A conquering army on the border will not be stopped by eloquence.
Otto von Bismarck
The lime tree is the national emblem of the Czech Republic and Slovakia. In old Slavic mythology, the ‘Linden’ or ‘Lipa’ is considered a sacred tree. A lime tree is planted to mark an event or as an honour to a town or village. So how extraordinary to find not one, not two but three commemorative lime trees planted in the Buckinghamshire village of Aston Abbotts in the Vale of Aylesbury. The story of why they are there is the subject of this chapter and the three houses at the heart of the story are Aston Abbotts Abbey, the wartime home of the Czechoslovak president-in-exile, Edvard Beneš; Wingrave Manor, four miles down the road from the abbey, which housed his chancellery; and Addington House, a safe-house for the heads of the military intelligence unit-in-exile.
We hear the oft-repeated cliché that after the fall of France Britain stood alone on the edge of Europe, implying isolation and lack of support. Britain was alone in the sense that the majority of mainland Europe, including the countries of all our erstwhile allies, was occupied by the Germans. In the literal sense, however, we were not alone. Czechoslovak and Polish armed forces, battle-hardened and experienced in a way that the British Expeditionary Force was not, were of great support during the summer of 1940. There were also Dutch, French, Australian, Canadian, and later Greek, American and others working alongside the British and Commonwealth armed forces and, later in the war, men considered enemy aliens in 1940, such as German nationals living in Britain, were accepted.
In 1940, the majority of foreign fighters were Polish and Czechoslovak, who numbered in the tens of thousands. Their pilots flew in the Battle of Britain, helping to thwart the Luftwaffe’s attempt to crush the Royal Air Force and render it useless prior to Hitler’s planned invasion. They were there to help the citizens of Coventry when the city was bombed in the Blitz and a number trained to become SOE agents and were parachuted back into their home countries to help the resistance.
Czechoslovakia’s place in the Second World War is inextricably linked with the Munich Agreement of September 1938 and the invasion of Bohemia and Moravia by the Nazis in March 1939. It is all too often passed over as a footnote in history, which does it a great injustice. In addition to the contribution of its soldiers and airmen, Czechoslovakia’s intelligence service had two high-quality agents within Germany and produced some inordinately valuable information about the enlargement of the Luftwaffe in the 1930s and Germany’s plans for the invasion of both their own country and Poland in 1939. Czech agents carried out the only successful assassination of a high-ranking Nazi officer, which led to a dramatic political U-turn by the British and French governments who had betrayed Czechoslovakia by agreeing to the terms of Munich but who now condemned the German reprisals after the assassination. Why and how this all happened is less well-known today than it was at the time but it constitutes a very important chapter in the history of the war.
The Republic of Czechoslovakia was created after the collapse of the Habsburg Empire at the end of the First World War and was officially proclaimed independent on Wenceslas Square in Prague on 28 October 1918. The new republic was an alliance of the Czechs from Bohemia and Moravia, who had been ruled by the Habsburgs and the inhabitants of Slovakia which was until then part of Hungary. It was considered by some interested parties as ‘the major blunder of many blunders made at Versailles’.1 However, by others it was deemed a success. Its first president, Tomáš Masaryk, appointed Dr Edvard Beneš as his foreign minister as he had been responsible for the lion’s share of negotiations for the formation of the republic in Paris during the war. On Masaryk’s death in 1935 Beneš became president. By 1938 he presided over a country that had developed heavy industry with an enviable record of workers’ rights: ‘an eight-hour day; sickness and employment insurance, government aid for housing, pensions for old soldiers and their dependents, a good system of wage arbitration courts, and protection of the tenant.’2 In Bohemia, where the majority of the Czech population lived, illiteracy was only just over 2 per cent. As to the German minority in his country: Beneš could point to the fact that more money was spent per head on the education of German children and the same applied to German students in Prague. The Sudeten Germans, however, did not see things in the same positive light. During the dismantling of Austria-Hungary after the First World War they found themselves no longer part of Austria but part of the new country of Czechoslovakia.
Czechoslovakia quickly became a thorn in the side of the Nazi party. Lieutenant-Colonel František Moravec, the head of the intelligence service, saw the danger right from the beginning of Hitler’s reign. He wrote in his autobiography:
In 1934 it was not necessary to go to history to see the German danger. By jutting deeply into its territory, Czechoslovakia with its military strength and mature industry had been since 1918 the keystone of the post-war French alliance in the east. The moment Germany decided to implement the policy of expansion announced in Mein Kampf it would come up against the Czechoslovak state. It would be a military necessity to destroy it before any German aggression could take place.3
President Beneš was singled out by Hitler as the epitome of evil. ‘Hitler hated Beneš and identified him, correctly as it happens, with the spirit of Czech nationalism that he was determined to crush.’4 In September 1938 he challenged Beneš to hand over the Sudetenland so that the ethnic Germans could be set free, accusing him of inventing ‘the lie that Germany had mobilised her troops and was on the point of marching into Czechoslovakia.’ Far from being oppressed, as Hitler maintained, Beneš believed the Sudeten Germans to be well cared for, despite, as he put it, ‘their innate sense of social superiority’. He wrote later that Hitler needed to take control of Czechoslovakia for strategic reasons and the Sudetenland question was just a screen for his ultimate plans, which were to gain control of the Czech armaments industry. The French aviator, writer and politician Henri de Kérillis agreed, writing in a journal called the Époque in 1938: ‘Bohemia and Slovakia are a bastion, a great junction that commands all the roads of Europe. With Czechoslovakia under her rule, Germany will be able to encircle Poland and Hungary, and gain an outlet to the reserves of oil and wheat in Rumania and Russia. If Hitler takes Prague, he will, in fact, have become master of Europe.’5
Hitler was implacable and every time Beneš spoke out about his country the Führer became more angry. Two weeks after he challenged Beneš publicly to hand over the Sudetenland he made a speech in Munich:
I can say only one thing: now two men stand arrayed one against the other: there is Herr Beneš, and here stand I. We are two men of a different make-up. In the great struggle of the peoples while Herr Beneš was sneaking about through the world, I as a decent German soldier did my duty. And now today I stand over against this man as the soldier of my people! . . . With regard to the problem of the Sudeten Germans my patience is now at an end!6
Three times Hitler ordered Beneš to meet with him and three times the Czechoslovak president refused. By the third time Hitler, who Beneš described as an ‘animalesque’, was beside himself. The president told his officials he would agree to go to Berchtesgaden on one condition: that he would be carrying a pistol in one pocket and a hand grenade in the other. His advisers were fearful but in 1944 he was asked what he would have done. He replied:
I am considered in Central Europe almost a human symbol of that democracy which Hitler loathes. He and I were living in two different worlds. There could be no mental link between us. Very well, he would have begun to shout at me, and so offend me. He would have been boastful and disgusting. I would not have tolerated that. Therefore my conclusion was: if I went it would end in disaster because I should never accept his insults. I should have to answer him, and as such a creature is impervious to reason the only answer would be to take a hand-grenade in my pocket and when he started to shout simply to throw it at him.7
The meeting of course never took place and Hitler pushed the head of the Sudeten Germans, Konrad Henlein of the Sudetendeutsche Partei, to draw up an eight-point plan to put to the Czechoslovak government. Henlein had been set up and funded as a troublemaker by the Nazis to provide an excuse for invasion on the grounds of the mistreatment of the German nationals. The plan included making reparation for post-republic damage caused to German estates, full self-government for the German-speaking areas and, most sinister of all, ‘Full liberty to profess German nationality and the German National Socialist political policy.’8 Beneš was prepared to give several concessions to Henlein in the pursuit of peace.
