Colonel (ret.) Miloslav Kratochvíl - Bitton

“I told the taxi driver a wrong house number, we arrived to the place and there was nothing, the building was torn down. So I told him: ´Never mind, just let us get off here, we will find it.´ We found him, he lived on the third floor. I rang the bell, Mrs. Schalk opened the door, I told her who I was and who had sent me. She told us: ´For God’s sake, get out of here as soon as possible, my husband was arrested yesterday by the secret police.´ So there was nothing for us to do than to go to Fér Utca to the French consulate. It was guarded by a local police, there was always a policeman striding up and down the street. We tried to calculate how many steps we had to make till he turns around and starts walking back. We waited for the most opportune moment, then crossed the street to the consulate building and reached for the door. But it would not open! What will to happen to us now? The policeman came to us and showed us how to open the door. There was a doorknob which you had to rotate, and we did not know this. A cop opened the door for us! The consulate officers already knew about me. ´Ančík will move on, we will take care of him, and you will stay here. ´ - ´I have no documents. ´ - ´That is not a problem, you speak Hungarian.´ - So I had to stay.”

“´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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”