This article is in memory of Warrant Officer Vilém Jakš, known to everyone as Vilda, an air gunner of No. 311 (Czechoslovak) Squadron RAF. Before the war he had been Czechoslovakia’s middleweight boxing champion, and the first Czechoslovak ever to fight for a professional world title.
On 21 August 1943 he took off from RAF Beaulieu in Liberator BZ780 ‘O’, captained by the squadron’s commanding officer. This flight was the squadron’s first operational sortie in its new four-engined Liberator. The aircraft was shot down over the Bay of Biscay by Messerschmitt Bf 110 fighters on the way home. All eight men aboard were lost. No bodies were ever recovered. Jakš was 33 years old and is commemorated on Panel 134 at the Runnymede Memorial in Surrey.
Warrant Officer Vilém ‘Vilda’ Jakš
Early life in Moravia
Vilém Jakš was born on 25 April 1910 at Bratčice, a farming village a few miles south of Brno in Moravia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He was the eldest of four children of Josef Jakš, a farmer, and Růžena Chmelíková.
The family lost its breadwinner early. Josef was called up in the Great War and fought on the Eastern Front. But sadly, he disappeared during the Brusilov Offensive near Lutsk in the summer of 1916. He was later declared missing – and this is where the irony falls, as it was the same fate that would later be shared by his son. Vilda started school two months after his father’s death.
His mother remembered him as a boy who was never ill and was seemingly never bothered by anything. She said how he always whistled when he stepped out of the front door. One winter he fell through ice while sliding barefoot on a frozen pond. He did not run home but instead carried on playing until evening in his hardened frozen clothes. That stubbornness would define him in later life.
The family struggled through the post-war years. Eventually an uncle in Prague offered to take Vilda and his younger brother Jožka as apprentice upholsterers, and the two boys moved to the capital. It was there that Vilda found boxing.
The boxer
Jakš began boxing aged fifteen at the Český lev (Czech Lion) club in the Nusle district of Prague. He was also, like many young working-class Czechs of his generation, a devoted ‘tramp’. For context, Czech ‘tramping‘ was, and still is, an outdoor movement born in the 1920s among city lads raised on Jack London and American westerns. At weekends they escaped Prague for the wooded river valleys to the south, built log cabins in ‘settlements’ which were then given American names, and sat round campfires in wide-brimmed hats playing guitar. It had nothing to do with vagrancy as the name suggests. Jakš’s own cabin, on the Sázava river below Medník hill, was called Kansas.
His first serious fight took place in 1928. It was an improvised tournament among the tramps building a cabin called Harward on the Sázava. A professional butcher had entered camp, and nobody would face him off. But Jakš did, and lasted so long that the butcher finished it with an illegal blow down onto the top of the head. Jakš was knocked out cold. Despite this initial set-back, he did not give up boxing.
At nineteen he won the Czechoslovak amateur welterweight title and was selected for the national team. In 1932 he turned professional, though fourteen months of compulsory military service interrupted him almost immediately. He served with the 81st Flight of the 5th Air Regiment at Prague-Kbely, where his commanding officer assessed him as “calm, orderly, intelligent, energetic and disciplined”. It was his first taste of military aviation.
By March 1933, he had returned to civilian life. Jakš then won around thirty professional fights without defeat. He beat the celebrated František Nekolný and held the Czechoslovak professional middleweight title from 1933 to 1936. He became a celebrity in Czechoslovakia – he was good-looking, successful, and said to be an easy-going man. He appeared on magazine covers and was photographed with glamorous actresses in open-topped cars.
In February 1935 he beat the Spaniard Alvaro Santos in Paris. This was an eliminator for the world title, having been knocked down three times in the first round before coming back to win. That set him up the fight of his life.
On 4 May 1935 at the Palais des Sports in Paris, in front of a crowd reported at between 16,000 and 20,000, Jakš challenged the French world middleweight champion Marcel Thil. Statistical boxing website BoxRec rates Thil as the second-best European boxer ever across all weight divisions.