On the last point of expressing Nazi political policy, however, Beneš refused to negotiate. His country represented the most liberal democracy in Central Europe and he was not prepared to surrender that freedom the people had won over the last twenty years. It was this that infuriated Hitler the most.
Some thought he had gone too far in his actions but, as his biographer Compton Mackenzie, who interviewed Beneš extensively in 1944, wrote:
Beneš was in the same position as every other European statesman. He might feel positive that it was useless to appease Hitler, but to assume that and provoke war was to face a moral responsibility beyond the courage of any man. He believed it to be his duty to the world to make the utmost sacrifices for peace, and of this belief the British and the French governments took advantage.9
Neville Chamberlain promised in his negotiations with Hitler that he would seek agreement from the Czechoslovak government that it would give up all lands to the Third Reich with 50 per cent ethnic Germans or more. For this concession, Hitler was prepared to discuss peace in Europe. Chamberlain presented his idea to the House of Commons in front of the French foreign minister and wrote to Dr Beneš to request him to agree to the terms and to do so quickly so that he could discuss the issue with Hitler on his next visit to Berchtesgaden. Dr Beneš personally wrote a long, poignant and dignified note in reply turning down the ‘offer’ and explaining eloquently why changing her borders would in effect be ‘a mutilation of Czechoslovakia’ and lead to the balance of forces in Central Europe and Europe being destroyed. ‘It would have the most far-reaching consequences for all other states and especially for France.’10 This reply was never published in London or Paris. President Beneš was effectively abandoned by his erstwhile allies. That France had refused to stand by Czechoslovakia hurt Dr Beneš personally and when friends visited him in late September after the Munich Agreement permitted annexation by the Nazis of portions of his country, he was a broken man. He said to one of them in a barely audible voice: ‘We have been disgracefully betrayed.’11
Winston Churchill recognised this and wrote on 21 September: ‘The acceptance of Herr Hitler’s conditions constitutes the prostration of Europe before the force of the Nazis, who will gain very important advantages thereby. It is not Czechoslovakia alone which is menaced, but also the freedom and the democracy of all nations. The belief that security can be obtained by throwing a small nation to the wolves is a fatal delusion.’12
Churchill was ignored, Hitler was appeased and Czechoslovakia was forced to surrender part of its territories. As the government was reconstructed at the beginning of October, President Beneš felt he had no option but to resign. He gave a broadcast on 5 October in which he said: ‘In these difficult times I have tried to safeguard the interests of our State and I have tried to do what is right for Europe in order to preserve the peace . . . As a convinced democrat, I think it better to go. We remain democrats and we shall try to continue to work with our friends, but my resignation is imperative in order to accommodate our State to the new circumstances.’13 He wished his fellow countrymen the best of courage for their future and urged them to stand together. He made special mention of the armed forces with whom he ‘would remain in spirit’. With that he left his official residence and moved out to the country.
On the same day Churchill stood up in the House of Commons and predicted a terrible future for Europe. He spoke of the five years of ‘futile good intentions’, of a search for the line of least resistance and for years of neglect of air defences. ‘We have been reduced in those five years from a position of security so overwhelming and so unchallengeable that we never cared to think about it. We have been reduced from a position where the very word “war” was considered one which would only be used by persons qualifying for a lunatic asylum.’14
In the middle of October, Bohuš Beneš, the president’s nephew, arrived in Prague and urged his uncle and aunt to flee to London as they would not be safe in Czechoslovakia. On his way to his uncle’s house, Bohuš Beneš spoke to a taxi driver who told him how brutal the Nazis had been in the short time since the president had resigned. He said: ‘The people are suffering from hurt like unto that of a watch dog which has been whipped unjustly for having guarded the security of Europe.’15
Czechoslovakia was left to become a victim of the Third Reich:
It was a bitter moment for Beneš as it was for all Czechs. He was under great pressure from the army to reject Chamberlain’s mediation and to fight Germany alone but decided that this would simply mean the annihilation of his country. It was a controversial decision and one which many held against him ever afterwards, for in handing over the Sudetenland with its frontier defences Beneš left Prague at the mercy of Hitler.16
It took a week to complete the preparations for Dr Beneš’ departure from Czechoslovakia. He flew out of Prague on 23 October 1938 and landed unannounced at Croydon airport later that day. His nephew, who lived in Putney, gave the Beneš family a home. The president retired to bed for two weeks and, once rested, began the next stage of his work in earnest. He maintained total silence in London, while his name was abused in his old country. He was to blame for everything and the Germans fanned the flames of fury. He said later that ‘I had to be careful not to make myself persona non grata in Great Britain by indiscreet public utterances.’ Early in 1939, the president accepted an invitation to go to the United States to give a series of lectures on democracy at the University of Chicago. He arrived in February to a warm welcome, which both surprised and delighted him and his wife.
By the late 1930s Czechoslovakia possessed one of the best intelligence organisations in Europe, run by the highly able head of the military intelligence service, Lieutenant-Colonel, later General, František Moravec. This was to have a powerful influence on subsequent events. Moravec had been part of the entourage who had entered Prague to celebrate the newly independent Czechoslovakia in 1918 and thirteen years later he was posted to the intelligence section of the First Army in Prague. He was an excellent networker and formed strong and trusting relationships. The British had had an SIS man in Prague from 1933 called Major Harold ‘Gibby’ Gibson, an officer with immense experience of intelligence gathering who specialised in running ‘deep cover spies’. He worked under the cover of passport control officer, a post that was recognised throughout Europe as synonymous with intelligence gathering. Gibson proved to be an important friend to the Czechs and was affectionately known later among the exiles as ‘Moravec’s Englishman’.
