The roar of the Spitfires is still heard here today. Reportage from Duxford, from where Czech pilots took off for the Battle of Britain

The train leaves London Liverpool Street station on time. After about an hour’s drive through picturesque countryside, it stops at Whittlesford Parkway. I get out and walk to the legendary war airfield at Duxford. I’m walking past typical English country houses and suddenly I hear that characteristic hoarse roar. Only a twelve-cylinder Rolls-Royce Merlin sounds like that, I realize… and a Spitfire flies overhead.

“This is what it might have looked like here when Czechoslovak fighters started fighting in the Battle of Britain,” I say to myself and add to my step. I want to be at the airport already.

Duxford: the Czech 310th Fighter Squadron was home here

I walk through the gate of the airport. Airplanes still take off and land here, but above all there is a large aviation museum. I rush to the old part, to the hangars and houses that stood here already during the Second World War. In these places, in 1940, you would come across the 310th Czechoslovak fighter squadron. That is, to our first, probably the most famous and certainly the most successful fighter unit in the ranks of the British RAF during the Second World War.

On the way, however, I am stopped by the call of a photographer standing by the airport area. “Hey! Come here quick, the Spitfire is about to land!” He waves at me. He sees that I have a camera and wishes me not to miss the opportunity. He’s right, Spitfire will land in no time.

We talk to each other. He is a British spotter, that is, a photographer who specializes in aircraft images. “I’m from the Czech Republic. That’s where our guys flew from Duxford,” I tell him. “A lot of people from different parts of the world fly here at air shows – Americans, Germans, Canadians…” he calculates, as if he doesn’t understand me exactly.

“No, no, the Czechoslovaks flew here in the Battle of Britain,” I explain, and from the expression on his face I read that it doesn’t mean much to him. “Yeah, they were big stories back then,” he seems to be playing it safe. Perhaps in order not to touch me, but perhaps he is alluding to the fact that there were many foreign pilots in the ranks of the RAF (Poles, New Zealanders, Canadians, Czechs, Belgians, Australians, South Africans… and many others).

Czechs resemble names on a blackboard

A little way behind the hangars crouches a typically British brick house, surrounded by high defensive ramparts. Inside, the operating room is restored to the condition it was in at the time of the Battle of Britain. Raised counter with telephones and walkie-talkies. And below it, a huge map table, across which operators of the WAAF Women’s Auxiliary Air Corps moved the silhouettes of the planes, representing the units in the air.

On the blackboard in the operating room are written the names of the pilots, which do not sound British at all: Hess, Fejfar, Janouch, Fürst, Prchal, Vopálecký, Rechka, Hubáček… Yes, of course they know about our pilots here. I stop for a moment. I try to imagine what they must have been like back then.

Many of them never returned home. A small copper sign near the memorial tree behind one of the hangars tells about it: “This tree was planted in memory of the members of the 310th (Czech) Fighter Squadron who died while operating at the RAF airfield in Duxford in 1940-41. Pilots: J. Chalupa , E. Fechtner, V. Goth, F. Hradil, J. Komínek, F. Marek, J. Štěrbáček. Mechanics: B. Pohner, J. Zavadil.”

Letters written with chalk, great destinies written by life

I sit on a bench outside. I can’t help it and I google the fates of the airmen whose names are written in chalk on the blackboard in the operating room.

The commander of the 310th fighter squadron, Alexander Hess, survived the war. He returned to Czechoslovakia and managed to escape from the communists to the USA. He died in 1981 (aged 83). Stanislav Fejfar was shot down in 1942 in the north of France and died. He did not live to see his thirtieth birthday. Svatopluk Janouch survived the war and managed to escape from communist-dominated post-war Czechoslovakia. He died in 1966 in New York, he was only 52 years old.

Bohumír Fürst survived the war and returned home. In 1950, like many other pilots working in the British RAF, he was arrested by the communists and sent to a heavy prison in Mírov prison. That was how the nation repaid the heroes who risked their lives for it. When he was released, he could only work as a storekeeper. The former aviation ace could not get a better job.

American Beauty: Norman Foster’s P51 D Mustang and Hangar

With flights at Duxford Airport practically every day and historic machines from the Imperial War Museum’s collections in the air, you’ll naturally find photographers at the runway. One of them calls me again. Around his neck dangles a walkie-talkie, tuned to the control tower’s frequency. “The Mustang is about to take off!” he tells me what he found out.

The P51 D Mustang fighter can be described perfectly by the name of a well-known movie. It’s simply “American Beauty”. And so we stand there in the cool wind silently admiring the graceful curves of the silver Marinell. That’s exactly how a pilot once named this metallic beauty.

A short distance away is a beautiful shell building by world-renowned architect Norman Foster. It is a monumental tribute to the American pilots who fought in Europe and from 1943 operated from Duxford airfield, among others. I think that the Czechs, Slovaks and Poles would certainly deserve something similar, even if perhaps more modest.

Just have a little more time…

I arrived in Duxford after noon. Suddenly it’s just before closing time and I realize that half a day to visit this aviation museum is desperately short for me. I focused only on the expositions focused on the Second World War, but there are also others, full of machines from the beginnings of aviation or from the present day.

I spent a lot of time watching vintage airplanes take off and land. I suddenly realize that I somehow missed one important thing: I have not yet come across a Hawker Hurricane in the colors of Josef František anywhere. On the one hand, he was a brilliant fighter who scored 17 enemy aircraft downs in a short period of time, but on the other hand, he was also a very undisciplined soldier who preferred to fight as a lone wolf.

He served in the ranks of the Polish 303rd fighter squadron and was killed while returning from a patrol flight in 1940. No one knows why this happened. Maybe he was totally exhausted from the huge number of combat sorties, maybe he wanted to show off his cool over his girlfriend’s house…

Maybe you’ll get lucky and see the RF-R in its full glory

“There was no pilot like him before him and there will be no one after him. He flew alone and went into battle with superior numbers, he ambushed the Germans. He was the best shooter, when he pulled the trigger of the machine gun, it meant a downed German. He flew with love and courage. He was the greatest hero of the Battle of England,” Witold Żyborski, aide to the commander of the 303rd squadron, said of František.

If you’re lucky and think of it as soon as you get to Duxford, you might do better than I did and see him. Hawker Hurricane with the letters RF-R on the side and a round Czech badge under the cockpit. In Duxford, in 2020, they introduced one Hurricane in exactly the form that František’s machine was said to have looked like just before it crashed on October 8, 1940 in Cuddington Way.

Goodbye and maybe see you again

“One visit to Duxford is probably not enough,” I think as I walk out the airport gate at the last possible moment, i.e. at 18.00. I understand why fans buy season tickets here, they say something different flies here every day. I follow the field path back to Whittlesford railway station. And from the blue height above me, I am accompanied by the hoarse sound of the twelve-cylinder Merlin.