Karla Berrios
English
Mr. Rodriguez
11.2.13
Code Breaker Research Essay On August 6th 1945, the United States dropped a foreign bomb on the city of Hiroshima. These types of bombs were never heard of at the time. This is the first time anything like this has been used and we barely knew anything about this extremely dangerous weapon. In the area there were alarms that went off whenever there was any kind of threat or attack coming so the people would be prepared for when it hit. In Hiroshima, from how many times the alarm went off, the people got used to it going off and eventually just ignored it. When the alarm went off warning the people in Hiroshima they ignored it not knowing that we actually did drop a bomb in their area.
During World War II the Japanese sent each other messages in codes. They used these codes as a type of communication so we wouldn’t know what they were saying or planning to do. “American experts named the Japanese code PURPLE, and they called intelligence from these messages MAGIC.” (“War of secrets: cryptology in WWII” Para. 3 and 4). We used the Navajo people to decode, the Japanese code, “PURPLE”. When a Navajo code talker received a message, what he heard was a string of seemingly unrelated Navajo words. They first had to translate each Navajo word into its English equivalent. Then he used only the first letter of the English equivalent in spelling an English word. Thus, the Navajo words "wol-la-chee" (ant), "be-la-sana" (apple) and "tse-nill" (axe) all stood for the letter "a." One way to say the word "Navy" in Navajo code would be tsah (needle) wol-la-chee (ant) ah-keh-di- glini (victor) tsah-ah-dzoh (yucca).
It was important to break Japans codes because then we would be prepared if Japan had something secretly planned for us. By us being able to break their codes we knew what they were saying to each other and that gave us a huge advantage because in the messages it says that Japan will not surrender. Due to the fact that they wouldn’t surrender we dropped the atomic bomb on them. By dropping this bomb we were saying that we were ready for war and just wanted to get it over with. When we decoded the message the message saying that they refuse to surrender we decided to use the bomb as soon as it was finished being built. We didn’t know the side effects, how much damage it actually could do, or how it would affect future generations.
Dropping the bomb on Hiroshima was completely unnecessary. First, we had never tested this bomb not knowing anything about it or its possible side effects. Second, we were hurting innocent citizens who had nothing