The Czechoslovak government-in-exile

On 21 July 1940 the British government recognised the Provisional Czechoslovak Government, formed in London by the Czechoslovak National Committee. On the same day Edvard Beneš, who from then on acted as President of the Republic, appointed a government with the leader of the People’s Party, the priest and prelate Jan Šrámek, as prime minister and Jan Masaryk, son of the first president, as foreign minister, and alongside the government he set up a State Council as a substitute for parliament. Czechoslovakia, which had vanished from the map in March 1939, once again had a president, a government and an army abroad, recognised by the state that was at that moment fighting Germany alone.

It is often recorded under this date that the Czechoslovak government-in-exile “arrived in London”. That is not accurate. Beneš had been living in London since July 1939, and the Paris section of the Committee and the army had made their way to England in June 1940. Nobody arrived on 21 July: on that day the existing émigré committee was recognised by the British as a government, and that government was formally constituted.

From Paris to London

For France and Britain, the National Committee, founded in Paris in October 1939, was merely a body representing the nation and directing the rebuilding of the army. France granted it this limited recognition in November, and London on 20 December 1939. From the outset Beneš wanted more: a government that would be the continuation of the pre-Munich republic, and the presidency, which he had resigned in October 1938 under pressure from Berlin but which, after the occupation of Prague, he regarded as still rightfully his. Paris, wary of him and courted by his rivals, especially Milan Hodža and his National Council, would not agree to this.

The defeat of France removed these obstacles. Two regiments of the 1st Czechoslovak Infantry Division fought on the Marne and the Loire in June, and after the armistice the soldiers and airmen sailed for Britain, many of them via Sète and Gibraltar. According to the British official history, 4,938 Czechoslovak servicemen were brought out of France during Operation Aerial and the other post-Dunkirk evacuations. From 7 July the ground troops, according to Czech figures more than three and a half thousand men, were camped in tents in the park of Cholmondeley Castle in Cheshire. The Paris section of the Committee ceased to exist, Hodža’s Council fell apart, and London became the sole centre of the Czechoslovak emigration. Winston Churchill’s government, which had replaced Chamberlain’s cabinet in May, bore no personal responsibility for Munich and needed every ally and every airman it could get.

Recognition

On 9 July 1940 the Committee announced its transformation into a provisional state organisation (prozatímní státní zřízení) resting on three pillars: the president, the government and the State Council. Beneš informed the Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, and asked for recognition. Czech studies state that Halifax replied on 18 July, confirming that His Majesty’s Government recognised the provisional organisation and would cooperate with it. Churchill, questioned in the House of Commons on 23 July by the Liberal Geoffrey Mander, stated that recognition had been granted on 21 July by a letter to Beneš. The British government, the Prime Minister read out, was pleased to recognise and enter into relations with the Provisional Czechoslovak Government established by the Czechoslovak National Committee to function in this country. The British liaison to this government was soon Robert Bruce Lockhart, a diplomat and expert on Central Europe who had served at the legation in Prague in the 1920s.

Mander asked whether the Czechoslovak government would have the same status as the Polish government, which Sikorski and President Władysław Raczkiewicz had moved to London in June. Churchill replied that “there may be certain differences of form, but there is no difference in principle”. The differences were in fact significant. The Polish government was the constitutional government of an allied state, recognised by Britain without interruption since September 1939, as were the authorities of the Netherlands and Norway, which had arrived in May and June. The Czechoslovak government was “provisional” and, as London stressed, had been appointed by an émigré committee rather than deriving from the pre-war republic. Britain did not withdraw its signature from the Munich Agreement and made no commitment on future frontiers. When the communist Willie Gallacher asked whether the new government represented pre-Munich or post-Munich Czechoslovakia, Churchill evaded the question.

The government and the State Council

In Šrámek’s government, appointed on 21 July, the foreign ministry went to Jan Masaryk, minister in London since 1925, who had resigned his post after Munich and had been one of the best-known Czechs in London since the outbreak of war. General Sergej Ingr became minister of national defence, the Slovak agrarian Juraj Slávik (PL), formerly minister in Warsaw, minister of the interior, the economist Eduard Outrata minister of finance, and the Social Democrat František Němec minister of social welfare. The ministers of state included the agrarian Ladislav Feierabend (PL), until early 1940 a minister in the Protectorate government, who had fled the country; the Social Democrats Jaromír Nečas and the Slovak activist Ján Bečko; and Štefan Osuský, formerly minister in Paris and a rival of Beneš. The composition was meant to show that the government represented both Czechs and Slovaks and the main pre-war parties, although its core consisted of Beneš’s own people.

