Colonel (ret.) Miloslav Kratochvíl - Bitton

“Three squadrons were already in the air, we were above the Channel and approaching the borders of Belgium. Then an order came that we did not need to fly on, that the Germans had surrendered. Come back! Then they said: ´This will be your very last operation flight, so find a place where you would like to fly your airplanes for the last time.´ Hlaďo said: ´We will fly to Exeter and from there to Manston.´ So we flew there and on the way back it was cloudy, the clouds were just touching the mountains, it was an absolutely nasty the weather. Which meant we were flying about 50 metres above the ground. On the return flight one of my engines suddenly stopped. We were flying on our reserve fuel, I did not know the condition of the extra fuel tank, whether there was not some dirt inside, so I switched to the main tank. I was only about fifteen metres above the ground, I needed to make that decision now. A little field, a farm, potato field, about hundred and fifty metres by hundred and fifty. A forest on one side, a row of poplar trees on the other. I flew in between two poplar trees, and one of my wings snapped off. The plane buried into the ground, bottom up. Praise God the ground there was not hard. I was head over heels, my left arm outside, the airplane pressed my head to the ground. As if I was supporting the plane with my neck; I could not even unbuckle my seatbelts. I was unconscious for less than a minute. In about three or four minutes the farm workers came running to me. They came with bare hands; they did not know what had happened. I screamed like an animal. I kept telling them that they needed to dig me out with their hands, that they should not pull at my arm. ´Don’t pull him, or you will tear his arm off.´ Eventually they dug deep enough with their hands that they could pull me out. Within ten minutes an ambulance came and brought me to a hospital in Uxbridge in London.”

“´When someone comes, you need to interrogate them, to find out what sort of people they are, whether they are not swindlers, or just people who only get over the border but do not want to take part in resistance fighting. You need to issue permits for them, there will be checkpoints when they ride on a train afterwards.´ So I went back to the border. Whenever there was somebody crossing the border in Nagykanizsu, the (Yugoslav) border patrol brought them to me. I filled in the permits for them and gave them money so that they could travel to Zagreb. Among them, there had been Klapálek, Střelka, and others, who were then my commanders in the Middle East. I was a rookie; I have never been in the army. I interrogated lieutenant colonel Klapálek. I asked him: ´What is your rank and where have you served?´ I was a greenhorn, I did not know anything. I also interrogated staff captain Zástěra. I was giving them money and documents so that they could continue further to Belgrade.”

“We could not be taken for a trustworthy element because we had married Englishwomen. That it was not possible for us to serve as officers in the army and have English wives at the same time. Our socialist state cannot stand something like that. One morning we came to the Kbely airport and they did not let us enter. This was already a sign that something needed to be done.”

“We guarded the harbour (Alexandria); at the same time the war was already raging in Libya. The Australians and the New Zealanders caught so many Italian captives that it was not even nice how easily they surrendered. Of course those Italians were then helping with construction work. For instance they would send me, one man with a firearm, to bring five hundred Italians to work on building a road. So I went with my rifle to the POW camp where the Italian captives were; there were thousands of them. I shouted: ´Per cinque.´ I ordered them into rows of five, counted the rows to know how many I had – about a hundred or hundred and fifty. And we marched to the place where we lived, because the Italians were good at building roads.”

“They told us they were sending us to Tobruk. We sailed on destroyers from Alexandria to Tobruk. We were on board the vessel, the sea was turbulent, and there as also a threat of a submarine attack. We all held onto the wires that were fastened around the ship, there was no other railing. Sometimes, when the sea was rough, they had to toss the boxes with ammunition to the sea. We had to hold firmly; everybody was sick. Even the sailors. We thought: ´They are used to it.´ But it’s not true, maybe only some of them, but the others also had to feed the fish just like us. We arrived to the besieged Tobruk around midnight, almost a day and a half after we departed Alexandria. There was a Polish unit, and we were replacing the Australians and the British. At midnight we disembarked, they placed a pontoon for us there, about half a metre wide, and with a rope on the right hand side. With our backpacks we climbed down to the firm land. Then they transported us to the interior. Just before there had been an air raid on Tobruk, so we immediately knew what happened. Now there was nothing more to bomb. Just the water.”