9 May 1945: the day after the beast War has been pronounced officially dead in Europe. Angels with trumpets play tunes of peace to heaven and earth. The politicians, flanked by journalists, formally declare the wings of violence to have been clipped. Men of religion remind the faithful that peacemakers are blessed, and that where there is peace there is God. Moralists agree that peace is the elevating and healing face of the world. Philosophers add: peace is liberty with tranquillity. But seated at his desk at his parents’ country house at Havlov, near the Moravian village of Žd’árec, a little boy trembled.
The boy gripped his pen. In his neatest handwriting, eight-year-old Václav Havel recorded on paper that the day of general jubilation was for him filled with scenes of panic, slaughter, destruction. ‘On the 9th of May in the morning,’ he began, ‘Žd’árec was bombed because German troops who had not surrendered were still there.’ He continued: ‘After the air raid many residents of Žd’árec came to our house to seek shelter. In the afternoon, we experienced a stampede of German troops near us and shooting at them. They left behind a lot of ammunition, wagons, cannon, horses. Russian shells almost landed on Havlov.’ The young boy added: ‘We children were afraid (and I think the grown-ups were as well). At that moment I wanted to be in Australia and little Ivan pooed himself.’47
For the past year, the Havel family had shivered through the cold dawn of peace. They had been gripped by the feeling that peace would be war in masquerade — that the earth and skies of middle Europe would continue to be convulsed by men slaying each other like wild animals. Talk of peace had begun to seem like words in the wind, thanks to a miscalculation by the Americans. Early in the afternoon of St Valentine’s Day, 1944, a squadron of American bombers lost its way in thick cloud and strong winds over Czech territory. Thinking Prague was Dresden, the pilots roared from the direction of Jinonice through the city centre, dumping a deadly cocktail of high-explosive, incendiary and phosphorous bombs as they passed over the Jirásek Bridge. More than 500 people were killed and many others wounded. Extensive damage was caused to several hospitals and to the bridge itself. Many residential buildings were wrecked, including a block on the Vltava embankment. In the middle of the afternoon, young Václav, together with his little brother and parents at Havlov, huddled around the wireless to listen to a special report from Prague about the bombing raid. An hour later, Uncle Miloš telephoned with bad news. The apartment next door to the Havels’ flat had been hit directly. Fire had spread to their apartment, destroying its roof and top floor. ‘Our house is now uninhabitable,’ reported Miloš. ‘Mr Hartvich and a few other employees from Lucerna rushed there to rescue whatever they could. You must stay at Havlov.’48
The misdirected ‘bloody February’ assault on Prague was not unexpected, since the allied air forces had been in a position to bomb the Protectorate from bases in Italy from late 1943. From the summer of 1944, Prague could be reached as well from airfields in France. Partly for humanitarian reasons, the Czechs were spared destruction until the autumn of that year. Prague was first deliberately bombed in the late autumn of 1944. Damage was officially declared as light — the phrase ‘light bombing’ is insulting to its victims — for a total of five stray bombs hit a suburban electricity station, killing four and injuring thirty people. The following year’s raids were considered ‘heavier’: for instance, during the miscalculated ‘bloody February’ attack, and again on Ash Wednesday, 25 March, when American bombers targeted the Böhmen und Mähren engine works, which manufactured self-propelled guns for the Nazis. The bombs killed another 500 Prague residents and left the city in a thick pall of black smoke.
By German and British and Russian standards, these attacks resembled nuisance encounters. But for many Prague citizens air raids meant weeks of screaming sirens, the wails and grunts of men, women, and children helter-skeltering into railway tunnels, coal cellars, and basement apartments, their faces and spines chilled with the fear of ending up underneath a mountain of choking, crushing rubble. As a young boy — a child born six months before the Franco-Hitler assault on the Basque town of Guernica — Havel twice tasted one of the twentieth century’s foulest technical inventions. He never forgot them, and it is unsurprising that several of his earliest notebooks, completed around this time, contain crayon and black-and-white sketches of fighter planes, as menacing as those drawn by Otto Dix.
The air raid was especially terrifying for children. It was technical power at its most destructive. Once upon a time, technical methods of killing others in war were clumsy. Read, for example, how Carthaginian elephants were used in the concluding cruel moments of the first Punic War to trample mutinous mercenaries to death.49Compare the twentieth-century masterpiece of finishing off the enemy with mechanical power. The air raid: a new and improved form of mechanized power over human beings. From great heights, its potential victims look faintly absurd. Reduced to ant-like figures in the far distance below, they scurry for shelter, if they can. The young are swaddled, dragged, cajoled. The old hobble, fall, and are collared and hauled to safety. There is great tumult and much confusion. Nobody wastes time. Everybody’s ears ring with sirens, screams, shouts. It is as if each person is suspended in time and pinned down in space. It is almost as if they don’t exist. Hearts thump. The hunted feel both weightless and leaden. Their existence now depends upon architecture. And technical error. Or survival is a matter of instinct, or pure luck.
The airborne masked raiders: looking down from their flying machines, armed like Jove with thunderbolts that can be hurled from the sky, the bombers’ hearts beat equally fast, but for different reasons. The attack is the perfection of technical power in the face of danger. The attackers zoom and turn and zoom again, and yet again. Their mission involves cleverly dodging their opponents — if there are any — so as to hit their target. The prize is obliteration. Armed with the means of burning and levelling everything, and killing everyone below, the attackers buzz over their victims, delivering their sting with anonymity, and impunity. Then they roar away, at high speed. Clouds of smoke rise. The attackers vanish. Hidden from their eyes are wrecked and burning buildings, maimed and dying and dead victims. The raiders’ ears are meanwhile deafened by the roar of steel machines. Below, the air bursts with groans and screams and pitiful whimpers. Roofs collapse. Metal carcasses burn. Human victims lie as still as stone. Dogs sniff and lick at their wounds. Crows peck and tear at their limbs.