Only three of 12 recognized Sioux code talkers remain

By Kevin Abourezk, Lee Enterprises | Monday, October 27, 2003

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WANBLEE -- The old soldier with skin like cracked mud squints now, trying to recall that killing field.

He watched dozens of soldiers and friends die all around him.

He struggles to understand why he was saved from all that hell.

And he can only attribute it to a prayer.

As bullets and shrapnel from grenades rained down around him, Clarence Wolf Guts whispered a promise in his Lakota tongue.

Wakantanka waglikte wachi, hechel chazenitaki gluonihasa.

Bring me home God, and I will praise your name always.

Navajo code talkers are the most famous group of American Indian soldiers to use their language to confound America's enemies in World War II. Most served in the Pacific with the U.S. Marines, relaying messages from island battlefields to nearby gun ships and aircraft.

The 450 Navajo code talkers sent radio messages using a code based on their language. Even fluent Navajo speakers who did not know the code could not have interpreted their messages.

The code was never broken.

Later, the Navajo were the subject of books and movies, including last year's "Windtalkers."

That attention eclipsed the efforts of Indian soldiers from at least 15 other tribes who used their languages to fight the Japanese and Germans in World War II.

Kenneth Townsend, a history professor at Coastal Carolina University in South Carolina and author of "World War II and the American Indian," said Navajo code talkers deserve the recognition. But other tribes shouldn't be forgotten.

"It is equally important to remember they were but a few men among a much larger body of men who served their nation, their communities, their families, and, most critically, their comrades in arms," he said.

Among the tribes that sent code talkers to war: Assiniboine, Cherokee, Choctaw Kiowa, Comanche, Menominee, Muskogee Creek, Navajo, Pawnee, Seminole and Sioux.

Now, nearly 60 years after the end of World War II, congressional leaders are working to recognize code talkers.

The Code Talkers Recognition Act, introduced in March by Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., would honor all Indian code talkers with the Congressional Gold Medal.

But it has not made it past the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee, according to an aide to Sen. Tim Johnson, D-S.D., a co-sponsor of the bill.

Last year, former Rep. John Thune, R-S.D., helped a similar bill move through the House of Representatives. But it never made it past the Senate.

"We certainly wanted to recognize a number of tribes around the country, but especially the Sioux," Thune said.

Time is running out. Only three of 12 recognized Sioux code talkers remain.

Two live in South Dakota, one of them on Pine Ridge Indian Reservation and one in Gregory. The third lives on Fort Peck Indian Reservation in Montana.

He was looking for a way out. A way to escape a father who liked to drink and wake his son by whipping him with a rope.

One evening, the 17-year-old packed his things and left his father's home.

Shirley Quentin Red Boy, now 82, never looked back.

He had always been a good shot, hunting deer and elk in the backwoods of northern Montana.

When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, he got to put his hunting skills to use.

At the time, he was part of an all-Indian infantry company stationed in San Francisco and charged with loading ships bound for the Pacific.

One Sunday, he awoke to reports of civilians killed by stray bullets and ships bombed to oblivion in a place called Pearl Harbor.

A few weeks later, he boarded a supply ship headed for Hawaii, where he saw ships smoldering in the bay and bodies being loaded into giant pits.

His unit was sent to guard the north shore of Oahu, the island where Pearl Harbor is.

To kill time, he and his friend, Herman Red Elk, would sing songs to each other in Dakota using their field telephones.

As they scanned the ocean, they relayed messages in Dakota. Because the language didn't include words to describe military machinery, they developed their own.

The Dakota word for mosquito, chapunka, came to describe a small aircraft.

Dragonfly, tuswecha, meant a large bomber.

Fish, hogan, was a submarine.

Turtle, keye, meant a tank.

When another soldier told a lieutenant about their use of Dakota, the officer paid them a visit.

"When he first asked me about it, I asked him if we were doing anything wrong," Red Boy said.

No, the officer said. In fact, he thought it was a clever way to protect their lines of communication.

