By Sandra Jontz, Stars and Stripes Pacific edition, Thursday, November 7, 2002

Charlie Chibitty, the last surviving World War II Comanche code talker, tells of code words he and fellow soldiers used during World War II to confuse the enemy.

ARLINGTON, Va. — Comanches had no word for tank. So they called the big, green slow-moving machines “turtles.”

During the World War II battles in Europe, the Native Americans had no direct translation for bazooka, so “stovepipe” it was.

And machine gun?

“We called it ‘sewing machine.’ After all, they made the same noise,” joked Charlie Chibitty, the last surviving World War II Comanche code talker, during a Tuesday interview at the Pentagon.

They had a word for airplane, but not a bomber. The code talkers devised the phrase “pregnant airplane” to get their point across.

The code for Hitler himself?

“We called him ‘Crazy White Man,’” Chibitty said, matter-of-factly.

Chibitty, 80, has outlived the other members of the elite group of Native American men fluent in the Comanche language and used by the U.S. Army to send messages on Europe’s World War II battlefields, messages the Germans never did break.

The Kansas native has outlived his wife, Elaine, “the most beautiful woman the day I met her and the most beautiful after 49 years of marriage.”

He’s outlived both of his children, Sonny and Pam. Sonny was killed in the early 1980s in a car crash, and his daughter died from a ruptured appendix about 10 years ago, he said.

Dates, he admits, are a bit fuzzy. But there are things he’ll never forget.

Like carrying the body of Pvt. “Moon” Mullins to a German basement following a mortar blast, only to be told his friend took shrapnel to the heart, he said.

He remembers his father didn’t mind when he ventured home for Christmas in 1940 to tell the family he volunteered for the Army.

“Mama held back, but eventually, she let me go,” he said, smiling a semi-toothless grin.

So off to Georgia he went, where the Army trained 17 men at Fort Benning, and then three years later, sent 14 of them to Europe to fight — and trick — the Nazis.

In January 1944, they were sent to Liverpool, England, “for training,” he said.

“But when we couldn’t get out [on leave], couldn’t drink beer and couldn’t chase women, we know something was up,” he chortled.

Embedded with allied troops, the Comanche warriors from the 22nd Regiment, 4th Signal Company, 4th Infantry Division, stormed the beaches of Normandy on D-Day, June 6, 1944, and began laying communication lines and sending code messages.

The Comanches went to Europe, while the Navajo Indians fought in the Pacific.

Until his high school years, when he enrolled in Haskell Indian School in Lawrence, Kan., Chibitty never had spoken a word of English.

The Army champion boxer served for four years, and when he returned to American soil, he married Elaine. The two moved to Tulsa, Okla., where he worked as an auto body mechanic and later learned the “glass trade,” which meant hanging windows in buildings, sometimes 20 or 30 stories up. He still makes his home there.

In November 1999, Pentagon leaders presented Chibitty with the Knowlton Award, created in 1995 by the Military Intelligence Corps Association to honor contributions to military intelligence.

-- Anonymous, November 06, 2002