Fiat CR.30 a CR.32 Freccia – Šnajdr Miroslav (2019)

Among the most successful biplane fighters of the 1930s was the Fiat CR.32 Freccia (Arrow), produced in significant quantities for the Italian Air Force as well as for export. The type became famous primarily for its participation in the battles of the Spanish Civil War, but it also took part in several confrontations of World War II. It flew over four continents: Europe, Asia, Africa, and America. The Fiat CR.32 played an important role in the story of Czechoslovak aviation as well. The first casualties among our pilots in the escalating fight against Nazism and Fascism were caused by Fiat CR.32s in the second half of the 1930s. On May 31, 1937, Italian-controlled Freccias shot down a Potez 540 bomber of the Spanish Republican Air Force near the Mediterranean island of Mallorca, in which Czechoslovak volunteers, fighting according to the leftist rhetoric of the time "for Prague at Madrid," Josef Soušek and Zdeněk Talaš, fell. Only the injured and captured pilot Jan Ferák survived from the crew. In the tense days of territorial trimming of what was then Czechoslovakia due to the Munich Agreement, a Hungarian Fiat CR.32 shot down a Letov Š 328 reconnaissance aircraft of Squadron 10 over the territory of southern Slovakia demanded by the Hungarians on October 25, 1938, resulting in the death of observer sv. asp. Jaromír Šotola.