Fiction
Code Talking
During World War II, thousands of women were employed by the Allies as code breakers both in Europe and across Asia. In the Pacific Theater, the U.S. Marine Corps also recruited some 500 Navajo code talkers to transmit messages in their native language, because it was unintelligible to the Japanese.
In my WWII novel Glorious Boy, Claire Durant volunteers to use her knowledge of indigenous languages to both break and make codes for the British in Calcutta in 1942. Claire, a young anthropologist, has spent six years studying the indigenous Biya tribe of the Andaman Islands, off the coast of Burma. She only left the islands under duress, on the eve of Japanese occupation, after her four-year-old son went missing. Her husband, Shep, a physician and botanist, forced her onto the evacuation ship while he stayed behind to search for their child, and Claire hasn’t seen either of them since. Her fervent hope is that, by making herself indispensable to the Secret Operations team that’s headed back to the Andamans under cover, she’ll be able to help rescue Shep and little Ty.
To write this book I researched the fascinating history not only of the Navajo code talkers but also their WWI predecessors, the Choctaw code talkers, as well as the brilliant and indefatigable female code breakers whose…
