The incredible story of the Native American code talkers who outsmarted Japan during World War II

• Navajo Code Talkers played an instrumental role in the allied victory of World War II.
• The group of Native Americans used their language as a code that proved to be uncrackable to the enemy.
• One of the last surviving members of the group died earlier this week.

One of the last surviving Navajo Code Talkers — a group of Native Americans who played an instrumental role in the defeat of Japan during World War II — had died, according to the Associated Press.

Alfred K. Newman was 94. He had served as a Marine between 1943 and 1945. 

The Navajo "code talkers" were recruited during the second World War to help communicate messages on the battlefield. Their language, which at the time was still unwritten, proved to be an uncrackable code.

Here is the remarkable story of the Navajo code talkers, helped the United States win World War II.

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The Navajo are a Native American ethnic group living in the American Southwest, and their main reservation, which occupies the Four Corners area of Arizona, Utah, and New Mexico, is the largest reservation in the United States today.

The Navajo are the largest Native American ethnic group in the United States today. Although their language was the one used to create code in World War II, people from other Native American groups like the Hopi and the Comanche were recruited as code talkers as well.

Sources: NavajoPeople.org, Indian Country Today

At the beginning of US involvement in WWII, the Japanese were breaking every code the Americans came up with. In response, World War I veteran Philip Johnston suggested a novel idea to the US Marine Corpse in 1942 — using the Navajo language as a code.

Johnston was the son of missionaries, and had grown up speaking Navajo on the Navajo reservation even though he himself was not Native. He was inspired to use the Navajo language as a code after seeing Native Americans communicating with each other in the US Army during the First World War.

Sources: Newsweek, National Museum of the American Indian

The Navajo language was the perfect language to use because it had no alphabet, and as a result, there were no materials the Japanese could use to learn it. The Marine Corps loved Johnston's idea, and began recruiting young Navajo men as code talkers.

One of the code talkers at Trump's event on Monday, Peter MacDonald, said the new recruits were initially not told they were going to be used to speak in code. 

"They were just asked, 'Do you want to join the Marines? You want to fight the enemy? Come join the Marines.' So they volunteered," MacDonald said.

Some, though, were drafted. 

"We were drafted. They made us go. I didn't volunteer," Franklin Shupla, a code talker from the Hopi tribe, said.

Sources: Newsweek, National Museum of the American Indian