Jakš was now in the big time, and was the first Czechoslovak boxer to ever to fight for a professional world title. Czechoslovak Radio broadcast the fight live. Jakš, whom the French crowd called ‘Žaks’, went down in the ninth round, put Thil down in the tenth, and kept pace with the more experienced champion until the fourteenth, when after a third knockdown his manager, Krassovský, threw in the towel.
Thil was generous afterwards, calling Jakš a fine “fencer with his fists” with a great future ahead of him.
1935 proved to be the high point for Jakš’ boxing career. After the match he was cheated by fraudsters selling forged securities, fell out with the Czechoslovak professional boxers’ union, which handed him a suspended lifetime ban, and on 1 September 1936 resigned from professional boxing in disgust. He was invited back to defend his national title, but a car accident intervened and he never fought again.
He moved and settled in France, dealing in Bohemian cut glass, and lived with the Hungarian-born film actress Käthe von Nagy. Through her he moved in French film circles and counted Jean Gabin among his friends. He even appeared briefly on screen.
Mobilisation, Munich and escape
When Czechoslovakia mobilised in September 1938, Jakš ignored von Nagy’s pleas to stay with her on the French Riviera and went home to rejoin his old unit, the 81st Flight of the 5th Air Regiment. Munich ended that. On 7 October 1938 he was stood down with the rest of the mobilised reservists, and on 15 March 1939 the German Army marched into Prague.
Getting out of the Protectorate to fight was not simple. Jakš used his old contacts in the boxing union to obtain a forged document confirming a non-existent bout in Italy, supposedly arranged to cement friendly sporting relations with the fascist state. He left with a loaded pistol in his pocket and, if caught, had prepared a cover story that he had broken into the union office and stolen the stamp himself, so that nobody who had helped him would be implicated.
He left Czechoslovakia on 9 February 1940 and travelled through Italy and Belgrade to Beirut and Alexandria, arriving at Marseille at the end of March. He later wrote in his diary that the journey from Prague to the Czechoslovak forces in Marseille had taken 49 days. He enlisted on 28 March and reported to the Czechoslovak air depot at Agde two days later.
France fell before he could fly. Käthe von Nagy came to Agde to try once more to persuade him to stay. He refused, and in June 1940 sailed from Bordeaux with the Czechoslovak air contingent, landing at Falmouth on 23 June 1940.
311 Squadron: the first Czechoslovak bombing raid
In England, he was offered a job as a physical training instructor with the Commandos. He asked if he could join the RAF instead, and when No. 311 (Czechoslovak) Squadron was formed at RAF Honington in July 1940, he joined as an air gunner.
The squadron’s first operation, and the first raid by a Czechoslovak crew from Britain, was flown on the night of 10/11 September 1940 against railway marshalling yards at Brussels. It was here that the Germans were assembling material for the planned invasion. Jakš was the rear gunner in the Wellington bomber commanded by Václav Korda. However, bad weather prevented them from bombing, and Korda brought his bombs home rather than jettisoning them in the sea.
Before that first sortie, Jakš wrote a short letter to his mother on 10 September 1940. He left it in his kit bag to be found, just in case he did not return from the mission. It read:
“Dear Mother, if you receive this letter, don’t wait for me at home any more. I say goodbye to you and send my greetings to everyone at home. Vilda.”
His mother received it after the war and kept it for the rest of her life.
Jakš was awarded the Czechoslovak Medal for Bravery in October 1940 and the Czechoslovak War Cross 1939 in June 1941. He flew fifteen operations as a rear gunner during 311’s Bomber Command period and was wounded in combat with German night fighters. In July 1941 he was taken off operations to recover.
Instructing, and the whispers
After convalescence, Jakš was posted as an armament instructor to No. 2 (Pilots) Advanced Flying Unit at RAF Brize Norton and received a promotion. Around twelve months later he moved to the Czechoslovak depot at RAF St Athan as a sports instructor, putting new arrivals through basic training. He also got back into the ring for a station boxing exhibition. The local RAF champion reportedly watched him warm up and withdrew.