Moravec had two key agents working with him. The first, known as A52, was a ‘brush-haired Prussian type with a monocle’17 called Major Selm. He told his contact in the intelligence service in Prague that he was heavily in debt and needed large sums of money to keep his lifestyle going. For handsome payments he was prepared to offer detailed information about the build-up of Goering’s Luftwaffe, including ‘numbers of planes of the various fighter, bomber and dive-bomber types, the nature and training of the pilots and their support crews and their battle tactics.’18 He also listed the locations of airfields and the expansion plans. It was prime data much needed by London and Paris as the estimates of German aircraft strength available to the Allies were inaccurate. In total, Moravec paid him over 2 million Czech crowns, the equivalent at the time of £150,000 (and around £6 million now). He warned Selm not to spend lavishly as he would draw attention to himself. His advice was ignored and Selm was tracked by German counter-espionage who arrested and beheaded him in 1936.
A year later, Moravec met his most impressive agent of all, a high-ranking Abwehr officer who called himself Karl. He was given the name Agent A54 and the material he produced was of such high quality and of such a reliable nature that it gave the Czechoslovak government-in-exile top-class intelligence from inside the Reich. From March 1937 until October 1941, A54 supplied information about Germany’s intentions, including the invasion of the Soviet Union, and its order of battle. In December 1937 he gave the Czechs the cipher keys used by the SS signal regiments in the field and told them that the secret password on the night before the Munich agreement was Heil 15 März.
At the beginning of March 1939, A54 warned Moravec of the German intention to invade Prague on 15 March. The two men met in a secret location in the city with a few of Moravec’s most trusted men. He described the scene:
The master spy stood facing me, stiff and erect. The suppressed emotion in the room was almost palpable and found its expression in rigid formality. We were all standing – almost to attention – as we listened to A54’s report, which made it perfectly clear that in exactly eleven days our country would cease to exist.19
He gave them details of the plans of attack and even the names of the officers who would be commanding the four divisions. Chillingly he also brought with him an original document, an order for the Gestapo to arrest all Czechoslovak intelligence officers and subject them to interrogation ‘with great severity’ in order to learn the identity of their source agents on German soil. A54 asked Moravec what he would do next and when Moravec hinted that they might go abroad, he assured him he would find the Czech intelligence officer wherever he went and would keep supplying information.
The next day Moravec warned the Czech Parliament of the coming invasion by the Germans. At a secret meeting of the cabinet the foreign minister told them in his opinion the fears expressed in the report were wholly unfounded. The following week Moravec tried again to convince the government of the situation. He was told by the foreign minister: ‘I know that you are a good intelligence officer and that you mean well. But if anything of this kind were happening, I, as Foreign Minister, would be the first to know about it. Calm down. And bring us better news in the future.’20 It was the most humiliating experience of his life, Moravec said later.
Major Gibson, who had been working closely with Moravec for the best part of a decade and had already made it clear that British intelligence ‘had a great interest in preserving co-operation’ with the Czechs, organised for Moravec and ten others to be flown secretly out of Prague on 14 March with the most valuable intelligence files and archives. They stopped over in Amsterdam and then flew anonymously into Croydon airport. As Moravec flew out of Czechoslovakia and into German airspace Gibson watched him bury his head in his hands and weep. At six o’clock the following morning the Germans made their move. Moravec, safely in London, wrote to Beneš, ‘informing him of our arrival and placing myself and my staff at his disposal as the natural leader of any nascent movement.’21 He was invited to head up the Czechoslovak military intelligence in exile. The team worked out of the radio shop of a British agent called Reg Adams in Rosendale Road in Dulwich, as a cover for their work. The shop was bombed in September 1940 and they were only just able to rescue the precious secret files smuggled out of Prague by Gibson and Moravec. The radios were all lost.
After the German takeover of Bohemia and Moravia in March 1939, Beneš was recognised as the voice of free Czechoslovakia and its natural leader. In April he was formally invited by representatives of the Czech National Alliance, the Alliance of Czech Catholics and the Slovak National Alliance, to accept the leadership of what was to become the Czechoslovak National Council.
Dr and Mrs Beneš returned to London and moved into a villa in Gwendolen Avenue, Putney in July 1939. He was fired up by his welcome in the United States and three months later by French prime minister M. Daladier, who recognised the Czechoslovak National Council and agreed to the reconstitution of the Czechoslovak Army.
Beneš was embarked upon a project to promote the Czechoslovak cause in the free world. In due course he would be successful in gaining recognition from other countries: Lord Halifax confirmed the British government’s recognition in December and on 23 July 1940 His Majesty’s Government recognised the Provisional Czechoslovak Government. With Chamberlain out of office and Churchill in power, Britain had gone from betrayal to becoming an ally. It was an extraordinary turnaround. A year later, ‘on 18 July 1941, Great Britain accorded full recognition of the President of the Czechoslovak Republic and of the Czechoslovak Government, and the king accredited to the President of the Czechoslovak Republic his Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary.’22 This did not mean they made life easy for the Czechs in London. Quite the opposite; President Beneš and his ministers found themselves frequently confounded by Whitehall mandarins who were uncooperative and treated the Czechs with little respect. However, the British government’s intelligence arm, MI6, was very keen to court the Czechs.
Meanwhile, A54 continued to supply the Czechs with reliable information and this gave President Beneš a strong hand with the British government. Moravec and Gibson carried on working closely together, making use of the Czechoslovak network within the Third Reich. This relationship would have positive repercussions for the future. Moravec was also in touch with Colonel Gubbins in Paris and Captain Peter Wilkinson in London in early 1940. ‘Through these channels Czech intelligence kept the War Office “generally informed” about the operational plans of the underground, passed on requests for weapons and received tactful military advice.’23
A54 remained an enigma and his true identity unknown to the Czechs, MI6 or the Russians for a decade after the war. But the Germans knew who he was and caught up with him in October 1941. Such was the protest at his arrest, as a highly decorated Nazi Party veteran, that the Gestapo was forced to release him. He was rearrested the following March and imprisoned without trial. It is alleged he was murdered by his SS guards two weeks before the end of the war but not before he had succeeded in significantly damaging Germany. His name was Colonel Paul Thümmel, a Dresden-based high-ranking member of the Abwehr and no one has ever worked out the motives behind his treachery. He received payment for his intelligence but nothing like enough to compensate for the danger he put himself in and indeed the quality of the material he was handing over to the Czechs. Some believe he was disenchanted with the Nazis because they looked down on him for coming from a working-class family. Whatever the reason, his information was of vast importance and it helped to give the president-in-exile a much-needed lever in London.
Despite the quality of the material coming through from A54, the British attitude towards the Czechs, with the exception of the intelligence services, was unhelpful. President Beneš had an intermediary at the Foreign Office called Robert Bruce Lockhart, a former diplomat and journalist who had got to know the president well in Prague and was sympathetic to his cause. He had worked for SIS in Russia before the war and wrote a book about it. From 1941 he ran the Political Warfare Executive (PWE) and was close to the foreign secretary Anthony Eden. Lockhart was equally frustrated by the attitude and over the next years did his best to ease the relationship between the Czechs and the British. After A54’s arrest, however, that was not as easy as it was when the information was flowing freely. With this and other arrests SIS was virtually wiped out on the continent and it was partially as a result of this that a plan was hatched within the Czech intelligence service to deliver what might today be called a ‘Spectacular’. Hugh Dalton met Beneš in 1941 and agreed that a small number of Czechs could be trained for special operations.
