Lo, Hurtgen Forest, the Battle of the Bulge and the rescue of the "lost battalion." The division was the first American unit to participate in the liberation of Paris and the first infantry division to enter Germany. Chibitty took part in some of the fiercest fighting of the war, including the breakthrough at St. Chibitty was one of the remaining 17 dispatched to Fort Benning and then to signal school at Fort Gordon, Ga.Īs a radio man with the 4th Infantry Division, Mr. Three were sent home because they had dependents. The Army wanted 40 native speakers and managed to get 20. He went home on Christmas break in 1940 and received his mother's permission to enlist. Attending Haskell Indian School in Lawrence, Kan., he heard rumors not only of war but also of plans the military had to organize a native-speaking unit. Very proud."Ĭharles Joyce Chibitty was born in a tent near Medicine Park, Okla., a small community in the Wichita Mountains north of Lawton. My language helped win the war, and that makes me very proud. "It's strange, but growing up as a child I was forbidden to speak my native language at school," Mr. Some of the Comanches were wounded, but all survived the war. They sent coded messages from the front line to division headquarters, where other Comanches decoded the messages. Two Comanches were assigned to each of the 4th Infantry Division's three regiments. Chibitty recalled, was "posah-tai-vo," or "crazy white man." In presentations over the years, he recalled the first coded message he transmitted that day: "Five miles to the right of the designated area and five miles inland the fighting is fierce and we need help."īecause there was no Comanche word for "tank," the code talkers used their word for "turtle." "Bomber" became "pregnant airplane." "Hitler," Mr. Chibitty landed at Utah Beach, one of 14 Comanches who hit the beaches of Normandy with Allied troops on D-Day. The Navajos became code talkers about a year after the Comanches, but there were over a hundred of them, because they had so much territory to cover." Chibitty said in a 1999 interview with the Armed Forces Information Service. "We compiled a 100-word vocabulary of military terms during training," Mr. The Comanche recruits created their code at Fort Benning, Ga., in 1941. He served with the Army's 4th Infantry Division, 4th Signal Company. He was one of 17 Comanches from the Lawton, Okla., area who were selected in 1941 for special Army duty to provide the Allies with a language the Germans could not decipher. He was descended on his mother's side from Chief Ten Bears, known as one of the signers of the Medicine Lodge Treaty of 1867. Chibitty, whose name means "holding on good" in Comanche, also was the last surviving hereditary chief of the tribe, the Comanche Nation reported. He had been living at a Tulsa nursing home. Charles Chibitty, 83, the last of the Comanche code talkers who used their native tongue to confound Hitler's forces during World War II, died July 20 of complications of diabetes at St.
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