“So we wanted to somehow get over the border, but then some bastard Úlehla from Mutěnice spoiled it all, our preparation and our planned escape to England. There were Šeda, Schoř, Nedělka, Holoda, their wives and me. This was the group which wanted to get away. We were all arrested and sentenced. All of them were western soldiers. Captain Schoř got a sixteen-year sentence, Šeda got fourteen years, Holoda thirteen years, I got eleven years and Holoda seven years. All our wives were also imprisoned – Šeda´s wife for one year, Holoda´s one year, Schoř´s one and a half, my wife one year. They spent all this time in prison. From my sentence, I was imprisoned for six years and three months, Holoda for eight years. I was held in Horní Slavkov, Jáchymov, Pankrác, Bory and in Leopoldov. In Leopoldov I spent about two years and from there I got out on conditional release.”
“I arrived there and was assigned to a crew. I already had my crew, Jacek Tichý was the captain and I was his radio operator. There was a navigator, two radio gunners and the second pilot. This was our entire crew. We returned back to Scotland to Tain, where the 311th squadron was based, its task was to guard the gateway between the Shetlands and Iceland, through which ships and submarines sailed out on the open sea. We guarded the North Sea from England to Norway, we were also flying up to Iceland. We would take off and fly over a determined area in a square pattern. In these squares, there was one plane next to another; and the area was quite large, about two hours of flight time. So we would fly in this square area and we would spend ten to eleven hours in the air. This meant for example we could take off at midnight and return around noon. There was no weather whatsoever; we flew in all kinds of weather. No matter what the weather conditions, we flew on our mission.”
“She divorced in 1954. We agreed on divorce, and she then... It is a very interesting and complicated story. While I was in prison, there was a guy imprisoned with me, on the basis of retribution decrees, sentenced for collaboration with Germany. He was young, younger than me. His sentence was twelve years, and out of that he spent nine years in prison. He got released, started a relationship with my wife, and through the Red Cross he left the country as a deported German. My wife with children was released to go to England, and she married this German. Obviously, he did not get a residence permit for England, and so they settled in Kiel, in Germany.”
“(When did you experience the greatest fear?) My greatest fear... not really. Now, I would feel it more intensively than back then. I was afraid when I anticipated something might happen, like when four fighter planes started after us by the coast of Norway, we were warned that there were German airfields for focke-wulfs and messerschmitts. They were after us from the back, we were not supposed to get into our gunsights, and as soon as they did, we started a fire. But we took a bad aim, there was no alert coming, because these planes were spitfires from the Shetlands. Only when they got closer, we recognized that they were four spitfires, not 109s. This happened over the coast of Norway. (What did you fight for? What were your motives?) What I was fighting for...? For this country, for what else? I did not have to, it was not obligatory. Abroad, there were many people who were just having fun, they were normally supported and sponsored by our government and they refused to fight, they lived there as civilians. I could have done the same thing, too... (Was this the way your parents brought you up?) Yes, that is right. We strove to make a difference, to make our country independent again, as it used to be. That was everyone’s ideal. There were various people... with various opinions.”
“I come from Veselí nad Moravou, from the small neighbourhood of Milokošť. I was born on April 9th 1920. I went to school there, then to a higher school in Uherský Ostroh and then I continued for two more years with vocational training for carpenters. When our country was occupied by Germans, I was sent on forced labour to Germany, to Kiel, where I worked in Marine Kaserne, in construction work. During my first leave I stayed at home and I did not go back there, and I was thus summoned to the Gestapo in Zlín, where I was asked why I did not return to Kiel. Since there were three widows in my family, and my father was seriously ill with cancer, they accepted my explanation, but told me I had to go back. Together with two friends of mine I therefore decided to go to France. On the St Nicolas day, on December 6th 1939 we crossed the Slovak border. One of our friends worked there, and his brother arranged for us a person who took us over the border to Hungary.”
Colonel Jaroslav Šišpera was born on April 9th,1920 in the village of Milokošť, near Veselí nad Moravou. After elementary schooling in Uherský Ostroh, he trained for two years as a carpenter. After the Nazi occupation in 1939, he was sent on forced labour to Kiel, and during his leave he returned home. However, after the permitted leave was over, he did not go back to Kiel, which brought him the attention of the Gestapo in Zlín. Šišpera with two friends, decided to escape abroad via the so-called Balkan pathway through Hungary, Yugoslavia, Greece, Turkey and Syria, and then by ship to France. On January 26th, 1940 he joined the 9th company of the 2nd Czechoslovak regiment, where he served as an intermediary, and took part in the defence of France. After the fall of France, he sailed to England on the ship Agapa. In England he joined the 311th squadron, first as ground personnel, where he served as a mechanic, telegraph operator and repairman from 1940-1942. He was trained as a radio operator and then joined the crew of Jack Tichý. Their crew operated over the North Sea, where they guarded Allied boats against attacks by enemy airplanes.
In 1941 he married in Great Britain. Jaroslav Šišpera´s uncle also served as an airman in England, and his brother, who was an American national, was flying as an American combat pilot in India and Burma, where he was wounded. After the end of the war, Jaroslav was doing flights to England for repatriated soldiers and he worked for the Czechoslovak Airlines as a radio operator, but was dismissed from the company in 1950. Together with other soldiers who had fought on the western front he decided to leave Czechoslovakia, but in 1950 he was arrested and sentenced to 11 years in communist prisons. He did time in prisons in Horní Slavkov, Jáchymov, Prague-Pankrác, Pilsen-Bory and in Leopoldov, where he spent two years. He divorced his English wife in 1954 and four years later he remarried. From his first marriage, there are three children, ten grandchildren and ten great-grandchildren living in England. He was rehabilitated in 1967 and he returned to work in the Czechoslovak Airlines, where he flew to and from the western countries. In 1972 he went in early retirement due to health problems. Till his death on October 27th, 2006 he was living in Prague-Písnice.