Before he left the beach, he told the men, "You might save lives."

Little has been written about the contribution of Sioux code talkers during World War II.

Townsend, the historian, said Yankton Sioux were first used during World War I to transmit messages. Later, they used their language to call in artillery strikes in North Africa, Sicily and Normandy.

However, historians continue to debate whether any Sioux actually "spoke code" during World War II. Indeed, some say only the Comanche and Navajo used code during the war.

Using code was different from merely sending messages using the unaltered words of an Indian language, Townsend said. Although the language would form the foundation for a code, a code was essentially a new language.

For the most part, Sioux soldiers sent messages only in emergency situations, when communication lines were severed or a unit was about to be overrun, he said.

Yet, perhaps even more remarkable to some is that young Sioux men would join the military at all, considering the tribe's troubled past with the U.S. government, he said.

In fact, for years before the war, the government forced Sioux children to attend boarding schools, where they were punished if they spoke their native tongue.

The four soldiers sat on a dock pounding on empty beer boxes, imagining they were Dakota singers around a drum.

The war was over.

And Clarence Wolf Guts was trying to forget the confusion, the deprivation, the horror.

He had spent 3-1/2 years fighting the Japanese and, now, guarding Tokyo. He was tired and homesick.

The song he and his friends made up by pounding on beer boxes would be one of his few war souvenirs and one of many memories.

He and his cousin, Iver Crow Eagle, joined the Army together in June 1942.

The United States had been at war with Japan for seven months, and the young men from Pine Ridge wanted to join the fight.

They took basic training in Alabama, where Wolf Guts first heard of the code talkers. One day, a general called him into his office.

"I thought, 'What the heck did I do now?'" Wolf Guts said.

He asked Wolf Guts if he could speak Sioux. Wolf Guts told him there were three dialects of Sioux - Lakota, Nakota and Dakota - and that he could speak and write Lakota.

The officer asked if he could learn to operate a radio.

Yes, he responded.

After the meeting, Wolf Guts helped develop a phonetic alphabet based on Lakota, he said. That alphabet was later used to develop a Lakota code.

He and three other Sioux code talkers eventually joined the Pacific campaign, jumping from island to island, pushing the Japanese ever farther back toward their homeland.

Wolf Guts' primary job was transmitting coded messages from a general to his chief of staff in the field.

When it was over, Wolf Guts never forgot the promise he made.

To this day, the 79-year-old continues to pray to God, thanking the creator for allowing him to return.

"All my boys, my buddies, they're all gone now," he said. "I often wonder, 'Why, why am I alive?'"

As he lay in a hospital bed under a tent in New Guinea, Charlie Whitepipe watched the transport ships sail away, taking with them the soldiers of his unit, his friends.

He was sick. Sick with jungle rot and malaria, diseases earned from months spent up to his neck in flooded foxholes.

Now, he would be sent home, a casualty of war.

He would tell his son many years later that his unit "got clobbered" on its next mission.

"I didn't feel any regrets," he said about leaving the Pacific.

Whitepipe never got to use his Lakota language in combat. Nor was he ever taught to use a code based on Lakota.

He spent nearly two years in New Guinea, a forward observer and radioman for an artillery unit stationed on the American-occupied island.

When it was learned he could speak Lakota, his commanding officers made plans to have Whitepipe transmit messages to a Lakota-speaking Crow soldier in case the unit's communications were cut.

The plans were never carried out, because communications were never severed. And Whitepipe never got to meet the Crow soldier whose first name he only remembers as "Gerard."

"A lot of that I forgot," he says, an elder now sitting at his dining room table beside his son and daughter.

The 85-year-old's memories come and go now, like the autumn leaves outside his bedroom window.

Still, one memory continues to bring him joy.

The day he returned home from the war, he caught his mother by surprise as she stood in a pool hall in Mission.

"She pretty near collapsed."

Contact Kevin Abourezk at 1-402 473-7237 or kabourezk@journalstar.com