To go back to 1939, as Beneš was in London promoting his country’s cause, the servicemen in his once great armed forces in Czechoslovakia had to decide whether they should remain in their occupied country or whether they could better serve their fellow countrymen by leaving and finding friendly territory. The Germans had raided the Czechoslovak armed forces, taking 48,000 machine guns, 1.5 million rifles, 2,500 guns of different calibres, 4.5 million rounds of ammunition, 600 tanks and 1,000 aeroplanes. They raided the Czecho-Slovak National Bank’s gold reserves, seizing 18 million pounds of sterling – now worth some £6 billion.
Most Czechoslovak servicemen were influenced by memories of 150,000 Czech and Slovak volunteers who had fought alongside the French in the Great War. Now many chose to leave Prague to fight in other countries, some getting out while sympathetic customs officials looked the other way while others posed as Sudeten Germans and got passes to Austria. Most ended up in France where they joined the Foreign Legion.
The French high command seemed to know little and care less about the welfare of its Czech allies. The troops lost their smart Foreign Legion uniforms and were issued with kit which had probably done service with French recruits in 1914. Weapons were few and antiquated. There were no boots and the soldiers had to wear wooden clogs. There was increasing frustration and bitterness with the situation amongst men who had travelled across Europe at great personal risk to fight, only to find themselves relegated to the margins of the allied war effort.24
Others had remained in France after 1918 and were integrated in French society, marrying into French families. Some fighters had joined the International Brigades fighting in the Spanish civil war. They were known as Spaniěláci and held strong left-wing, some even Communist, views. Those who could not return to Czechoslovakia had been living since the end of the conflict in a large camp in the Bas-Pyrénées. At the outbreak of war in September, they were allowed by the French to join other Czechoslovak soldiers who gathered at Agde Camp on the Mediterranean coast.
Czechoslovak pilots saw action during the Battle for France, but it was too late to save France by the time the ground troops were brought into the fight near Paris in June 1940. As the situation unravelled and France surrendered, Czech troops made their way back to the Mediterranean coast. It was anything but orderly. Some lucky pilots were able to fly direct to Britain, other men escaped southwards in small groups, a few ended up in North Africa. In the chaos that followed the collapse there was no systematic withdrawal. It was a case of each group of men for themselves. As they had no food for the long walk back to the south they had to forage in deserted houses and gardens in order to eat. Franz Kaplan was with a small party of officers and men who made the journey on foot. He explained what happened in an essay in 2000 to mark the sixtieth anniversary of the arrival of Czechoslovaks in Britain.
Those who had families in France were released from their service commitments: for them the war was over. The rest, mainly those who escaped from their homes in Czechoslovakia and risked being arrested by the Germans as traitors, congregated in Sete and embarked available ships bound for England, via Gibraltar.25
The majority of the Czechoslovaks who were to end up in Britain in July 1940 were rescued in this way. Soldiers piled into any vessel that would take them, such as the Northmoor, a British registered coal ship, which had just unloaded its cargo. The rescued men arrived at Gibraltar covered in coal dust. They were transhipped to The Viceroy of India where they sailed in a little less discomfort and arrived in Plymouth at the beginning of July. The last contingent to get away from France sailed in an Egyptian vessel on 27 June, joining at Gibraltar on 2 July and sailing up the Mersey and into Liverpool a few days later. A few stragglers arrived on other vessels and family members and dependents who had managed to escape from France were also soon to arrive in Britain.
Our group consisted of approximately 40 officers and men, some Czechoslovak airmen and civilians escaping from Paris whom we picked up on our way through France . . . We arrived in Bordeaux the day the ceasefire was signed between France and Germany. Due to that, we had to travel to Le Verdon at the mouth of the Gironde estuary where we persuaded a willing captain to take us out of France. We eventually landed in Liverpool and our introduction to the British way of life began.26
Once Kaplan and his fellow Czechs docked in Liverpool they were taken to the landing stage from the ship in small craft where the beautiful sight of a long array of tables laden with sandwiches, cakes, tea and soft drinks greeted them. ‘It was the first decent food we had had for weeks and we were encouraged to help ourselves to as much as we wanted. The last time we had so much attention and genuine willingness to help lavished on us was before we left our homes.’27 After the feast they marched to Lime Street railway station. People in the streets cheered and pressed chocolate and cigarettes into their hands. It was an extraordinary experience for them and one they savoured as they made their way in comfort to Bunbury, a small village in rural Cheshire, almost equidistant from the railway junction at Crewe and the ancient Roman city of Chester. The journey by train was a joy, Kaplan wrote. Their previous journey across France had been either on foot or in the back of cattle trucks. This train had ‘proper, soft covered seats for each of us – utter luxury! As we passed through the countryside, we saw bunkers and plane-landing obstacles in fields. From what we had experienced since we landed, everyone agreed on one thing – this country cannot lose the war.’28
When they arrived at Bunbury they decided to walk the five or so miles to Cholmondeley Castle and in Czech fashion they sang as they marched. In contrast to the reception they received in France in 1939, the Czechoslovak forces were warmly welcomed by the local villagers. To their surprise and delight children waved flags and cheered as they marched in their rag-tag combination of uniforms – British battledress with French-style helmets. Kaplan recalled that ‘people were coming out of the houses as we passed, slightly bewildered, anxious to see what all the noise was about but smiling and clapping.’29
Cholmondeley Castle is the ancient seat of the Cholmondeley family who have lived there since the twelfth century. The current castle was built in the nineteenth century in true fortress style with castellated towers and gothic windows. It stands on a hill dominating immaculate gardens and an extensive estate. During the war, the castle was used by various authorities but most importantly as a Royal Navy Auxiliary hospital treating men suffering from nervous breakdowns. The Czechoslovak troops were housed not in the castle but in the grounds in a city of tents.
Long hot days and dry ground made the tented encampment a pleasure to inhabit, although Kaplan complained that when they first arrived they had to fumigate the tents as the previous occupants had left them flea-ridden. As they settled down to life at Cholmondeley, the spelling and the pronunciation of which caused endless mirth among them, they got organised into units. The soldiers became a Czechoslovak Independent Brigade, a force of some 3,000 men. They were given new uniforms, new equipment and above all, as Franz Kaplan wrote, ‘a new resolution to carry on after the demoralising events in France.’30 Their pilots, who had fought bravely in the battle for France, were quickly picked out by the RAF and integrated, along with the Polish pilots who equally had experience of fighting the Luftwaffe. These two groups would soon play a key role in the Battle of Britain.
