World Battlefronts: Verni Zustaneme

On a spring day in 1939, a weary, grey-haired giant slipped across the Czech border. Behind him lay his ravaged homeland, echoing the Wehrmacht’s goosestep; before him, Poland’s reluctant refuge. The man was Ludvik Svoboda, a battalion commander, 44.

This week Colonel Svoboda was an army chief, awaiting orders to join the great Red offensive. Waiting with him was his Russian-armed Czech army, tough, confident, thirsty for revenge. The army’s heart was in the green valleys and forests of its native land. The army’s motto was on its banner: Verni Zustaneme—We Remain Faithful.

To Svoboda, the sight of his new army must have made up for the years of disappointment. To bring it into being he argued, pleaded, strove to blunt Moscow’s fears and suspicions. Once the Soviet Union leaders were convinced that Svoboda’s army would be no future menace, they spared neither materiel nor care.

Last spring, the first of Svoboda’s units, which, like the Red Army, included women, completed training. Promptly, Moscow assigned to it the defense of a crucial river crossing in the Ukraine. There, in a village much like the peaceful hamlets of Moravia, the Czechs met 60 German tanks in an angry melee. When the battle ended a day later Svoboda still held the crossing, and the site where the village once stood was littered with the shells of 19 enemy tanks and the corpses of 400 infantrymen.

For this victory Russia gave medals to 86 of the men and women who fought at the crossing. Svoboda himself journeyed to the Kremlin, where the Soviet Union’s peasant President Mikhail Kalinin pinned on his broad chest the coveted Order of Lenin.

Since then Svoboda has been Russia’s favorite non-Russian hero. When not with his army, Svoboda has been preaching a close Czech-Russian union. When the Pan-Slav conference met in Moscow four months ago, his appeals were among the most urgent.

To his own Czechs, as to the Russians, the Bulgars and the Slovaks, there was magic in the name of this handsome giant —for in most Slav languages the word svoboda means freedom.