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 “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 “machinegun” 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: “Five miles to the right of the designated area and five miles inland the fighting is fierce, and we need help.”

From then on, as the Allied divisions rolled across Europe, the Comanches continued to send their messages back from the front line to divisional headquarters, where they would be read and translated to English by other Comanches.

Chibitty served with his regiment as it fought its way through the Siegfried Line into Germany, and was present at the liberation of a concentration camp. To the end of the war the Germans had no idea that they were being bamboozled by an American Indian language.

Yet, for long after the war, there was no official recognition of the part that the Oklahoma Comanches had played in the winning of the North West Europe campaign. In 1989 the French Government honoured the survivors of the group of code-talkers by appointing each of them a Chevalier de l’Ordre National du Mérite. It was not until ten years later that Chibitty was honoured at a ceremony in Washington held in the Pentagon’s Hall of Heroes. By that time he was 78, and all his fellow code-talkers had died.

At the ceremony on November 30, 1999, Chibitty was presented with the Knowlton Award, which had been specially created only four years before by the Military Intelligence Corps to recognise major contributions in the field.

On that occasion Arthur Money, an Assistant Secretary of Defence, acknowledged that: “History has proven that our code-talkers confounded our enemy’s intelligence collection efforts, which on several occasions gave us the tactical advantage.”

But at the presentation it was undoubtedly the admission of Kevin Gover, Assistant Secretary of Indian Affairs, that was the more gratifying to Chibitty: “It’s incredibly ironic that my agency, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, dedicated itself for the first half of this century to destroying the native languages that proved to be so useful to our armed services in World War II”.

This gratification was tinged with sorrow for Chibitty as he recalled his dead Comanche comrades.

“They’re not here to enjoy what I’m getting, after all these years,”he said.

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