The first problem the Czechoslovaks came across was how to cook the food they were supplied with. Their cooks had little experience of ingredients supplied by the British Army. ‘On one occasion, there was a delivery of some flat, smelly fish. Our cooks had no idea what to do with them but, in the evening, they started to glow in the dark! Not long after, a procession formed and marched in the dark, down the tree-lined drive, singing and carry ‘fish lanterns’ aloft on sticks, which the English military personnel quickly advised how to transform into delicious kippers.’31
It took the soldiers a little time to get used to the friendliness of the locals. In France it would not have been possible for a girl to be seen with a soldier, especially a foreign one. Cheshire families had no such inhibitions. They welcomed the Czechs into their homes for tea, for dinner, for weekends, and gradually the men began to feel human once again. Franz Kaplan wrote: ‘After all, most of us were civilians in uniform who had a job to do which necessitated being in the army. The local people, with their friendship and understanding were responsible for restoring our morale which had been so badly shaken by our experiences in the latter days of our stay in France.’32
The Spaniěláci who arrived at Cholmondeley, numbering just over 500, were not happy to be absorbed into the British Army. While the Soviet–German Non-Aggression Pact was in place they were presented with a dilemma. Most were committed Communists and objected to fighting with the Imperialists against their Communist brothers in Russia. The British solution was to intern them, first in Oswestry, then at York race course and finally at Sutton Park near Birmingham. At the beginning of October, as the bulk of the Czechoslovaks were being sent to Leamington Spa, 460 of the Spaniěláci were sent to Ilfracombe and formed two Czechoslovak Pioneer Companies. The remaining seventy soldiers were sent to Scotland and in early 1941 were released into civilian life. The German invasion of the USSR changed the political reasoning of the pioneers and a large number of them rejoined the Czechoslovak Brigade. A small number of Czechoslovak fighters were hand-picked at Cholmondeley to be trained as secret agents by SOE to be parachuted into the Protectorate to operate with the Resistance behind the scenes in due course.
Richard Beith, author of The Postal History of the Free Czechoslovak Forces in Great Britain 1940–1945, described the situation that now faced them: ‘As the Czechoslovak government-in-exile was now based in London, it was not long before the forces were on public display with the aim of emphasising the exiled government’s determination to contribute to the Allied war effort and, eventually, to ensure that the pre-Munich borders and integrity of Czechoslovakia were restored.’33
Two events took place at Cholmondeley, the first being a troop review by President Beneš on 26 July 1940. Local people watched the event and there are photographs of village children cheering and waving flags, just as they had done the day the soldiers marched through their villages a few weeks earlier. The second took place on 28 September 1940 for the St Wenceslas Day celebrations. The foreign minister, Jan Masaryk, unveiled a memorial carved by František Bělský, at the time a nineteen-year-old gunner who went on to become a sculptor of international renown. It remains at Cholmondeley as a permanent memorial to the presence of the Czechoslovak forces in Cheshire that summer. Not long after these celebrations the Czechoslovaks left Cholmondeley and went to Leamington Spa where they had winter billets.
On 8 August 1940, at the height of the Battle of Britain, President Beneš had lunch with Churchill in Downing Street. They had known each other during the First World War but this event was in acknowledgement of the valuable contribution offered to the RAF by the Czechoslovak Air Force. Nearly ninety pilots would fly Hurricanes with 310 and 312 (Czechoslovak) Squadrons during the battle, while a number served with other fighter squadrons. They earned a reputation for bravery and aggression in aerial combat. They claimed almost sixty air kills over the course of the battle and of the eighty-six Czech and two Slovak pilots, nine were killed. The top Czech flying ace was Sergeant Josef František, serving with the Polish Air Force. He was considered ill-disciplined and potentially dangerous to his fellow pilots but he was undoubtedly extraordinarily brave. He claimed seventeen confirmed kills over the course of just one month, making him one of the highest scoring Allied pilots in the Battle of Britain. He died on 8 October 1940 when his aircraft crashed in Surrey during a landing approach.
In the early days of the war, the Republic of Czechoslovakia’s government offices were at 114–115 Park Street in London, but they were destroyed during the Blitz so the President’s headquarters were moved to 9 Grosvenor Place, a stone’s throw from Hyde Park Corner and overlooking Buckingham Palace’s walls. President Beneš was still living at Putney but in the autumn of 1940 a bomb landed in the garden and another destroyed the house opposite. A move was necessary. President Beneš was clear that he wished to pay his own way rather than relying on the British government to fund his residence. The story goes that his foreign minister, Jan Masaryk, organised the move to Buckinghamshire through his Rothschild contacts who were involved in the Whaddon Chase hunt. Masaryk was the son of the first president of Czechoslovakia, Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk and his American wife, Charlotte, and had entered the diplomatic service becoming ambassador to Britain in 1925. He spoke fluent English, was engaging and popular, embracing the British lifestyle with enthusiasm. Anthony de Rothschild was on friendly terms with Mary Eveline Stewart-Freeman, Countess of Essex, who was in charge of the hounds for the Whaddon Chase hunt and also with Captain Harold Morton, and was able to negotiate the rent of two properties close to one another in the Buckinghamshire villages of Aston Abbotts and Wingrave.
President Beneš, his wife, their nieces who lived with them, and their household staff, including his Alsatian, Toga, moved to Aston Abbotts Abbey near Aylesbury before Christmas. It was a village of just 400 inhabitants and the Abbey belonged to Captain Morton and his wife, Beatrice, who leased it to the Beneš family for twenty guineas a week (about £850 in 2016). The Mortons moved into the White House, the second largest house in the village, and the two families spent time together. Captain Morton was invested with the Command in the Order of the White Lion by the president in recognition of his duties in the Home Guard protecting the Czechs and his generosity towards Czechoslovakia during the war.
