The Commanche Code Talkers of World War II

The use of Comanche to transmit tactical intelligence during WWII is clarified by an interview with Charles Chibitty, the only surviving member of the 14 Comanche code talkers who went overseas with the 4th Signal Company, which was formed in 1941 & consisted initially of 20 bilingual Comanches from the area surrounding Lawton, Oklahoma. The 4th Signal Company trained in Georgia & England, took part in the D-Day invasion, & served on the western front thereafter. Special Comanche idioms were coined & used for 75-100 technical military terms, & geographical names in France & Germany were rendered by Comanche equivalents of English words beginning with the letters spelling out the toponym; unlike the Navajo Marine system, different words could be freely selected to represent a given letter. The cryptographic use of Comanche in addition to Choctaw in WWI, quoted from a 1940 newspaper article by Willard Walker (1983), is disconfirmed. 3 References. J. Hitchcock