WASHINGTON -- As the 21st century looms, with its promise of Y2K glitches and wars fought in cyberspace, the Pentagon took an hour out on Tuesday to recall one of its largely forgotten low-tech triumphs -- code talking.
As four American Indians beat a drum and chanted, Charles Chibitty, a 78-year-old Comanche elder, received a medal for his work in a war that ended half a century ago. It's a medal he believes was long overdue.
Chibitty was honoured as the last living member among 17 Comanches recruited in Oklahoma during World War II to use their language to fool the Germans.
As with the Choctaws in World War I and the Navajos in the Pacific Theater during World War II, the US Army took advantage of the obscure native language to provide a simple code for relaying battlefield messages that confounded the enemy.
Chibitty recalled one of his first messages, when he and some of his fellow Comanches were dispatched with forward units while others manned radios at headquarters to relay information that would have endangered other troops had it been overheard.
"The regiment is five miles to the right of it's designated area. There is furious fighting. Needs help," was his message in English. As it was relayed over the radio, it was in his native language, with a series of intricate codes that they had spent months mastering back in the United States.
Comanche is not a written language and bears no resemblance to European or Asian languages. While the British employed thousands of mathematicians, crossword puzzle experts, and other cryptanalysts to crack the highly sophisticated German Enigma code -- a major breakthrough in the war -- the American code talkers were never knowingly cracked.
Many of the words of 20th century warfare were not in the Comanche vocabulary. For tank, they used the word for turtle. A machine gun was a "sewing machine gun." A bomber was "a pregnant machine that flies."
In a ceremony at the Pentagon, Chibitty was given the Knowlton Award of the Military Intelligence Corps Association for his professionalism and "high standard of integrity and moral character" in carrying out his duties.
The work of the Comanche code talkers was "key to ... the armed forces success from Normandy to Berlin," said Assistant Secretary of Defense Arthur Money as he passed the medal's chain over Chibitty's long grey hair and hung it round his neck.
"In those days we did not have the ability to produce encryption devices, (we had) no way to protect tactical radio transmissions," Money said.
Chibitty, a former boxing champion and a renowned exponent of Indian dancing who worked for years to turn Indian youth away from drugs and alcohol as he grew older, did not disguise his feeling that the award was welcome, but late.
"Yes, it's been a long time, it's been a long time," he said, regretting that his colleagues could not have been there to also be honored and recalling that France had given them the coveted Chevalier of the National Order of Merit in 1989.
"Sometimes I wonder why it took so long to recognize us," Chibitty said, his broad, lined face creasing sadly as he named, one by one, his colleagues, all who have since died.
The existence of the code talkers was kept secret for many years after World War II. It's only recently that the Comanche speakers have been publicly recognized for their contribution to the American success in Europe immediately after the 1944 Normandy invasion.
Kevin Gover, assistant secretary for Indian affairs in the Department of the Interior, reflected on the fact that, through misguided government policy, code talking might never have come about.
"There is an extraordinary irony in all of this in that my agency dedicated itself for the first half of this century to destroying the Indian languages" as the government promoted the use of English, he said.
Copyright 1999 Reuters Limited.
