, for just this short English word, “bad” there are many possibilities and to the combination of words used. To a Navajo speaker, all versions are nonsense. It gets worse for a Navajo speaker because normal Navajo conjugates in complex ways (ways an English or Japanese speaker would never dream of). These lists of words have no indicators of how they are connected. It is utterly non-grammatical.

Then to speed it up, and make it even harder to break, they substituted Navajo words for common military words that were often used in short military messages. None were just translations. A few you could figure out. For example, a Lieutenant was “one silver bar” in Navajo. A Major was “Gold Oak Leaf” n Navajo. Other things were less obvious like a Battleship was the word for Whale in Navajo. A Mine Sweeper was the Navajo word for Beaver.

A note here as it seems hard for some people to get this. Navajo is a modern and living language. There are, and were, perfectly useful Navajo words for submarines and battleships and tanks. They did not “make up words because they had no words for modern things”. This is an incorrect story that gets around in the media. There had been Navajo in the military before WWII. The Navajo language is different and perhaps more flexible than English. It is easy to generate new words. They borrow very few words and have words for any modern thing you can imagine. The words for telephone, or train, or nuclear power are all made from Navajo stem roots.

Because the Navajo Marines had memorized the Code there was no code book to capture. There was no machine to capture either. They could transmit it over open radio waves. They could decode it in a few minutes as opposed to the 30 minutes to two hours that other code systems at the time took. And, no Navajo speaker who had not learned the Code could make any sense out of it.

The Japanese had no published texts on Navajo. There was no internationally available description of the language. The Germans had not studied it at the time. The Japanese did suspect it was Navajo. Linguists thought it was in the Athabaskan language family. That would be pretty clear to a linguist. And Navajo had the biggest group of speakers of any Athabaskan language. That is why they tortured Joe Kieyoomia. But, he could not make sense of it. It was just a list of words with no grammar and no meaning.

For Japanese, even writing the language down from the radio broadcasts would be very hard. It has lots of sounds that are not in Japanese or in English. It is hard to tell where some words end or start because the glottal stop is a common consonant. Frequency analysis would have been hard because they did not use a single word for each letter. And some words stood for words instead of for a letter. The task of breaking it was very hard.

Here is an example of a coded message:

béésh łigai naaki joogii gini dibé tsénił áchį́į́h bee ąą ńdítį́hí joogi béésh łóó’ dóó łóóʼtsoh

When translated directly from Navajo into English it is:

“SILVER TWO BLUE JAY CHICKEN HAWK SHEEP AXE NOSE KEY BLUE JAY IRON FISH AND WHALE. “

You can see why a Navajo who did not know the Code would not be able to do much with that. The message above means: “CAPTAIN, THE DIVE BOMBER SANK THE SUBMARINE AND BATTLESHIP.”

“Two silver bars” =captain. Blue jay= the. Chicken hawk= dive bomber. Iron fish = sub. Whale= battleship. “Sheep, Axe Nose Key”=sank. The only normal use of a Navajo word is the word for “and” which is “dóó ”. For the same message the word “sank” would be spelled out another way on a different day. For example, it could be: “snake, apple, needle, kettle”.

Here, below on the video, is a verbal example of how the code sounded. The code sent below sounded to a Navajo speaker who did not know the Code like this: “sheep eyes nose deer destroy tea mouse turkey onion sick horse 362 bear”. To a trained Code Talker, he would write down: “Send demolition team to hill 362 B”. The Navajo Marine Coder Talker then would give it to someone to take the message to the proper person. It only takes a minute or so to code and decode.

[dreamy-conceit]

Orphans of the Pacific, you are really orphans now. How will you get home now that your ships are sunk?

— Allegedly said by Iva Toguri, in character as Orphan Ann, one of the characters collectively known as Tokyo Rose.

[savage-kult-of-gorthaur]

THE HELL OF THE PACIFIC COMES HOME IN '43 -- THE REALITIES OF WAR IN THE PACIFIC.

PIC INFO: Resolution at 1993x2560 -- Caption from "LIFE" -- "Three dead Americans on the beach at Buna." Buna Beach, Papau New Guinea. 📸: George Strock — Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images.

OVERVIEW: "Here, LIFE.com recalls one of those pivotal battles, the Battle of Buna-Gona, through pictures made by the master photojournalist George Strock —including one of the most famous and influential photographs ever taken in any war, anywhere: the disquieting image of three dead Americans half-buried in the sand at a place called Buna Beach.

What is ultimately so notable about Strock’s picture, however -- beyond its sheer technical excellence, and its quiet power — is that when it was published in "LIFE" magazine in September 1943, it was the first time that any photograph depicting dead American troops had appeared in any American publication during World War II. The story behind how the photograph came to be published, meanwhile, speaks volumes about "LIFE" magazine’s national stature during the war, and the strained relationship that always exists (and, in an elemental way, should always exist) between journalists and government officials."

-- TIME, "The Photo That Won World War II: ‘Dead Americans at Buna Beach, 1943," by Ben Cosgrove, October 31, 2014

Source: https://time.com/3524493/the-photo-that-won-world-war-ii-dead-americans-at-buna-beach-1943.

[dirjoh-blog]

The International Military Tribunal for the Far East-aka The Tokyo War Crimes Trial.

Most people will have heard of the Nuremberg Trials, but few have heard of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE), or Tokyo War Crimes Trial. The Nuremberg trials are often criticized because of the low number of convictions of Nazi War criminals. The conviction rate of International Military Tribunal for the Far East was even lower. Most surprisingly the Japanese Emperor,…