Washington (AFP) - Chester Nez,
the last of 29 Navajo Indians who helped create a code used during World
War II and never broken by the Axis Powers, died Wednesday. He was 93.
Flags will be flown at half-mast until June 8 on the tribe's territory in the United States.
"The
power of our language was shared with the world during World War II
when the Original 29 Navajo Code Talkers stepped forward for service,"
Navajo Nation President Ben Shelly said in a statement.
He said Nez's passing in his sleep during the morning hours "closes another chapter in the annals of Navajo."
Nez and 28 other Navajos were
recruited by the Marine Corps in May 1942 to create a code for
communications on the battlefield based on their complex tribal
language, which is tonal and unwritten.
He later participated in the war's Pacific Battles in Guadalcanal, Guam, Peleliu and Bougainville.
Nez's death "sadly marks
the end of an era in our country's and Marine Corps' history," said
Marine Corps spokesman Colonel David Lapan.
"The
Navajo Code Talkers made invaluable contributions to the war effort in
the Pacific theater during World War II," he added, hailing their
"heroic actions."
Last year, Nez said "I was very
proud to say that the Japanese did everything in their power to break
that code but they never did."
A total of 400 Navajo Indians took part in the Pacific Wars as Code Talkers.
Other
Native Americans from the Choctaw, Comanche and Seminole tribes took
part in combat against the Germans and the Japanese, transmitting coded
messages in their native language.
Due
to the lack of equivalent terms in their native tongue, certain words
had to be substituted, such as "plane" for "bird" and "bomber" for
"pregnant bird."
The Navajo
code would attribute an Indian word for each letter of the alphabet. So
"moasi," which means "cat," would serve to designate the letter "c."
The code was classified until the 1980s because the US military long hoped it could reuse it in a future conflict.
We n' de ya ho
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