The State Council, announced together with the government, was to replace the parliament, which could not be convened: of the roughly 450 deputies and senators of the pre-war National Assembly, fewer than forty were in exile. It was therefore decided that it would have 40 members appointed by the president for one year and would be an advisory body, giving its opinion on matters put before it by the president and the government. Its members were appointed in the autumn. The Social Democrat Rudolf Bechyně became its chairman, and Hodža, who was reconciled with Beneš for a few months, one of its vice-chairmen. The communists did not join the Council until 1941. Legislative power passed to the president: from October 1940 Beneš, on the government’s proposal, issued decrees with the force of law, later known as the Beneš decrees.

The army at Cholmondeley

Recognition of the government came at a moment of crisis in the army. Among the soldiers evacuated from France were many conscripts from among the Czechs and Slovaks settled in France; some of the refugees from the Protectorate were Jews; and the volunteers included communists and former International Brigade members from Spain. There were complaints about the pre-war officers, who were blamed for the defeat in France, about discipline and about conditions in the camp. On 23 July, two days after the government’s recognition, a large group of soldiers staged an open protest at Cholmondeley. Not even an address by Beneš calmed it. On 29 July 539 soldiers were removed from the Czechoslovak army, most of them transferred to the British Pioneer Corps, an auxiliary formation. According to Czech studies, around 350 of them were of Jewish origin and many others were communists.

The rest formed the 1st Czechoslovak Mixed Brigade, which in October moved to the area around Royal Leamington Spa and for years afterwards defended stretches of the British coast against invasion. The airmen were more visible. On 10 July, the day the British later took as the beginning of the Battle of Britain, No. 310 Squadron, the RAF’s first Czechoslovak fighter squadron, was formed at Duxford; No. 311, a bomber squadron, followed at the end of July, and No. 312, a fighter squadron, on 29 August. Some Czechoslovak airmen served in British units, and Josef František in the Polish No. 303 Squadron. It was their part in the Battle of Britain that most impressed British public opinion.

Place in the war

The recognition of 21 July 1940 was the second step, after Halifax’s December letter, on Beneš’s road to the full restoration of the state. The government and the president settled in and around London (Beneš in Putney, and later at Aston Abbotts in Buckinghamshire), and on 25 October 1940 Britain concluded an agreement with them on the Czechoslovak armed forces and extended the government a credit to maintain them. In November 1940 the governments of Šrámek and Sikorski issued a declaration on a future Polish–Czechoslovak confederation, which in the end came to nothing.

The word “provisional” disappeared only after Germany attacked the Soviet Union. On 18 July 1941 Masaryk signed an agreement in London with the Soviet ambassador Ivan Maisky establishing relations with the USSR, and on the same day the Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, agreed that agreements would be concluded, as before September 1938, in the name of the Czechoslovak Republic. In October 1942 the United States granted the government full recognition. After the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, prepared by the London government and carried out by paratroopers from the Czechoslovak brigade in England, London declared on 5 August 1942 that the Munich Agreement would not be binding in settling the post-war frontiers, and on 29 September 1942 the Free French declared it null and void from the outset. In 1943 Beneš concluded an alliance with Joseph Stalin, and in 1945 he returned to Prague via Moscow and Košice as president, recognised by all the Allies. In April 1945 the London exiles handed over power to the government of Zdeněk Fierlinger, in which the communists already held a strong position.

July 1940 was also the time when London was becoming the capital of occupied Europe. Alongside the Poles, Norwegians, Dutch, Luxembourgers and General de Gaulle’s Free French, it was home to Belgian politicians who had tried on 5 July to form their own committee, and now also to the Czechoslovak government. For Czechs and Slovaks this meant that their state, erased at Munich and in March 1939, had once again become, albeit with reservations, a party to the war on the Allied side.