Oldřich Kulík

"For many of the Czechoslovakian pilots it was a bumpy ride to get there. It wasn’t so easy to get in England. Usually they came from France or Romania, Yugoslavia across the Gibraltar from the Mid East. But that wasn’t my case. I got there from Morocco, where my father worked as a Czech consul. After the American coastal landing in Morocco, which was by the way the very first landing of the west powers on the West me and another four Czech friends applied for the army there. In that time a lot of Czech people, technicians mostly, lived in Morocco. So we applied for the army. All of us, who were entering the army, were the same age."

"Firstly, I was given the radiologist training. There were also some other Czechs who came from different places like Canada, or Belgium or Holland etc. The whole group was very international. The training took about three or four months. After this training was over we moved to another place by the Irish Sea. There we underwent the shooting training. They taught us how to use the machine guns, shooting from the plane as well as the ground attacks. This training took also few months. I have been promoted to temporary sergeant. All countries had special status for all foreign soldiers accepted in their armies. In France it was the foreign legion. Here in England it was a common thing that the rank was only given for the time of war, that’s why my position was called temporary sergeant."

"Well, we have expected better life after the war. But everything just turned out to be different. It’s all the matter of the politicians. But it’s not only them."

"We were on a training bombing flight. We flew on aircraft called Mitchel, which was rather smaller type of an aircraft with uncompleted crew. We were supposed to hit the target on the sea which was made out of two floats. We had to drop two bombs in the middle of the floats. My position was at the back of the plane and I was supposed to announce how many bombs hit the target. So I was watching the sea, but it was quite bubbly which made it more difficult to recognize the targets. Everything happened so fast. I looked out and saw about three bombs hitting the water. All of a sudden the aircraft jerked widely. I looked around and I found out that some liquid is pouring out of the plane. I didn’t know though, whether it was oil or fuel. One of the bombs fell inside of the plane and created the jerk. Fortunately it was a training bomb not as dangerous as the real one would have been. The bomb fell into the plane body and exploded. The explosion caused the damage of the hydraulic system. That is a mechanism which allows certain parts of the plane to move. In this case it damaged the hydraulic system of the landing wheels. Due to the hydraulic system collapse the wheels couldn’t be set in proper position for landing. We have received an order to do steep flights and hope that the wheels would wedge and block themselves in proper positions. And we managed in deed. But it was only specious. One of the wheels didn’t block completely. We kept flying steeply down, but the wheel just wouldn’t jump in its position. At the end we decided to land due to a lack of fuel. The pilot luckily managed to land the aircraft using only one wheel. After we touched the ground the aircraft was scrolling on the runway. Nothing bad happened; especially no fire occurred which would have been the worst thing that could happen to us. Only then we could say - we made it!"