The Comanche Code Talkers of World War II (review)

This volume tells the relatively unknown story of the Comanche Indians who served with the Army's 4th Infantry Division in the European Theater. Unlike the better-known and more numerous Navajo code talkers who served with the Marines in the Pacific, the Comanche code talkers numbered just seventeen men—only thirteen of whom actually served overseas. The Army recruited and trained its code talkers before the Navy even initiated its program, but the Navajos saw combat first—at Guadalcanal. The Comanches had to wait until D-day. Unlike the Navajos, the Comanches were not sworn to secrecy. But like many veterans, they disclosed few details about their wartime exploits.

William C. Meadows, an assistant professor of anthropology at Indiana State University, discovered their story while researching his dissertation on the military societies of the southern Plains Indians. By the time he began this study, the Comanche code talkers had nearly disappeared, with just five surviving members. When his book was finally published, only one, Charles Chibitty, was still living. Meadows interviewed the code talkers late in their lives and decades removed from their combat experiences. Nonetheless, their accounts ring true, and Meadows allows them to speak for themselves by generously using direct quotations. Another significant contributor to the project was Major General (Retired) Hugh F. Foster, who had served as the code talkers' original training officer.

Meadows traces the origins of Native American code talking to the Army's limited but effective use of Choctaws during World War I. Other dialects may also have been similarly employed in France, including Comanche, but documentation is lacking. Despite its earlier success, the Army decided not to make extensive use of code talkers during World War II, preferring to rely on more established methods of signal security. It is doubtful that the Native American population could have supplied sufficient numbers of eligible, bilingual speakers to meet the Army's vast communication needs. In contrast, the Marines, a smaller service, successfully employed four hundred Navajos. Whether feasible or not, Meadows's contention that an expanded use of Native American code talkers "would have unquestionably saved numerous lives and possibly even shortened the war in both theaters" (p. 50) cannot be substantiated. While he makes an interesting distinction between formal (coded) and informal (noncoded) codetalking, its application to additional tribal groups rests largely on anecdotal evidence alone.

The book is best where it focuses on the code talkers themselves. Meadows seeks to place the Comanches' achievements in a larger cultural context. Rather than simply a means of acculturation, he attributes their military service to a variety of factors, in particular their strong martial tradition. Most of them had attended government-run boarding schools where, ironically, they had been forbidden to speak their native tongue. The regimented routine, however, prepared them well for military life. The Comanches were recruited in Oklahoma beginning in December 1940 and underwent training at Fort Benning, Georgia, as members of the divisional 4th Signal Company. The two chapters covering their camp life and service overseas contribute previously untold details about these men and their work.

Although known as codetalkers, they actually communicated most often in everyday Comanche language, assigning Comanche words to military personnel, weapons, and equipment. Tanks, for example, became turtles. Where no equivalent term existed, they created a unique Comanche code word. To distinguish bombers from other planes, they called them "pregnant birds" and the bombs themselves, "baby birds." The unwritten Comanche language had no standard alphabet, but in special cases, like proper names, they devised an ingenious method of impromptu spelling. None of the Comanche code talkers was captured or killed in combat and, like their Navajo counterparts, their code was never broken. But the Comanches did more than just talk: They laid wire...