Prokopec Josef
Czechoslovakian during the Normandy invasion
Josef Prokopec, fighter pilot, member of the 310th and 312th Squadrons of the RAF
On the night of 5 to 6 June 1944, one of the most complex military operations of all time was launched - the Normandy invasion. Allied forces attacked the legendary Atlantic Wall with all their might, broke through it and began to build a bridgehead. Exactly 11 months later, shortly after 8 a.m., American Shermans pull up in Pilsen's town square. Nazi domination would, at least for the people of Pilsen, become a thing of the past.
Compared to other towns in the Protectorate, Pilsen had experienced more than enough of the horrors of war. This was mainly due to the Skoda factory, the largest supplier of arms to the Reich. The city mourned hundreds of victims after the war, but there were also many who obeyed the voice of conscience and went abroad to fight Hitler with weapons in hand.
Among them was Josef Prokopec. Already in the summer of 1939, this twenty-year-old graduate of the “Thousand New Pilots for the Republic” action, who had trained at the West Bohemian Aeroclub in Plzeň, fled to Poland to enlist in the then nascent Czechoslovak army abroad. At that moment, he probably had little idea that it would take another five years before he would sit behind the controls of a fighter jet. When Hitler's Wehrmacht invaded Poland in September 1939 and Stalin's troops on the other side, he and other Czechoslovaks had to flee. Eventually he ended up in the Soviet Union, where he waited for many months to be transported to England. This was followed by flight schools in England and Canada. He didn't join a combat squadron until February 1944. A quarter of a year after that, it was time for D-Day to begin.
It was 4:30 a.m. on June 6, 1944, when a combat alert was issued at Appledram, the base of the Czechoslovak fighter pilots. By that time, fighting between Allied paratroopers and German defenders was already in full swing in Normandy. The largest fleet the English Channel had ever seen was inexorably approaching the French coast.
"At seven o'clock in the morning we had a boarding party, and less than half an hour later the first machines went into action to operate over the invading coast for the next few days. The ‘longest day’ for us did not end until 10.35 p.m. when our last machines sent into action that day landed. The section we were guarding lay to the east of the invasion zone where the English and Canadians had landed, roughly from the centre of their sector with a left turn, towards Le Havre harbour. Here was ‘our’ invasion area, where we turned around and around and did air cover for those below. We didn't see any Germans, just our soldiers. There were an awful lot of them, streaming ashore from the invasion boats, and the landing fleet seemed to have no end. Allied soldiers were jumping off the boats into the water and rushing forward. Amidst the swarming, tanks, trucks, jeeps, and many other machines we had no idea existed until then were lumbering ashore. From the cockpits of our Spits we had this amazing spectacle in the palm of our hands. We also saw the firing of long range guns from the coastal batteries west of Arromanches. Because of the great speed, the altitude and the fact that we had to look after those below as well as our neighbours to avoid bumping into each other, we were unable to find out any further information.
Our presence on the battlefield in the first hours of the invasion, owing to the complete absence of Luftwaffe machines, rather only gave moral support to the infantrymen in their efforts, for the main share of the destruction of the enemy's fortified positions by air attacks was taken by the Typhoons and twin-engined Beaufighters of Tactical Air Command. We ourselves could attack only when asked to do so from the ground by the instructors. I didn't fire a shot all day, but the situation changed dramatically in the weeks that followed.
Before the flight, during a short briefing, we obtained the necessary data about the planned targets and the positions of the individual airmen in the formation. On the fateful 6th of June 1944, I flew to the ‘Red Four’ position. The first fighters of our squadron went into action after seven in the morning. After the second wave of our fighters, three more went into action in succession. Along with other pilots from No. 134 Airfield, I operated as part of the second wave, which reached the invasion zone around noon. By that time, the landing was in full swing.
Meanwhile, to the west of the British-Canadian sector, fierce fighting was taking place over Omaha Beach. After crossing the shores of England, we had a fascinating view of a channel filled with small boats and huge surface vessels. We walked above them at a height of at least 300 meters. It was under a cloud and the sea was rough. The first flight of our formation lasted two hours. In the afternoon we went into action again. Again we penetrated into the interior of France in the stretch between the coast and the cities of Bayeux and Caen. After returning from the action, we went to the parachute section to hand in our parachutes and then immediately there was a flight evaluation. No sooner had we sat down than ‘Spy’ was there, asking about everything we had seen, how the flight had gone and whether we had achieved any successes. Our commander was also present for the post-flight discussion. 'Spy' plotted the progress of the front on the map during the invasion, so that not only we, but also the mechanics and other ground personnel were able to follow the troop movements, even if only remotely.
