The Legion of Czechs and Slovaks

On 3 September 1939 in Warsaw, President Ignacy Mościcki signed a decree establishing the Legion of Czechs and Slovaks, a volunteer formation made up of Czech and Slovak refugees who had found shelter in Poland after Germany occupied their country. It was preceded by an agreement between the President and General Lev Prchala, who took command of the Legion; his deputy was Lieutenant Colonel Ludvík Svoboda. On the same day the Commander-in-Chief, Marshal Edward Rydz-Śmigły, issued an appeal to Czech and Slovak soldiers, calling on them to fight together against the common enemy. It was the first time that the government of a state at war with the Third Reich had officially recognised the Czechoslovak resistance abroad and allowed it to raise an army of its own. The Legion, however, was formed too late to play any significant part in the September Campaign. Its soldiers, almost without weapons or uniforms, retreated east with the Polish forces, and most of them ended up in Soviet captivity.

Refugees in Poland

After the Munich Agreement, and especially after the occupation of Bohemia and Moravia in March 1939 and the creation of the Protectorate, thousands of Czechs and Slovaks fled their country. Some were in danger for political or racial reasons; others wanted to fight for the restoration of Czechoslovakia, as their fathers had fought in the Czechoslovak Legions during the First World War. The shortest route led through Poland. Polish–Czechoslovak relations were poor at the time, because in the autumn of 1938 Poland had seized Zaolzie (Trans-Olza), and many Czechs could not forgive it. In the face of the German threat, however, both sides began to see a common interest.

The centres of the Czechoslovak exiles became the legation in Warsaw and the consulate in Kraków, whose staff refused to recognise the occupation and did not hand the buildings over to the Germans. More than ten thousand civilian refugees passed through Kraków and Katowice. On 30 April 1939 a Czechoslovak military group was formed at the Kraków consulate, and by May it numbered over 150 soldiers. The Polish authorities, unwilling to provoke Berlin with the presence of a foreign force, merely tolerated it and preferred its members to move on. Between May and August five sea transports took more than 1,150 soldiers to France, where they joined the Foreign Legion, since France did not yet permit a Czechoslovak army to be formed. About a thousand men remained in Poland, having arrived too late or having chosen to wait for the war there.

At the beginning of July the Polish Army gave them an empty camp at Bronowice Małe near Kraków, and at the end of August most of them were moved to a camp at Leśna near Baranowicze, where they were to receive weapons and training. They were led by Lieutenant Colonel Svoboda, who had arrived in June and was a veteran of the Czechoslovak Legions’ fighting in Russia. Army General Lev Prchala, in January 1939 Minister of the Interior of Carpathian Ukraine, came to Poland in May and, thanks to his acquaintances among Polish officers, conducted talks about a Czechoslovak formation. As the most senior in rank he was its natural commander, although the exile circle around Edvard Beneš regarded him with suspicion. The airmen formed a separate group: in July and August 93 of them – most only on 29 August, when the transports to France were halted – signed contracts with the Polish air force and were sent to the training centre at Dęblin.

The decree and the appeal

After Germany’s invasion of Poland, in which troops of Slovakia also took part on the German side, Polish reservations vanished. On 3 September, the day on which Great Britain and France declared war on Germany, General Prchala agreed with President Mościcki on the formation of “Czech and Slovak legions” operating jointly within the Polish Army. The President signed the decree and the Commander-in-Chief the appeal. For the Czechoslovak exiles the act was of great significance: for the first time a foreign government had recognised that the Czechs and Slovaks, though their state had vanished from the map, had the right to an army of their own. The Polish liaison officers were Colonel Karol Zborowski, commandant of the centre at Leśna, and Major Henryk Smotrecki.

The first Czechoslovak casualties were suffered by the airmen. On 2 September, even before the decree, three airmen were killed in a German air raid on Dęblin: Štěpán Kůrka, Zdeněk Rous and Ondrej Šándor, regarded as the first Czechoslovak soldiers to fall in the Second World War. On 4 September the Czechoslovak Reconnaissance Flight of Captain Bohumil Liška was formed at Góra Puławska airfield. With a dozen or so obsolete Potez XXV and RWD-8 aircraft it flew reconnaissance missions for Polish staffs, falling back with the army to the south-east.

Retreat to the east

The Legion’s infantry never had time to arm itself. When the German armies from East Prussia began to threaten Baranowicze, Lieutenant Colonel Svoboda took his men out of Leśna by rail on 11 September, via Sarny and Równe, to Tarnopol. They had only small arms and a few machine guns, which they set up for anti-aircraft defence. In mid-September, during an air raid on the station at Hłuboczek Wielki near Tarnopol in which Slovak aircraft also took part, Vítězslav Grünbaum, who was directing the anti-aircraft fire, was killed – the first of the Legion’s infantry to fall (Polish and English-language studies give 15 September, Czech ones 17 September). According to Czech researchers, the legionaries shot down two German aircraft over Tarnopol in those days. The group from Bronowice, some 200 men, set out east on 4 September to join up with Leśna but was unable to catch up.

By 18 September the Legion numbered more than a thousand soldiers. The entry of the Red Army on 17 September decided its fate. General Prchala, with his staff and some of his men, made his way via Trembowla and Husiatyn to Romania. The group of Captain František Divoký, around 120 men, crossed the Romanian border near Kuty on 19 September. The airmen were ordered on 22 September to fly to Romania. The main part of the Legion under Svoboda was surrounded by Soviet troops during the night of 18–19 September and interned; more than 800 men were taken captive.

Place in the war

The Legion of Czechs and Slovaks played no military role in the September Campaign, but its political significance was considerable. The Polish decree opened the way to the recognition of a Czechoslovak army by other states: on 2 October 1939 France agreed to the formation of a Czechoslovak army, whose core consisted of soldiers who had passed through Kraków and Bronowice. The shared experience of September also eased the later talks between the exile governments of Beneš and Władysław Sikorski on a Polish–Czechoslovak confederation, which in the end came to nothing.

Those interned in the USSR passed through camps at Kamianets-Podilskyi, Yarmolyntsi and Olkhovets, and from June 1940 they were held in an NKVD camp in a monastery at Suzdal. Moscow, bound by its pact with Germany, was willing neither to release nor to arm them, but in 1940–1941 it let more than 470 of them go to the Middle East in several transports. They formed the core of the Czechoslovak battalion that in the autumn of 1941 defended Tobruk alongside the Polish Independent Carpathian Rifle Brigade. Svoboda and a small group of his men remained in the USSR. After Germany attacked the Soviet Union they formed the nucleus of the 1st Czechoslovak Independent Field Battalion, raised from early 1942 at Buzuluk. On 8 March 1943 the battalion fought its first battle at Sokolovo in Ukraine, and in time it grew into the 1st Czechoslovak Army Corps, which under Svoboda’s command fought for the Dukla Pass and the liberation of Czechoslovakia. After the war Svoboda became Minister of Defence, and from 1968 to 1975 President of Czechoslovakia.

Prchala took a different path. His comrades accused him of having abandoned his soldiers in Poland, and in exile in France and Great Britain he became one of the leaders of the opposition to Beneš. After the war he remained in exile. Among the former legionaries from Bronowice were also men who made their mark on the later course of the war, such as Josef František, who flew with the Polish air force in September and in 1940, with the Polish No. 303 Squadron, became one of the most successful pilots of the Battle of Britain.