The abbey had belonged to St Alban’s Abbey during the Middle Ages and stood on the edge of the village at the end of a long drive guarded by a thatched gate lodge, making it an ideal home for the president and his entourage. The accommodation comprised eight bedrooms, six reception rooms and extensive outbuildings. President Beneš set up an office in the library and his wife had a private sitting room on the ground floor. The drawing room and dining rooms were handsome, light rooms ideal for entertaining. The large, mature gardens and lake were both beautiful and practical from the point of view of security as the property could not be seen from the road. However, this did not stop the Ministry of Agriculture and Food requisitioning land around the abbey from the middle of the war. The croquet lawn was well used and Compton Mackenzie, who began to visit President Beneš regularly in 1944, noted with amusement that the croquet hoops had all been widened at the base. ‘I was told with a smile that the “dear Benešes” could not bear to see the efforts of their guests thwarted by the severely narrow and exclusive apertures of hoops de rigeur for match play, and I reflected that even the croquet hoops by the President’s standards had to be democratic.’34
The president’s office was a comfortable room full of maps and books with a large armchair that Beneš used to sit in to read or talk to guests. He could become very animated and enthusiastic, waving his hands to emphasise his point. He had a habit of removing his spectacles and swinging them by one of the shafts so they span round his hand. Mackenzie spent many hours in the office talking to him for the biography he planned to write, which was published in 1946, a year before his giddily intoxicating wartime classic, Whisky Galore. He said that Beneš reminded him of a well-preened chaffinch. ‘He was then on the edge of his sixtieth birthday; but the effect of his personality was of a man ten years younger at least, and this impression of comparative youth was sharpened by the care with which he always dressed . . . his ties and his shirts and his suit always appeared to have been chosen deliberately to get on with one another.’35
Beneš spoke fluent English but with a thick Czech accent overlaid with an American lilt. He was short – a few inches over five feet tall – and sensitive about his height. He disliked having anyone over six feet tall in his retinue. By the time he was living in England he was balding and his moustache, which he wore short, was grey. His high forehead and bright blue eyes under dark eyebrows gave the impression of a man with great energy and strength. He described himself as a natural optimist and a man who never lost hope, despite being caught up in difficult, not to say at times impossible, political situations. He said: ‘In politics I always behave as though I were playing tennis. When my opponent is “forty” and I am “love” and the next ball may be the last I am still convinced that I can win the game!’36 In contrast to Compton Mackenzie’s easy relationship with Beneš, Robert Bruce Lockhart found that he was ‘a difficult man to know well’ for his mind was ‘machine-like in its compact tidiness and his reserve . . . almost impenetrable.’ His conversation was ‘factual and entirely unemotional. Each point was marshalled in its proper place and, when dealt with, was marked off on his fingers.’
The president had a routine that seldom changed. Three days a week or so he would leave Aston Abbotts in a Daimler, driven by his chauffeur, accompanied by a body guard and, more often than not, Mrs Beneš. She was the honorary president of the Czechoslovak Red Cross and often had meetings in the capital. They would arrive at Grosvenor Place at 10am and leave London at 6:30pm arriving home in time for dinner.
The president’s chancellery officials and his private office staff, which included his secretary, Edvard Táborský and his chief of staff Dr Jaromír Smutný, moved to the Old Manor House in the neighbouring village of Wingrave. Other inhabitants were Mr Leopold Matouš, caretaker and major-domo of the house, and General Oldřich španiel, the president’s military adviser. The manor belonged to the Countess of Essex, who received twenty pounds a week for the house. The manor, a Victorian half-timbered pastiche of a house near Wing called Ascott House. It was sufficiently grand to be used by the Czechs to house visiting dignitaries. The house commands a magnificent view over the Vale of Aylesbury and has large gardens, which during the war were used to provide a kitchen garden and pens for farm animals for the household. The staff kept chickens and rabbits for the pot, and three pigs named after the French collaborators: Pétain, Darlan and Daladier. The Wingrave stable block housed the government’s two Austins and Jan Masaryk’s bicycle. Although most drove the four miles to Aston Abbotts and back, the foreign minister preferred to cycle.
The everyday detail of the life of President Beneš’ household is presented in a photographic book compiled by Neil Rees giving an exquisite insight into his establishment at Aston Abbotts. The British government permitted Beneš a permanent guard of fourteen Czech soldiers for his personal security. Their numbers were increased by thirty men from various regiments on a three-week cycle, who came from Leamington Spa. They lived in Nissen huts which they built with the help of Italian prisoners of war. The soldiers guarding the president were paid 2/6d a day (about £15.50 now) and a 5d (£2.50) clothing allowance. They had a daily newspaper called Naše noviny (Our News), printed in Leamington Spa and distributed to all Czech bases around the country. The soldiers fortified the village with forward and defensive active positions with light machine guns, anti-aircraft positions and Tommy guns. A military map of Aston Abbotts shows that the local residents were very well protected by the presence of the Beneš court and their guards.
The Czechs were popular in Aston Abbotts, Wingrave and the surrounding villages. Beneš regularly walked Toga from the abbey towards the village of Weedon. The route took him along a shoulder overlooking the Vale of Aylesbury and he told Compton Mackenzie that the view reminded him of the corner of Bohemia where he had lived as a boy. On one of his walks he met a lady from Weedon who asked him who he was. ‘I am the president of Czechoslovakia,’ he replied, much to her surprise. The Czech guards were regular customers in the Royal Oak Inn in Aston Abbotts, run by Bill and Audrey Williams. Some Czech soldiers married local girls and there were a number of weddings during the war. Another popular pub in the neighbourhood was the Bull and Butcher, which the soldiers visited when they were off guard duty. It was there that some of them learned to play darts.
President Beneš received many distinguished visitors during the Second World War. These included King Haakon VII of Norway who had been forced to flee his country, having taken a strong stand against the German demand to end resistance and appoint a fascist prime minister. He had initially been a guest at Buckingham Palace but moved to Bowdon House in Berkshire in September, while the Norwegian government-in-exile’s official headquarters were at 10 Palace Green in Kensington. Another royal guest was Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands, an immensely impressive figure described by Churchill as ‘the only real man among the governments-in-exile in London’. She had a country house at South Mimms but travelled extensively during the war, spending part of 1942 in the USA and 1943 in Canada. Politicians came too. Charles de Gaulle of Free France was based at nearby Ashridge Park in Hertfordshire, and General Wladyslaw Sikorski of Poland who was based at Iver in Buckinghamshire enjoyed hospitality at the abbey.
Despite the delights of their domestic situation, the Czechoslovak president was consumed by the desperate situation 800 miles to the east. Reports coming out of the Protectorate via military intelligence were deeply worrying. The Reichsprotektor, Konstantin von Neurath, installed by Hitler in March 1939 was replaced in September 1941 by Acting Reichsprotektor Reinhard Heydrich who came to rule Bohemia and Moravia with particular brutality. Within three days of his arrival in Prague he had had ninety people executed. He told his aides he intended to ‘Germanise the Czech vermin’. Nicknamed variously the Butcher of Prague, the Hangman or the Blond Beast, he systematically terrorised the population, arresting thousands of citizens on trumped-up charges. Those who were not executed were sent to Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp. Only 4 per cent of those who were sent there survived the war. It was referred to by the Reich Main Security Office as the Knochenmühle (bone-mill) and was reserved for ‘the extermination through labour of the intelligentsia’. Beneš knew that Heydrich was dealing with the Czechs mercilessly and that terrible reprisals followed any signs of insubordination. Nevertheless, he was aware that the Czechs were determined not to be crushed and that the resistance movement, small and fragmented though it was, would not be annihilated.
