Pátou kartu bere smrt – Marek Jindřich (2024)

This book somewhat deviates from the existing line of historical literature about Czechoslovak wartime paratroopers, which has largely focused on the period of 1941-42, culminating in the bloody aftermath of the Heydrich terror, or has paid attention within regional historical literature to a more detailed description of the history of certain parachute units (e.g., Clay, Wolfram, Potash) in the final phase of World War II. The author, who divided his work into two parts UNDER FOREIGN SKIES and THE ONLY STAR - HOME!, intentionally focused on the least known chapters of the training and deployment history of Czechoslovak paratroopers in Great Britain from 1941 to 1945. The first part describes, alongside the training of Czechoslovak paratroopers in Scotland, Palestine, and Egypt, their deployment outside their occupied homeland in Italy, Yugoslavia, Romania, France, and Austria. The second part captures the complex attempts to re-establish communication with the occupied homeland through drops sent from autumn 1943 to the Czech lands from airfields in North Africa and southern Italy. All of this is connected with the issue of air supply of weapons to the Czech resistance from the West, whose failure, long effectively exploited by communist propagandists, is presented here for the first time...