OBITUARY - Charles Chibitty

THE TIMES
July 28, 2005

OBITUARY - Charles Chibitty
November 20, 1921 - July 20, 2005

Comanche code-talker whose messages in his native tongue baffled German 
attempts to read American signals on D-Day

WHEN the US Army sought a code for its forces in the North West Europe 
theatre that the Germans would be unable to decipher, it turned to a group 
of Comanches of whom Charles Chibitty was the last survivor. Like the much 
larger numbers of Navajos, who performed a similar function for US forces 
in the Pacific theatre, Chibitty and his select group of colleagues 
provided a secure medium for transmitting messages between HQs and units 
which totally baffled the enemy.

One of a number of Uto-Aztecan languages scattered across the western 
United States and northern Mexico, the Comanche tongue was ideal as a 
secret code. By the outbreak of war, after decades of proscription by the 
US authorities, the language was spoken by very few people (today only 800 
speak it) - and it had no written alphabet. (One was not adopted until 
1994.)

From the moment the Americans landed on Utah and Omaha beaches German 
specialists monitoring signal traffic were mystified by the sounds they 
heard coming over their receivers, and remained so during the rest of the 
campaign, as they vainly tried to crack the American  "code". They were 
never to know, for example, that the sound which they heard as  "posah 
tai vo"  was the Comanche for â"crazy white man", and referred to 
their supreme warlord Adolf Hitler.

Charles Chibitty was born in 1921 near Medicine Park, Oklahoma. From the 
late 1800s onwards there had been discrimination against native American 
languages and, like many Comanche children before him, he was educated in 
a boarding school, Haskell Indian School, in Lawrence, Kansas. There he 
was required to speak only English, and like his schoolmates he was 
punished if he did otherwise.

This atmosphere changed when war came. The use of native American 
languages as codes in wartime was not new. In the First World War Choctaw 
had been used as a means of rendering messages unreadable by the enemy, 
and had played an important role in the Meuse-Argonne battle of 
September-October 1918.

In January 1941, before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour had led to 
America's direct involvement in the conflict, Chibitty was one of 20 
Comanches from Oklahoma who enlisted and were selected for special 
communications duty in the European theatre.

They were trained at Fort Benning, Georgia, where they compiled a 
vocabulary of military terms. Since the Choctaw language was not rich in 
the vocabulary of modern warfare, Chibitty and his comrades had to 
improvise. Thus, since Comanche had no word for "tank", the 
code-talkers, as they were known, substituted the word "turtle". For 
"Âmachinegun" they decided on "sewing machine", while"bomber" 
became  "pregnant aeroplane".

As Allied forces built up in the vast armed camp England had become by 
early 1944, Chibitty and his colleagues crossed the Atlantic and prepared 
to go ashore on the Normandy beaches on D-Day. For the assault, Chibitty 
was one of the two Comanches who were attached to each of the regiments of 
the 4th Infantry Division, which was commanded by General Joseph 
"Lightning Joe" Collins.

This landed on Utah Beach on the right flank of the Allied landings, and 
Chibitty sent the first Commanche message on D-Day which, in English, 
read: â"Five miles to the right of the designated area and five miles 
inland the fighting is fierce, and we need help.".../snip/


...Charles Chibitty, Comanche code talker, was born on November 20, 1921. 
He died on July 20, 2005, aged 83.



http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,60-1710775,00.html



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