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Old 24th May 2019, 22:01
  #12638 (permalink)  
alanjpraha
 
Join Date: Dec 2006
Location: Prague
Age: 79
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Czech Pilots

Honza17, thank you for the information - I came across your story quite by chance. It reminded me of another brave Czech pilot, my daughter's great-uncle, Vaclav (Venda) Jicha. I don't have the whole story of his life but what I think I know is that he was also a trained and qualified pilot in the Czech air force in 1939. At some point he escaped from Czechoslovakia via Poland and arrived in France where he fought and destroyed three German aircraft. On the fall of France he escaped once more and joined the RAF. He flew Spitfires and I believe he took part in the Battle of Britain. He became a Spitfire test pilot at Castle Bromwich, deputy to Alex Henshaw whose book 'Sigh for a Merlin' speaks warmly of Venda. I think he remained in this job until 1945, when he died with three others in an Avro Anson, flying to Scotland for the wedding of a colleague. Long ago I took Venda's sister to his grave in Haddington, near Edinburgh. I've seen some of Venda's logbooks and his medals (three, IIRC, including DFC and bar): the citation for one of them mentions safely landing nine (!) Spitfires with dead engines. And I've talked to some of the people he knew in his time in the UK - he was apparently a charming, modest man and a very skilled flyer.
My involvement in all this was a long time ago - I may have got some of the facts wrong, but not by much. Stories such as these leave me amazed and full of respect for decent men who rose to the desperate challenges of the time, and excelled. Venda's death was tragic and ironic, but in some ways he was lucky. Working in Czechoslovakia in the 1970's I met two men who had flown Spitfires for the RAF: one was a janitor, the other a car-park attendant. Returning to their own country after the war they were treated not as heroes but as probable traitors. I was at the time young, arrogant and 'busy', so I paid little attention to them. My shame!
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