Congratulations to Mr. Prewitt. It should be noted, however, that France’s highest order of merit is called the Legion of Honour (Légion d’honneur), not the Legion of Armour, and also that France doesn’t actually have knighthoods in the same sense as Britain does. “Chevalier” (knight) is indeed one of the Legion of Honour’s five levels, and the name is a holdover from the days when France still had an aristocracy, but the French nobility system went out the window with the French Revolution. I once saw a series of amusing cartoons depicting what life in France would be like today if the Bourbon monarchy hadn’t fallen, and one of them showed an irate air traveler standing at the ticket counter of “Royal Air France” and telling the ticket agent “But I’m a baron and I have a confirmed reservation!” The agent replies, “I’m sorry, sir, but the Duke of So-and-so has precedence over you, so we gave him your seat.” In fairness, the same sort of thing actually happens in real-life republican France. A few years ago, there was scandal involving one of the major D-Day anniversaries (I think it was the 50th one), when the French government contacted various hotels in Normany and appropriated some of their existing reservations so that various French officials could have rooms for the event. Some of those rooms, however, had been reserved by foreign veterans of the D-Day invasion. When the story broke on the front page of French newspapers (under such headlines as “Our Liberators Insulted!”), public opinion was outraged and the French government beat a hasty retreat. The prevailing editorial opinion over this affair was: Do this to our own citizens if you want, but don’t do this to the heroes who ended the occupation of France.
WWII Mohawk Code-Talkers
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An interesting article which mentions that Navajo, which is perhaps the best-known example, was one among many Indigeneous languages – notably Mohawk, on which this story focuses – used in WWII to send hard-to-crack coded messages.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/indigenous/louis-levi-oakes-code-talker-obituary-1.5153816
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Thanks. That was awesome to know. Just love these ww2 stories and learning about all the good and bad hardships during this war !
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@SS-GEN said in WWII Mohawk Code-Talkers:
Just love these ww2 stories and learning about all the good and bad hardships during this war !
Me too. One of the things I like about the code-talkers concept is that, in my opinion, it’s an example of the flair which the Allies sometimes showed for coming up with clever, practical, and sometimes deceptively simple solutions to wartime problems. Some of those solutions involved large-scale efforts, but some of them were small-scale nuts-and-bolts devices and practices which required relatively few resources yet produced a big payoff. An example of the large-scale type is the solution the Americans devised to meeting the Battle of the Atlantic’s huge demand for shipping capacity, a demand which could not possibly be met by traditional shipbuilding practices and by existing shipyard capacity. The solution was to design a standard, simple cargo vessel (the Liberty Ship) which could be prefabricated in pieces at inland factories, then sent to the coast for final assembly; this greatly reduced the amount of worktime at the shipyards themselves, and meant that even small shipyards could handle the work. On the small scale, several examples come to mind. When the Allies started running into the new German high-tech (for the time period) acoustic torpedo, for example, they soon devised a low-tech countermeasure: simple mechanical noisemakers (as I recall, bunches of metal bars trailed in the water at the end of a steel cable, which would clang against each other under the influence of the flowing water) to draw the torpedoes away from the ships. When the Allies experienced trouble with Normandy’s dense hengerows, which tended to make tanks go belly-up, a U.S. Army sergeant come up with the answer: welding some steel “teeth” (initially improvised with cut-up railway track sections) to the front of a tank so that it could plow into a hedgerow and crash through it rather being tilted upward by it. These “can do” practical solutions, even when they were small-scale ways of dealing with a local problem, could potentially add up, and they also had the virtue of having an excellent cost/benefit ratio (in contrast, let’s say, with the impractical and wasteful Maus super-tank, which never even saw combat).
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Great stuff. Gives me an idea with an event card or something to that affect on codes. I do have an event card for Ger that’s says can’t use wolf pack attacks due to decoded messages.
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yea when i was Iiving in Southeast AK I saw an article in the paper about Tlingit code talkers. I hadn’t realized the USA had used other tribes up to that point. Was pretty interesting.
On a side note, the Tlingit’s were/are badasses. They kicked ass on the russians and were hired to pack 200lb packs up the chilkoot trail. They all seem to be naturally strong. Probably weeded out the weak genes long ago : )
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@barnee said in WWII Mohawk Code-Talkers:
On a side note, the Tlingit’s were/are badasses. They kicked ass on the russians and were hired to pack 200lb packs up the chilkoot trail. They all seem to be naturally strong. Probably weeded out the weak genes long ago : )
I saw something similar in a 1950s US Army film about the Korean War, part of which showed UN troops employing locals as porters to haul impressively large loads of supplies and equipment up steep trails to hilltop positions.
Another example of a simple-yet-sophisticated solution which the Americans used to address a WWII problem was the Marston Mat, which was conceptually similar to those Meccano construction sets for kids. It required heavy industry to manufacture it in the required huge quantities, but the device itself was mechanically straightforward: standardized sheets of steel mesh which could be laid down in an interlocking pattern, at whatever length and width was desired, to construct runways for aircraft in places where they were needed in a hurry, or in remote locations like Alaska and the Pacific Islands. The Marston Mat, combined with the use of heavy equipment like backhoes and bulldozers – which were commonplace in the US civilian construction industry – and chainsaws, allowed the Navy’s SeaBees (in the Pacific) and the Army’s Corps of Engineers (in Alaska) to turn an area of wilderness into an operational runway in just a few days.
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