CODE TALKERS Mystery Cache
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Difficulty:
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Terrain:
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Size: 
(regular)
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Navajo Code Talkers
This is a puzzler/2 stage multi.
I am working on an interesting unit with my students about the
Navajo Indians and they were especially interested in the use of
Navajo Code Talkers during WWII, so I thought this bit of history
would make a fun puzzle cache.
The NAVAJO CODE TALKERS took part in every assault the U.S. Marines
conducted in the Pacific from 1942 to 1945. They served in all the
six Marine divisions, Marine Raider battalions and Marine parachute
units, transmitting message by telephone and radio in their native
language – a code that the Japanese never broke.
The idea to use Navajo for secure communications came from Philip
Johnston, the son of a missionary to the Navajos and one of the few
non-Navajos who spoke their language fluently. Johnston believed
Navajo answered the military requirement for an undecipherable code
because Navajo is an unwritten language of extreme complexity. Its
syntax and tonal qualities, not to mention dialects, make it
unintelligible to anyone without extensive exposure and training.
It has no alphabet or symbols, and is spoken only on the Navajo
lands of the American Southwest. One estimate indicates that less
than 30 non-Navajos, none of them Japanese, could understand the
language at the outbreak of World War II.
As always with puzzlers DO NOT go
to the above
coordinates.
I won’t ask you to decode
the way they did since it’s
so complex, but your job is to translate the following Navajo
words
to English using the “code talkers” dictionary.
THEN
using the first letter of each NEW word decode the un-known parts
of the coordinates in
the ORDER GIVEN to move on to the 1st
stage.
N 46. 2 _ . _ _ _
AH-JAH,
DZEH,SHUSH, AH-NAH
W 117. 0 0.
0_ _
AH-TAD, NA-HASH-CHID
At the 1st stage then decode the following in the ORDER GIVEN to
fill in the blanks for the final coords.
N46.2 _. _ 0 _
2nd word, 2nd letter
7th word, 1st letter
14th word, 5th letter
W116.5 _. _ _ 9
1st word, 1st letter
13th word, 1st letter
17th word, 5th letter
Gift certificate for
FTF.
Additional Hints
(Decrypt)
N = 1