Bedřich Schalek

“After the landing in Liverpool, when the remains of the Czechoslovak army from France arrived to the English soil, a group of some five hundreds people who were dissatisfied with the conditions in the Czechoslovak army separated and they left the army. The English interned them and then used them for the English Pioneer Corps. It was only an unarmed work group. President Beneš then pardoned five hundred people who had left the army. They were mostly communists, volunteers from Spain, who had enormous combat experience under their belts, but they had to join the army in the ranks they had. For instance Oskar Bareš, one of the leaders, was a corporal or a sergeant in the Czechoslovak army, but in Spain he had been a high-ranking officer. Unfortunately for the Czechoslovak army, his rank was not recognized here.”

“Churchill rose to power and things became entirely different. We got permission to work, to work in the war industries above all. We could choose, there were positions we could choose from. We were told there was an open position for a school caretaker, or for workers in forests. The Englishmen considered it very important, because from Narvik they were cut off from their mining timber supply, which was used as shaft lining in their coal mines. And to import wood from Canada would be way too expensive, because they needed money for other important things, and therefore the last English woods began to be chopped down.”

“There was the tank battalion training, and we as sappers were preparing targets for them. It was in Cumberland, close to the sea. There was a trench we were in; we operated trolleys, little covered wagons. On the one side, tanks were moving, this was the tank fire training. We were riding down with these trolleys, and they were shooting at them. It was said that the Czechoslovaks had the best results of all.”

“Suddenly I felt something like an immense slap on my face. I was lying there, my uniform torn to pieces, and the left side was really torn and strewn all over. They arrived with a jeep and took me to an ambulance station MPO. While there, they automatically gave each wounded soldier a lighted cigarette into his mouth.”

“The village on the eastern coast served for military purposes and there we were trained to attack. We were shooting from all kinds of weapons and attacking. Then we were digging trenches and in the morning tanks rolled over us, so that we would get used to it, should something like that happened, but actually such a thing never happened.”