Petr Uruba: Czech pilot RIP

Kyt · Mar 10, 2009

Petr Uruba: Czech pilot | Times Online Obituary

Petr Uruba was a Czech pilot who was one of the determined few who escaped Czechoslovakia’s occupation by Nazi Germany to fight for the restoration of Czech independence from abroad, providing vital support for the Allied war effort by flying for the RAF.

For Uruba, however, who was captured in occupied France in 1941, this service led to years in prisoner of war camps, and on one occasion his near execution.

Even after the defeat of Nazism, his suffering was far from over. After the communist coup in Czechoslovakia, he was banished, because of his links with the West, to poor housing and menial jobs, and was fully rehabilitated only after the revolution against communism in 1989. He was delighted to witness his country’s entry into Nato, which he saw as the final guarantee of Czech security after a lifetime of vulnerability to larger, aggressive neighbours.

Uruba was born in 1916 in Rusava in Moravia, where his father was a forest labourer. In 1935 he joined an air training school in Prostejov, where he became a bomber pilot, urged by his anxious mother to always fly “slow and low”.

However, his hopes that he would be able to defend Czechoslovakia against the looming Nazi aggression were dashed by the Munich conference of 1938, and the ceding of the Sudetenland to Hitler’s Germany, undermining the defences of the rest of Czechoslovakia.

Uruba later recalled the huge disappointment among his fellow Czechs when it became clear that Britain and France would not fight to defend their Czechoslovak ally. He realised that Czechoslovak forces on their own would not have lasted long against the Germans — just as the Poles did not last long when the Second World War broke out.

After Germany had invaded — unopposed — the remains of the Czech lands in March 1939, Uruba and his colleagues were sent home, their units dissolved. He made his way illegally across the border into Poland, and joined other Czech and Slovak exiles determined to fight from abroad, including many of the airmen with whom he had trained. They made their way initially to France, and then, when France was defeated in 1940, on to Britain.

Uruba joined the RAF’s 311 Squadron, composed largely of Czechoslovak personnel, based in Norfolk. He flew Wellington bombers, beginning with attacks on the German forces around the Channel which were assembling for a possible invasion of Britain. However, in 1941, returning from a raid on Boulogne, a navigational error and fuel shortage led to Uruba landing his plane on an airfield in Normandy in occupied France. As German troops were approaching the plane, and he realised the error, Uruba tried but failed to take off again.

Uruba was sent to a series of prisoner of war camps. His status was always precarious as the Nazi regime, which had incorporated the Czech lands as a protectorate of the Third Reich, regarded Czechs fighting for the enemy as traitors. Uruba used his linguistic skills to help to disguise his identity. At one stage, after interrogation by the Gestapo in Prague in 1944, he was condemned to death. However, the sentence was not immediately carried out, and he survived, spending the final months of the war in the notorious prison at Colditz.

Liberated by US forces in April 1945, emaciated and in poor health, he was taken back to Britain to recuperate, and enjoyed the VE-Day celebrations in London. He then returned to begin a busy life as a flying instructor in Czechoslovakia, and married in 1946.

But postwar optimism was dashed in 1948 when the communists took power in Prague. Those who had fought in the West were regarded, according to the logic of Stalinist paranoia, as “imperialist stooges”. Uruba was dismissed from the armed forces, and banished from his flat in the city of Olomouc to life in rural Moravia, where he lived with his wife and daughter in a house without electricity. He was harassed by the communist secret police, interrogated and beaten.

There was some relief in the political thaw of the 1960s. He was allowed to rejoin the military until the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Later he was able to find work that made some use of the five languages he spoke. And former RAF members in Czechoslovakia began to meet quietly in mutual support.

After the revolution against communist rule in 1989, these Czech war heroes were rehabilitated — though many still lived in poor conditions. Uruba was given the rank of colonel and presented with a French decoration by President Chirac.

Petr Uruba, Czech pilot, was born on December 15, 1916. He died on March 1, 2009, aged 92
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Antipodean Andy · Mar 10, 2009

It never ceases to amaze me how badly treated some of these men were...and all for loving and wanting a safe and free homeland. RIP.

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