On 7 June 1944, the second day after the opening of the second front, my friend Staff Sergeant Mirek Moravec, who like me was a member of 310 Squadron RAF, died tragically. It happened shortly after seven o'clock while taking off on a patrol over the front. The visibility was not ideal that morning and the weather had settled down to 8/10. The sky was overcast, but it didn't change the fact that we had to get our machines in the air at literally any cost. Also, the success of the Overlord depended to some extent on us and our Spitfires. Although the invasion force had already been captured on the coast and was slowly extending its beachhead, it was still very vulnerable and there was a real threat of being pushed back out to sea by the German armour. The consequences would have been disastrous. All three Czechoslovak fighter squadrons were on patrol three times that day, trying to block the skies over the invasion area from enemy attack.
The first wave took off after seven o'clock in the morning. Shortly after Mirek and his machine broke away from the runway and took to the air, he waved his wings to the other pilots that he was apparently returning due to a malfunction. He deployed on the circuit, but because another machine was taking off at the same time, he could not land immediately. This delay proved fatal, for his Spitfire plummeted in mid-air and went down like a stone, landing gear and flaps extended. The aircraft landed about half a kilometre from the Appledram runway. Mirek's body was trapped in the wreckage. A rescue party immediately arrived, but Mirek showed no sign of life. His neck was broken. We were both the same age at the time, had the same journey to freedom and even the same pilot schools.
My friend's sudden passing had a terrible effect on me. Even though it was wartime and we were putting our lives on the line every day, I couldn't cope with Mirek's cruel fate. I missed him everywhere. I was certainly not the only one affected by his death," said Josef Prokopec.
Until the last moments of his life, Mirek Moravec did not know what terrible things had befallen his family from Žižkov in Prague two years earlier during the so-called Heydrichiad. The whole patriotic family was actively involved in the anti-Nazi resistance. When Czechoslovak paratroopers appeared in Prague to prepare the assassination of the acting Reich Protector SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, their apartment became an intelligence cell and command post. In the Moravec family's apartment, paratroopers Josef Valcik (Silver A paratroopers) and Jan Kubiš (Anthropoid paratroopers) found temporary shelter, but it happened that there were also five paratroopers sent from England to carry out intelligence tasks and, above all, to execute the sentence pronounced on the executioner of the Czech nation. On the night of 25-26 April 1942, Valčík and Kubiš, together with several other paratroopers, attempted to guide British bombing planes to the Škoda arms factory in Pilsen. However, the action codenamed “Canonbury” came to nothing and the paratroopers withdrew again to Prague. In the streets of Prague, Gabcik and Kubiš waited for Heydrich on 27 May 1942 and carried out the orders they had received in England. The Germans then unleashed a terror with which Czech society coped for many years after the war.
It was June 17, 1942, when a Gestapo commando stormed into house No. 7 in Biskupcova Street in Prague's Žižkov district. When they penetrated apartment No. 17, they did not find the wanted paratroopers. In the confusion that reigned in the apartment at that moment, Mirko's mother Marie poisoned herself with cyanide. However, Inspectors Herschelmann, Chalupský, Bitter and others detained Alois Moravec, Mirko's father. His younger brother Vlastimil, called Ata, was in Písek at the time. The Gestapo lured him from there to Prague and immediately arrested him. The same fate befell his fiancée, Vera Löblová, who was arrested by the German security authorities together with her brother and mother.
Vlastimil was only 21 years old when he was murdered by the Nazis in Mauthausen in October 1942, together with his father Alois. Mirek outlived his younger brother by less than two years. He knew nothing of the tragic fate of his parents and brother, but he often remembered them during his stay in England and Canada. The entire Moravec family died fighting Nazism. “With Mirko, a friend left my life, the likes of which I never had in England again”, Josef Prokopec further recalled the first days of the Normandy invasion.
"Three days after the tragic death of Mirek Moravec, I again completed two two-hour missions. My ‘Spit’ is going flawlessly, but the weather does not favour us. On top of that, some of us found out that they have a problem with lack of fuel. The consequences are tragic for the 134th Wing. As the planes of sister 312 Squadron returned home in the evening, some pilots were caught out by the dense fog. The twelve-man formation led by Captain Vojtech Smolík broke up and the machines began to make their way in small groups to where they could land. Rotary Vilém Nosek, Captain Smolík's ‘number two’, while searching for a suitable landing area, crashed into the ground shortly before 7 p.m. less than thirty kilometres from his home Appledram. The pilot died in the wreckage of his Spitfire. The swarm commander, Captain Smolík, landed his machine on its belly. Five days later, Vilém Nosek was laid to rest alongside my friend Mirek Moravec in Chichester Cemetery," recalled the late Colonel Josef Prokopec, recipient of the 1939 Czechoslovak War Cross.
After February 1948, he was persecuted by the Communist regime, dismissed from the air force, stripped of his rank and even expelled from his home with his family. He did not receive full rehabilitation until four decades later. He died in 2010. Like Josef Prokopec, Vilém Nosek, a native of Líní near Pilsen, was a pre-war member of the West Bohemian Aero Club. An organisation that educated a number of future aviation aces who served in the ranks of the British Royal Air Force during the war, such as Karel Pošta, Jiří Hartman or Václav Šlouf.
From the book 500 Hours of Victory by Karel Foud, Milan Jíša, Ivan Rollinger
