“Now about money. There was certain Venca Štětka from Pilsen. And one day we walked over a bridge over the Seina, and this was a pretty high arch bridge and this Venca was a sportsman and he says: ´Boys, I will take off my clothes, and I will walk on this arch and pretend I am about to jump to the river, and you will collect money from the bystanders. We may get some beer money.´ Well, it was fun. Venca was walking on top of that arch, and whenever there were people passing by, we offered them our hat to throw some coins in. We did collect some money and Venca eventually did jump down to the Seina, just for sport. But he took it easy, he did not dive head first. Because he did not know how deep it was. He just jumped there butt first.”
“Beaulieu is a beautiful part of England, there were still herds of horses roaming around freely. For instance some fifty horses were running on the airfield. Before every take off, guys had to ride around in cars to scare the horses away. They were allegedly horses which had been working in mines before for three years, they had been pulling some wagons there. After three years they were set completely free, so they were just roaming there and multiplying. They were said to be partly blind, due to having been in the mines somewhere near Cardiff. So they then set them free in return.”
“It was after 1938, around May, I believe. A Swiss sports plane landed there. And there was an alarm, because it was a military airport. No civilian aircraft was allowed to land there. Quickly he was ushered to Ruzyně. The pilot was certain captain Glossmaier, or so they said. His identity was checked. Now the March 15th came, all the soldiers left and only about three pilots and the rest of us remained there. There were about thirteen of us, one officer, first lieutenant Cigoš. We were left there to clean up the place. The army was disbanded, on March 15th the army was dissolved and we were left there. In a week, Junkers-52 started landing there. They were transport planes, German ones, old planes, and the commander was this Swiss guy.”
“We were driving on this highway, and the traffic was becoming denser and denser. Then it was just one moving mass. It was the mass of people who were fleeing to France. It was the worst for the elderly. Grannies, then mothers with children, baby prams, holding babies in their arms. You simply could not drive on in this. And to make matters worse, suddenly I can see these people diving to the ground, running. I stopped. And the guys from the back are shouting at me: ´Hurry, get out of here! Get out! Run to the side.´ Well, the German fighter planes had to do nothing else but start shooting into this mass.”
“Mosquito planes were allegedly falling shortly after take off. It was found out that a German spy had sneaked in, he was going there in a corporal’s uniform, they caught him afterwards. When you have so many soldiers, no one can notice that there is some intruder wandering among them. He had a uniform, which meant he was able to eat in the canteen. Nobody asked anybody about anything and nobody cared where he slept or lived. But what he did: in the Mosquito airplanes, which was a wonderfully fast double-engine airplane, both fighter plane and a bomber, after it dropped its bombs, no fighter plane could measure with him in speed. It was a special airplane and this guy was allegedly cutting the cables leading from the controls to the rudder. Thus the cable then broke and the plane became uncontrollable. Then the planes were falling to the sea. But they discovered this quickly, and he was caught.”
“And then Svoboda came. That the first 200 airmen would be leaving for France. I was also among them. This way Svoboda brought us to Gdynia. We arrived there in the morning and boarded a ship. Our consulate got obtained some yacht, a yacht from Sweden, because there were only two hundred of us. It was a small ship. In order to take us away, while there was still time.”
“He was giving us instructions about what we would have to do in England. And now the guys were bringing some monkeys there. The guys who had been in Africa, they were loading them onto the ship. They had monkeys and various dogs with them. Well, the Czechs. And cats, also. But now an order came: ´No living animal is to be brought to England, dump it all into the sea. Get rid of everything.´ And now the doggies, cats, monkeys, everything, was being thrown to the sea.”
“Jarda Dosoudil was sitting on one side, I on the other, the windows rolled down and we were driving over the meadows and fields. And in these fields there were many pheasants. Great pheasants. He slowed down a bit, and boom, they were close. Grab the pheasant and throw him into the car. But we arrived there, there was some farm with a long wall. And Jarda shot one more pheasant, I jumped out to fetch it. And he says: ´Hurry, hurry up, I can see some plume running along that wall.´ The wall was this high. And above it he could see a hat with a plume on top. A game-keeper or what. ´Come on, hurry, let’s get out of here.´ Well he did. But the guy jumped in his way and was waving his hat to stop the car. And he says: ´Don’t stop, he will run away, he will get out of the way. Láďa Matějíček kept going, on and on, and the game-keeper eventually dodged when he saw that we were not stopping. But the next day he came to the airport. And they were looking for the car. But the car was already well hidden in the forest and covered with branches. Nobody could find it and they were not able to recognize us by our faces. Well, we did pranks like this.”
“The entire ministry was brand new. A beautiful building, everything was beautiful, tables and columns made of marble, everything. The dining hall was exquisite but the French and their hygiene standards did not amount to much. They would get one plate, eat the entrée from it, then soup, then the main dish, all this from one plate. They would take bread, the white bread they have, tear a piece of it, and wipe the plate with it. We were eating it. It would be a waste to throw it away but the French were throwing it on the floor. You could see the floor covered with pieces of soft bread. Bread scattered all over the floor and trodden over.”
“Some three days after Adam Rusálek was taking off, his take off was around 10 p.m. It was a blazing hot day, the air was as if flickering. One plane took off before him. Now he was to take off. But he could not tear the plane off the ground. He was at the end of the airport, and he still could not take off, so he pulled it by force. Which means he pulled the plane too much, and the plane was no longer horizontal in the air, but as if pushing through. He was not able to attain the speed needed for flying. There was an officers´ canteen, and a forest behind it, and he brushed the tops of the trees and slammed into the ground. And it began exploding. I think the plane was ablaze for two days. All the ammunition was flying around and exploding, for you had about forty thousand of cartridges, bombs, rockets. It was terrible. There was a row of several unlucky days. I mean after we converted to the Liberators.”
Karel Kadlec was born June 17th 1916 in Chlum u Třeboně. As a young man he worked in the Baťa factory in Zlín. Before WWII, he joined the army where he became an aircraft engineer. After the occupation of the rest of the Czech territory by Germans, on March 15th 1939, he escaped to Poland. Together with other airmen he was taken to France, where he joined the Foreign Legion. He served in Sidi-Bel-Abbes in Algeria. In September 1939 he was transported back to France, where he worked at air bases in Chartres, Osey and Beauvais as an aircraft technician. In May 1940 he was sent for a mission to Belgium, but the aircraft at the airport were destroyed by German bombers. He escaped back to France, where he was hit by grenade splinters during a German air raid in Pontuas. Due to this injury he was temporarily blinded and he underwent treatment in Cubzak in Bordeaux. He escaped from the hospital and travelled by ship to Liverpool. In Honington he was assigned to the No. 311 bomber squadron as an aircraft technician. He served at bases in Honington, East Wretham, Aldergrove, Talbenny, Beaulieu, Predannack and Tain. At the end of the war, he was reassigned to air transport in London as a flight technician. In September 1945, he returned to Prague and then worked in aviation in Ruzyně. In 1946 he became a civilian. He settled in Šumperk, where he was working in a car repair shop. For a short time he was working in a quarry in Bohdíkov and then in a restaurant in Benátky till his retirement. He was constantly persecuted by the communist regime. He died on December 5th 2010 in Šumperk.
