FINAL BATTLE: PRAGUE UPRISING
“IN THE CZECH CAPITAL, THE REBELS CLUNG ON TO THEIR LAST POSITIONS. AT 5.00AM ON 7 MAY, GERMAN ARMOURED VEHICLES BREACHED THE BARRICADES AND INFANTRY BROKE INTO THE TOWN HALL”
On 8 May 1945, America, Britain and most other European countries were happily celebrating VE Day. On the same day, Czech insurgents were fighting for their lives. Amid the heady rush of events at the war’s end, the Prague uprising usually receives scant attention – and unjustly so. It is a story full of unexpected twists and turns, where courage and heroism triumphed against all military odds.
The Czechs had suffered the longest period of occupation in Europe and yearned to be free of the Nazi yoke. The Germans had annexed the Sudetenland in October 1938, and occupied the remainder of the country in March 1939, setting up an independent, pro-Fascist republic in Slovakia and forging the remnants into the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. After the assassination of Hitler’s henchman SS General Reinhard Heydrich (the region’s brutal Protector) in
