I READ with interest the obituary of Chester Nez (The Herald, June 9) who was the last of the 29 Navajo Native Americans who developed an unbreakable code which helped win the Second World War.
His native language, which had been banned in school, was a code which the Japanese found impossible to break.
In my father's memoirs a similar story is told about communication between Lloyd George and one of his cabinet secretaries. "Tom Jones, from the Rhondda Valley, was a student at Glasgow University in the 1890s and ... eventually became one of Lloyd George's cabinet secretaries.
"When I [my father] was examining in Wales, I renewed acquaintance with Tom Jones and heard some of his special stories about the negotiations in which he took part at the end of the war in 1918 and later the Irish revolution that led to the setting up of the Republic of Eire.
"His Welsh proved useful in both. Lloyd George was able to talk to him from London to Geneva, where he was, by phone in Welsh without any need for code messages. And in the course of the Irish negotiations, when the Irish leaders were talking big about making Erse the language of Ireland, Lloyd George made some remarks to Tom in Welsh, while the Irishmen could not use their own Gaelic."
Hugh Boyd,
65 Antonine Road, Bearsden.
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