As a result of the understanding between Gibson and Moravec, Czechoslovak military intelligence became an accepted part of the government-in-exile’s activity. It ran a wireless transmission station at Woldingham in Surrey, and in 1942 SOE set up a new station on a farm at Hockliffe, near Leighton Buzzard, supplied with equipment from the Special Communications Unit at Whaddon Hall, in Buckinghamshire. The station kept in contact with Czechoslovak embassies in neutral countries, the Czech resistance and paratroop mission radio operators. The safe house for the Czech secret service was twelve miles from Aston Abbotts in the secluded village of Addington. Moravec and his staff occupied Addington House, next to the village church, and the stable block and outbuildings belonging to the house.
After the capture of A54, the Czechoslovak intelligence service had the very real concern that they were no longer of first class importance to MI6 or the Russians. By the autumn of 1941 it was obvious to Beneš that, ‘if the Czech national cause was to survive and flourish, words must be backed with actions by the summer of 1942, whatever the human cost.’37 Occupied countries were judged by the success of their underground resistance’s contribution towards the war effort. Czechoslovakia was at a disadvantage over France, for example, because of the greater distance from Britain. Flights took longer and it was difficult for the RAF to support Czech Resistance with air drops. Since the installation in September 1941 of Reichsprotektor Reinhard Heydrich, the Czech underground had been more or less broken and Czechoslovakia had fallen to the bottom of the list for MI6. So Beneš and Moravec hatched a plan to land trained paratroop agents into the German-occupied Protectorate of Bohemia-Moravia, where they would link up with what was left of the underground resistance and plan subversive activities comprising sabotage and assassination – including of the Reichsprotektor himself. ‘The purpose of this action was two-fold,’ Moravec explained after the war. ‘First, a powerful manifestation of resistance which would wipe out the stigma of passivity and help Czechoslovakia internationally. Secondly, a renaissance of the resistance movement by providing a spark which would activate the mass of the people.’38
Moravec approached Gubbins asking whether he could help out with providing facilities for training and supplying weapons to the agents. Gubbins agreed but not without hesitation. He warned that an attempt on Heydrich’s life, whether successful or not, would result in all likelihood in a round of widespread reprisals. Then he learned that Heydrich ‘took a particular and personal interest in rooting out resistance in northwest Europe, which Gubbins saw as a direct threat to SOE.’39 Heydrich was due to be posted to Paris imminently and that must also have been a factor that influenced Gubbins’ thinking. So he changed his mind, though he ‘decided to restrict the knowledge of the Czech approach, and above all the identity of the probable target, to a very small circle.’40 The Germans had broken into an SOE cell in Belgium and were stepping up their efforts to infiltrate cells in other countries. It was in his and his organisation’s interest to see the Czech plan succeed. He sought no ministerial support or approval as political assassination fell within SOE’s charter but he did inform his superior, Lord Selborne.
Over the late summer of 1941, ten young men who had arrived at Cholmondeley the year before were handpicked to be trained and then flown into the Protectorate. They spent six weeks at Arisaig learning the basics of survival, sabotage, silent killing and weapons’ training before returning south to the safe house where they would receive their orders, falsified documents, clothing and every possible detail that would convince a guard running a spot search that they were bona fide Czech citizens. Unfortunately, the one item of kit that would immediately give them away as coming from Britain was the Sten gun they were carrying. It was issued to agents as it was easy to put together and remarkably reliable. Of the ten who were trained, two were chosen to carry out this audacious and historic assassination attempt of acting Reichsprotektor Reinhard Heydrich. Their names were Jozef Gabčík, a Slovak and Jan Kubiš, who was a Czech. The mission was codenamed ANTHROPOID.
Gabčík was twenty-nine years old and an orphan since the age of ten. He had been in the army since the age of twenty and had been awarded the Croix de Guerre in 1940. Moravec described him as having ‘a round face, blue eyes and brown hair . . . his demeanour pleasant and unassuming. He was frank, cordial, enterprising and full of initiative. A natural born leader.’41 Kubiš was the opposite of Gabčík but Moravec felt they were ideally suited as a pair. This was underlined by the report sent down to Addington House by Dan Fairbairn from Arisaig who described them as near perfect at jujitsu and artists with small weapons. Shortly before they left, Moravec interviewed them each separately asking them to be clear in their minds that this mission would probably lead to their deaths. He wrote later: ‘Gabčík said he viewed the mission as an act of war and the risk of death as natural. Kubiš thanked me for choosing him for a task of such importance. Both said they would prefer death to being captured by the Gestapo.’42
Kubiš and Gabčík parachuted into the Protectorate on 28 December 1941 with five other soldiers on two separate missions. There were problems from the start. The pilot had been unable to find the drop site, near Plzeň (Pilsen), and had landed them to the east of Prague. However, they managed to link up with their contacts and go on to Prague where they would live with underground supporters and plan their attack. SOE had equipped them well. They had ‘two pistols, a .38 Colt – with four full spare magazines and a hundred bullets – six armour-piercing bombs filled with plastic explosives, two magazines of fuses, two model Mills grenades, one Tree Spigot bomb launcher with one bomb, four electric fuses, one Sten Mk.II machine gun with a hundred rounds, 32lbs of plastic explosives, two yards of safety fuse, four smoke bombs, a reel of steel string and three timing pencils.’43 Over the next five months, the team contemplated how they could possibly guarantee the success of their mission. The first idea mooted in London was to kill Heydrich on a train but it was dismissed as too difficult. The second plan was to force his car to stop in the forest en route from his house in the country to Prague but that did not work so they had to go with a third plan which was to assassinate him in the city.
The Czechs on the ground realised that under Heydrich the human cost of any action against the Nazis would be immense. Many of the underground leaders in Prague had seen the response of previous German reprisals and feared a hideous backlash if the assassination were attempted. They even contacted London and tried to persuade Beneš to call off the operation, saying, ‘The nation would be the subject of unheard-of reprisals. At the same time it would wipe out the last remainders of any organisation.’44 Acknowledging that Beneš might have political reasons to do with national interest the message concluded: ‘If for reasons of foreign policy the assassination is nevertheless essential, the nation is prepared to offer even the highest sacrifices.’45 Moravec was disappointed. He had told Gabčík and Kubiš that they should not under any circumstances make their intentions known to the underground.
