  Friday 20 December 2013  Private Willard Oliver  Private
Willard Oliver, who died on October 14 aged 88, was one of some
400 Navajo Indians employed by the Americans during the Pacific
War to confound the Japanese by transmitting coded radio
messages from the front in their Diné language.  Choctaws and
Cherokees had carried communications messages in the First World
War. A veteran who had been partly brought up on a Navajo
reserve in northern New Mexico remembered this, and suggested
that the Navajo would be ideally suited for the task in a new
theatre; they had a highly complex, unwritten language, thought
to be known only to some 30 non-Navajos. Although the idea
encountered initial scepticism, a trial was staged in California
under simulated combat conditions in early 1942.  Willard Oliver
This proved that Navajo could encode, transmit, and decode a
three-line English message in 20 seconds while the machines of
the day took 30 minutes. Major-General Clayton Vogel, commanding
the Pacific Fleet's amphibio