Aktuálně.cz: Back after 80 years. The flag taken by the American liberators returned to the Czech Republic

The shipment from the United States is extremely cherished at the Army Museum Žižkov. It has been a few days since the American flag, which was sewn by several women in Ostroměř in the Hradec Králové region in the first nights of May 1945 and handed over to American soldiers, returned to the Czech Republic after eighty years. They stopped in the town unscheduled because of a defect in their jeep. The story is now exclusively described by Aktuálně.cz.

It's on the desk in the director's office of Ales Knizek. So far in a black travel case. It will be shown to the public for the first time on Wednesday, 30 April, when a months-long exhibition commemorating the events of May 1945 begins at the Žižkov Army Museum in Prague. The 80-year-old American flag will be one of the main attractions of the exhibition.

But already now Knížek and historian Tomáš Jakl have presented it. They took the historic flag out of its bag for a few minutes. That was just so that Aktuálně.cz could take a picture of it.

“It is a symbol of what the May Uprising meant for the end of the war in Europe,” Jakl said, describing the story of the hand-stitched flag with its unmistakable small blue field (canton) with 48 stars. This is no mistake - until 1959, the American flag had two fewer stars than it does now.

“Its creation is directly tied to what the May fast did - it prevented the Germans from defending themselves in what they called the ”Czech-Moravian“ area until May 20, 1945, as they had at least planned,” the historian continues.

They didn't want to join the Russians, they were afraid of Siberia
The flag is very closely linked to the story of the column of American armoured and regular vehicles that set off from Pilsen on 7 May 1945 under white banners and arrived in Velichovka via Prague. Field Marshal Ferdinand Schörner, the commander of Hitler's Army Group “Centre”, had been there with his staff since April.

An envoy of the German government, accompanied by American soldiers, carried a formal protocol to Schörner to have the Nazi troops surrender where they were and not push westward toward the American positions. Dwight Eisenhower, the commander-in-chief of the Western Allied forces in Europe, was particularly insistent on this.

"They wanted to the Americans. They feared that if they capitulated to the Red Army, Russian prison camps in Siberia awaited them," Jakl says of the Nazis' fears. However, Schörner and his men refused to surrender on the spot, so Eisenhower ordered the demarcation line in western Bohemia closed on May 9, 1945.

They got a flat tire and lost their comrades
And it is in these days that the story of that American flag begins to be written. Two vehicles with four soldiers - a jeep and an Opel Kapitän passenger car - had to be detached from the column heading to Velichovka. “They blew a tire and never made it back to their column,” Jakl says.

The two cars with the Americans thus joined the line of German vehicles in which the Nazi soldiers were retreating. Together they reached the eastern Bohemian village of Ostroměř.

“The village had a very strong rebel garrison reinforced by a detachment of escaped prisoners who joined the rebels on May 6,” explains Tomas Jakl. “The insurgents also had an improvised armoured train with a 20 mm cannon, they destroyed or disarmed passing columns,” continues the researcher at the Military History Institute.

The Ostroměř unit stopped part of the transport, which included the Americans. The Czechs provided them with accommodation, the Western soldiers ended up staying for three days, the rebel command provided them with an accompanying letter to avoid complications during their journey through the wild country, and they returned to Plzeň on 12 May 1945, after the official end of the war.

They brought with them a present that had been made by the women in Ostroměř. That American flag. “It's captured in a lot of period photographs,” says Jakl, showing a few of them.

How was it found? A compatriot helped
After World War II, the hand-sewn American flag made its way to the United States. Cruce R. Patire took it there. One of the soldiers who unwittingly spent the fall days and nights in Ostrommer eighty years ago. Patire donated the flag to a museum in Hoosick Falls, New York.

It was then discovered there by Czechoslovak compatriot and military columnist Omar Bartos. A few years ago, he contacted historians in Prague. As a result, the restored flag will now reappear, at least for a few months, in the Czech Republic.

Aktuálně.cz tried to find out how this history is known in Ostroměř. And surprisingly, it is a black spot in history.

Mayor Jaroslav Tomeš (SNK) says he is hearing something like this for the first time. And Lada Vávrová, the mayor of the local Sokol, is also overwhelmed by the information.

However, the flag may not be the last interesting find related to the end of the war and the uprising in Czechoslovakia. According to Tomáš Jakl, there are still many unidentified photographs in American regional museums that originate from our territory.

"We know that when the Czechoslovak Combined Brigade of the Western Brigade (the unit besieging the French port of Dunkirk from October 1944, ed.) crossed our border on May 1, 1945, it was filmed by an American cameraman. The film has not yet been identified, but we know it is ‘out there’ somewhere," says Tomáš Jakl.

Author: Ondřej Stratilík

Photo:

1. It is surprising, but the story of the sewn flag was only now heard for the first time by the mayor of Ostroměř Sokol and the head of the town hall: Lukáš Bíba

2. It is surprising, but the story of the sewn flag was only now heard for the first time by the mayor of Ostroměř Sokol and the head of the town hall: Lukáš Bíba

3. Historical photo showing the Ostroměř flag on a jeep of the American army in May 1945. | Photo: VÚA-VHA