Posted on 09/16/2007 5:29:00 AM PDT by Dysart
DURANT, Okla. -- Not many Choctaw Indians can speak their ancient tongue anymore.
As was the case in many tribes, the Choctaw elders wanted their children to speak the white man's language, while the U.S. government tried hard to eradicate it on its own.
"Choctaw was all I could talk until I was 9 years old," said Bertram Bobb, 83, one of the tribe's elders. "But I can't speak it fluently anymore. Not too many can."
There was a time -- many years ago now -- when the Choctaw language not only served as a cultural touchstone but also saved lives.
Although few people know it outside the Choctaws' original grounds in southeastern Oklahoma, they were the first "code talkers" in the U.S. military, using the intricacy and obscurity of their language a full generation before the Navajos played the same role in World War II.
A small band of Choctaw Indians volunteered when the U.S. entered World War I and joined the 36th Infantry Division, a joint Texas and Oklahoma outfit that made Camp Bowie into a household name in Fort Worth.
They were never recognized by the government for their role in confounding German eavesdroppers late in the war, and their descendants have been increasingly on the offensive to change that.
"We don't have a lot of Indian heroes," said Tewanna Edwards, the great-niece of Choctaw veteran Otis Leader. "Otis Leader was a hero of our people. He represents all Indians."
Today, they'll finally meet with some success.
Lt. Gen. Charles Rodriguez, commander of the Texas National Guard, will honor the 18 Choctaw code talkers at a ceremony in Austin. The families see the recognition as the fulfillment of a dream, but only partially so. They still believe that the code talkers deserve a Congressional Gold Medal, which the Navajos received for their role in World War II.
With its headquarters in Durant, about 25 miles north of Sherman, the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma counts 184,000 members, making it the third-largest tribe in the country. The band of Choctaws in Mississippi is considered a different tribe.
The Choctaws' history is largely one of peace -- they were considered one of the five "civilized" tribes -- and so their warrior history is not nearly as well-known as that of the Apache or the Sioux.
Not many people have heard of Leader, a widower with three children who enlisted at age 33. Gassed three times during the war and treated for months at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, Leader earned a Silver Star and the French Croix de Guerre for bravery unrelated to his code talking.
Or Joseph Oklahombi, whose name in Choctaw means "man killer." He too earned a Silver Star and Croix de Guerre and once captured 170 Germans by himself. He was such a proud Choctaw that after he returned from the war, he refused to speak English.
"The public thinks they know about the code talkers, but they don't know all of the history," Edwards said. "These men went forward -- they volunteered -- to fight for their country. And you can't put a number on the lives they might have saved through their code talking.
"They weren't even citizens of this country," she said, emphasizing each word.
Thrown into combat
The 36th Infantry Division marched to the Western Front in the summer of 1918, small-town boys from Texas and Oklahoma headed toward their first combat on some of the most inhuman battlefields in history.
In early October, the division -- attached to a French army group -- went into combat in the Meuse-Argonne region against the Germans, who always seemed to know when and where to hit them.
Col. A.W. Bloor, the commander of the 142nd Infantry, would remark later that the Germans were "a past master of listening in" to the regimental officers' telephone communications because they had tapped into the lines.
Using runners was not much more effective: A quarter of all the runners were captured.
October proved to be a very bloody month for the 141st and 142nd Infantry.
Someone -- history is unclear on who exactly it was, whether a white officer or Indian soldier -- remembered that E Company, 142nd Infantry, went by the nickname E Tribe because so many Indians served in it.
The Germans could listen all they wanted on the telephone lines. Unless they grew up in southeastern Oklahoma, they wouldn't have a clue to what was being said.
The Indians were separated and sent to command posts around the area to pass on and translate messages.
Bloor later wrote that the first time he used the code talkers was on Oct. 26 to withdraw some units under cover of darkness. The Germans did not respond. The regiment attacked a few days later and surprised the Germans, sending them into full retreat.
"They contributed with helping to turn the tide of battle in our favor," said retired Col. Pat W. Simpson, director of the Texas National Guard museum in Austin.
The Army, of course, is full of words that do not exist in Choctaw. The Indians and their commanders developed their own code just to make it work.
Machine gun became little gun shoot fast. Artillery became big gun. Casualties became scalps. Battalions became ears of corn.
Just two weeks after the Choctaws became code talkers, World War I came to a close, on the 11th day of the 11th month.
In the next few months, as the Choctaws rejoined their line units and word of what they had done reached higher levels of the Army, they were told to keep it to themselves.
A lesson learned
Less than 25 years after the Choctaws returned to Oklahoma, the War Department dusted off the memos Bloor wrote from France.
In World War II, the Army would call on Comanches from Oklahoma. But Army leaders seemed conflicted about whether they were effective and never used more than 20 of them. The Army Air Forces was dead-set against it.
The Marines were a different story. No service adapted native languages to the degree the Marines did in the Pacific Theater. Close to 400 Navajos acted as code talkers, serving during every island invasion from 1942 to 1945.
They were reported to be faster at sending and translating messages than a machine, and their language was never understood by the Japanese.
After the war, the Navajos returned to society with no more fanfare than the Choctaws.
Their stories remained classified for decades. In the 1980s, near the conclusion of the Cold War, national recognition finally started to arrive.
The French government honored the Comanches for their role in the liberation of France in the 1940s.
The Defense Department honored the Navajos and Comanches and unveiled an exhibit at the Pentagon in the 1990s. Congress authorized legislation to award the Navajos a Congressional Gold Medal. At the White House in 2001, the honor was presented to the few surviving men. Hollywood produced a movie in 2002, Windtalkers, starring Nicolas Cage.