Kubiš and Gabčík’s chance came on 27 May 1942 when Heydrich was on his way to Berlin for a meeting with Hitler. He usually drove in an open-top Mercedes in a defiant gesture to prove his confidence in the occupation and in his government’s effectiveness. On this day the hood was down and his driver, Johannes Klein, was at the wheel. The assassins had chosen a hairpin bend on the Dresden–Prague road in the suburb of Liben where drivers had to slow down to negotiate a steep turn. Kubiš was armed with the specially modified type 73 anti-tank grenades and Gabčík had the Sten gun. Both men were carrying their pistols. As the Mercedes approached it duly slowed down. Gabčík lifted his overcoat to reveal his Sten gun and fired but the gun did not go off. In the split second that followed, Heydrich ordered the driver to stop, apparently believing that Gabčík was a lone gunman. As they reached for their weapons Kubiš hurled his grenade at the car. It exploded against the right rear wing of the Mercedes causing the tyre to burst and blowing a hole in the side of the car. Heydrich was wounded. He and his chauffeur opened fire and Kubiš, who had suffered injuries from flying debris from the bomb, fled through the small gathering of Czech witnesses. Heydrich pursued him but soon had to stop as he was weak from shock. He collapsed. Kubiš had hidden a bicycle nearby and was able to find it and pedal to safety. The chauffeur, Sergeant Klein, was ordered by Heydrich to chase Gabčík and for a few minutes there was a running pistol battle which ended in a doorway when Gabčík wounded Klein in the leg, after which he was able to make good his escape.
Heydrich was mortally wounded, although Gabčík and Kubiš were unaware of this, thinking that he had merely been slightly injured and that their mission had been a failure. His spleen had been damaged by the blast and he contracted blood poisoning from the shrapnel, the seats’ splinters and the horse-hair filling in the upholstery. Hitler was incensed by the attempted assassination of one of his great leaders and ordered the SS and Gestapo to find Heydrich’s killers. He was also angry with Heydrich, who he described as an ‘irreplaceable’ man who should never have put himself in such danger by driving in an open, unarmoured vehicle. At first he wanted 10,000 Czechoslovaks rounded up randomly and executed but he was persuaded that this would have a deleterious effect on the work force that was so needed to help with motor manufacture and other war-related industries. Heydrich, meantime, was lying in hospital in great pain. Shortly after a visit from Himmler on 2 June he went into shock and fell into a coma from which he never regained consciousness. He died two days later from septicaemia.
Gabčík and Kubiš remained hidden in Prague for almost three weeks. Kubiš was hiding in a safe house provided by a family called Novak. He had abandoned his bicycle outside a shoe shop but unfortunately when Mrs Novak thought it was safe to send her daughter to collect the abandoned, blood-stained bicycle, the girl was spotted and reported to the Gestapo. Gabčík was in hiding at another safe house, owned by Mr and Mrs Fafek, who were resistance fighters. Opálka and Valčík, two of the other soldiers who had parachuted into the Protectorate in December were also safe. As the dust settled, the resistance group managed to piece together what had happened and brought the four men together with a view to helping them to escape Prague.
The Gestapo had offered a million Reichsmarks to anyone who could help lead them to the assassins. Not long after Heydrich’s death the Gestapo captured Karel Curda, another member of the resistance team trained in Britain, who was in hiding in his mother’s barn in southern Bohemia. He betrayed his contacts and took the bounty: ‘First, on June 13, 1942, he wrote a traitorous letter in which he identified Gabčík and Kubiš as the assassins. Curda then betrayed to the Gestapo everyone he knew personally who had assisted the paratroopers, not only in Prague but in Pardubice, Lázně Bělohrad and Plzeň. Through his betrayal he caused the deaths of Czech patriots and their families.’46
The following morning the Germans stormed the flats of the resistance fighters, torturing and murdering some while others took cyanide pills before the Germans arrived. Kubiš and Gabčík took refuge with the other parachutists in the Church of Saints Cyril and Methodius but Ata Moravec, too young to have been issued with a cyanide pill, whose mother was an active member of the resistance, gave their location away under severe torture. He was then executed. On 18 June 1942 over 800 members of the SS and the Gestapo stormed the church and were held off for fourteen hours by the parachutists.
Opálka died in the choir of the church and Jan Kubiš suffered multiple gunshot and grenade wounds and died of blood loss. The Germans realised the others were hiding in the crypt. They brought in the traitor, Curda, to try and persuade them to give themselves up but their defiant response was gunfire. The hunted men held out, picking off soldiers who were sent in to storm the crypt. The Germans tried to flush them out using gunfire, tear gas and eventually by flooding. As nothing worked they had no option but to blow up the stairs to make an entrance. The other Czechoslovaks, their ammunition exhausted, committed suicide, rather than surrendering to the Germans. Josef Gabčík ended his own life with a pistol shot.
In all, fourteen Germans had been killed in the fight and many others injured. There would be more deaths. Even while Heydrich was lying in hospital there had been hideous reprisals. In addition to the underground resistance fighters who had committed suicide rather than face the Gestapo, there had been 135 murders of people believed possibly to have been affiliated with the attack. But much worse was to come. The villages of Lidice and Ležáky, which the Germans wrongly linked to the assassins, were completely destroyed by the Nazis on 10 and 24 June respectively. All males over the age of sixteen were murdered, as were all the women in Ležáky. In Lidice, 173 men were shot in the garden of a farm. The women and children were taken to the local grammar school. Three days later the children were taken from their mothers and, with the exception of those selected for re-education in German families or babies under a year, were poisoned by exhaust gas in specially adapted vehicles in the Polish extermination camp at Chelm. Eighteen died in that way. The remaining women were sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp where most perished. A thousand Czech Jews were rounded up and sent to their deaths in SS extermination factories on 9 June. Two more transports of a total of 3,000 Jews followed. One man only survived – he jumped from the train. In all more than 13,000 people were arrested in the wake of Heydrich’s assassination and 1,300 died.
The Germans’ boast that Lidice was erased from the map was soon proved wrong. Several towns around the world renamed themselves ‘Lidice’ in memory of the Czechoslovak massacre. It was one of the most brutal reprisals meted out by the Nazis but Gabčík and Kubiš became national heroes.
President Beneš always denied that he had known about the detailed plans for the assassination of Heydrich but he cannot have been disappointed by the impact the reprisals had on the British and French governments. The success of Operation Anthropoid finally gave Britain and France the excuse to renounce the Munich Agreement. On 5 August 1942 Foreign Minister Anthony Eden sent a note to exiled Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk stating that the government regarded itself free from the arrangements settled in 1938 and that they acknowledged the Sudetenland should be restored following the surrender of the Third Reich. Two months earlier, Beneš had passed a resolution which committed the government to prosecute those guilty ‘for all the German crimes committed on Czechoslovak territory or against Czechoslovak citizens.’ He named Hitler and members of his government, all representatives of the German Government and administration and traitors within the population. The resolution promised to track down all criminals wherever they might be after the war and to ‘punish the culprits with extraordinary and most severe sentences.’47
Operation Anthropoid remained the only successful assassination of a top-ranking Nazi officer during the Second World War. In 1944 President Beneš planted the first of the three lime trees in the coppice behind Aston Abbotts Abbey to mark the link between the little Buckinghamshire village that hosted the wartime Czech president-in-exile and one of the most audacious of all SOE missions.