The Choctaws' story remained a one-sentence footnote, if that, in most of the hoopla.
Not that the Choctaw code talkers knew any of that. They had all died by then.
And with them died many of their stories.
"I knew four of the code talkers personally," said Bobb, the nephew of one, James Edwards. "I regret not having talked to them. I had opportunities. I never did."
Honored at last
The Choctaws' chief, Gregory Pyle, planned to lead a party of Indians to Austin today.
At 2 p.m. on the grounds of Camp Mabry, the 18 code talkers will posthumously receive the Lone Star Medal of Valor, the state's second- highest honor.
Pyle and the code talkers' descendants will then tour the Brig. Gen. John C.L. Scribner Texas Military Forces Museum, which recently completed a long-awaited exhibit on the men and their role in history.
"That will be a large recognition, and it is a huge step in the right direction," Pyle said last week.
Today's ceremony and museum tour are due largely to Ruth Frazier McMillan, the daughter of Tobias William Frazier, a 24-year-old Choctaw who served in E Company.
Frazier came from a plot of land in Rattan, the son and grandson of leading men in the Choctaw Nation. His grandfather had served as a tribal judge. Nearly everything on the land given to them when Oklahoma became a state in 1907 carried their name -- Frazier Chapel, Frazier Creek, Frazier Landing.
McMillan, 75, who now lives in a Seattle suburb, planted the seed for the exhibit with Scribner more than 10 years ago. Scribner died last year.
"Before he became extremely ill, he hired me and left me with a laundry list of things he wanted accomplished," Simpson said. "At the top of the list was the Choctaw code talker exhibit."
Speaking out about the Choctaws has become a bit of a crusade for McMillan.
Her father never talked much about it, although she knew he took great pride in his service.
But she knew very little about his talking on the telephone to other Choctaws while the Germans listened in.
"I didn't ask the right questions," she said.
Now that her father is gone -- he died in 1975 -- she asks other people whether they know anything about the Choctaw code talkers. Rarely they do. So she obliges, gladly, faithfully.
"Our people need to have pride in their race," she said. "I don't care what color you are, you need pride in your background."
Code talkers
The 18 Choctaw code talkers who will posthumously receive the Lone Star Medal of Valor:
Albert Billy, 142nd Infantry
Mitchell Bobb, 142nd Infantry
Victor Brown, 143rd Infantry
Ben Carterby, 142nd Infantry
George E. Davenport, 142nd Infantry
Joseph H. Davenport, 142nd Infantry
James M. Edwards, 142nd Infantry
Tobias William Frazier, 142nd Infantry
Benjamin W. Hampton, 142nd Infantry
Noel Johnson, 142nd Infantry
Solomon Bond Louis, 142nd Infantry
Otis W. Leader, 16th Infantry
Pete Maytubby, 142nd Infantry
Jeff Nelson, 142nd Infantry
Joseph Oklahombi, 143rd Infantry
Robert Taylor, 142nd Infantry
Walter Veach, 142nd Infantry
Calvin Wilson, 142nd Infantry
Museum
The Brig. Gen. John C.L. Scribner Texas Military Forces Museum is the official museum of the Texas National Guard.
Located at Camp Mabry in Austin (Take the 35th Street exit off the Mopac Expressway)
Hours are 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Wednesday through Sunday
Admission is free
In case anyone missed this gem.
Bump
Unfortunately, I can’t make the dedication but I’ll make a point of visiting the museum. Theirs is an amazing story.
Despite the U.S. government's efforts, the white man's language is still going strong.
... The Army, of course, is full of words that do not exist in Choctaw. The Indians and their commanders developed their own code just to make it work.
Machine gun became little gun shoot fast. Artillery became big gun. Casualties became scalps. Battalions became ears of corn.
...
Press 1 to continue to read this thread in English.
Ping to a great story.
There is a Maytubby Road (like the name on the list) here in the little town of Tishomingo, OK. I wonder if it was named for him? Obviously related to his family considering the location.
bump
My father (an average “mutt” of Welsh-English extraction) grew up with
Tonkawa Indian children as his playmates in north-central Oklahoma.
Doing a stretch in the US Military was a normal thing for virtually
all the Indian males he knew.
The Germans tapped telephone lines in this instance, but U.S. cyphers were so weak during WW-I that Herbert O. Yardley, used to decipher U.S. codes in his spare time.
Very interesting.
By WW-II it was the Americans (and the Brits) who were reading their enemies’ cyphers.
The role played by the Poles in making the critical breakthroughs into German cyphers is often overlooked. David Kahn remarks on the fact that the democracies were much more cryptographically successful than the dictatorships in WW-II. (The U.S. broke Russian diplomatic codes, the Venona project, though enormous tenacity.)
The WW-II code talkers were not at all an ad hoc affair. They had a great deal of prepartion and training. Still, they were only used for low level field cyphers of immediate tactical use, not for high level communications, which are encyphered using conventional machines, the same way as the Germans and the Japanese.
The Germans practiced terrible COMSEC, which greatly assisted Allied code breakers. They obviously underestimated their enemies. The Japanese Fleet was so dispersed that updating and distributing new code books and cyphers became difficult and often took a back seat to other priorities.
Up in my part of Oklahoma, I often heard that Oklahoma was a Ponca word that meant "land of red dirt and bad water, where red man get sick and die".
Mankiller is a popular surname in Cherokee. And, based on the above, it appears to be in Choctaw, as well.
And, in their own way, they confirm the accuracy of the Ponca translation.
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