Then the talk and rumours started. Among the Czechoslovak airmen in Britain, which was a small exile community and where everyone knew everyone else, word reached Jakš that some were saying he had found himself a comfortable billet in the rear while others were doing the fighting. This was May 1943 when 311 Squadron moved to RAF Beaulieu and began converting from Wellingtons to Liberators for Coastal Command work over the Bay of Biscay.
Jakš had never liked the sea. He said that when he got home, he never wanted to see more water in one place than what flowed in the Sázava below Medník, where his cabin was. But he could not live with being considered a coward by the other airmen. On 22 June 1943 he reported back to 311 Squadron and volunteered as an air gunner on the new American-made Liberators.
He was not, by his own account, fearless. Miroslav Vild, a 311 Squadron wireless operator who later wrote a memoir of his war, recorded a conversation with Jakš shortly before the 311 Squadron’s first Liberator operation. In Vild’s telling, Jakš said something to this effect: that if you put him in the ring against Carnera, a famous Italian heavyweight, then he would go in head first even knowing he would take a beating – but he did not want to get into that Liberator aircraft, no matter how beautiful it was. He admitted he was genuinely afraid and did not know why. He would try to get through three trips, he said, and then give it all up.
RAF Beaulieu, summer 1943
No. 311 Squadron arrived at RAF Beaulieu on 26 May 1943. They then spent the summer converting to the Consolidated Liberator GR Mk V. The Liberator was a very different proposition from the Wellington which they had been flying. Instead it had four engines, a crew of eight or more, radar, and the endurance to spend ten or twelve hours over the Bay of Biscay. The 311 Squadron would be tasked with hunting U-boats on passage to and from the French Atlantic ports.
The squadron was ready by the third week of August. Its commanding officer was Wing Commander Jindřich Breitcetl DFC, a 30-year-old who had commanded 311 since February 1943. He had fifty operations behind him, forty-five of which were in night bombing raids. It was customary that the commanding officer flew the first operation on a new type himself, and Breitcetl did just that.
The RAF Beaulieu station Operations Record Book for 21 August 1943 records the day in two lines:
At 09:47, “No. 311 Czech Squadron became operational and 2 anti-submarine sorties were carried out. Liberator O/311 Captain W/C Breitcetl, who was O.C. Squadron, failed to return. Crew of 8 reported missing.”
Jakš’ last flight: 21 August 1943
Liberator BZ780 ‘O’ took off from Beaulieu at 09:47 for an anti-submarine patrol over the Bay of Biscay. Aboard were:
- Wing Commander Jindřich Breitcetl DFC, captain
- Flight Lieutenant František Fencl, second pilot
- Flying Officer Eduard Pavelka, navigator
- Pilot Officer Emilián Mrázek, wireless operator
- Flight Sergeant Michal Pizúr, wireless operator
- Sergeant Josef Felkl, wireless operator
- Flight Sergeant Jozef Halada, air gunner
- Warrant Officer Vilém Jakš, air gunner
This was an experienced crew. Fencl had 55 operations. Halada, at 35 the oldest aboard, had 54, and had distinguished himself in July 1942 by silencing the flak gun of U-106 with his turret fire while his captain attacked with depth charges. Mrázek, the youngest at 22, was the brother of Wing Commander Karel Mrázek, who commanded the Czechoslovak fighter wing at RAF Exeter.
The second Liberator, BZ775 ‘G’, took off twenty-eight minutes later at 10:15 with Squadron Leader Václav Korda, Jakš’s old captain from the Brussels raid, at the controls. Korda’s aircraft carried a distinguished passenger: Group Captain Alois Kubita, the Czechoslovak liaison officer at Coastal Command, flying as a gunner to witness the squadron’s Liberator debut.
The weather was excellent, with good visibility and a smooth sea. Both aircraft patrolled without incident. On the homeward leg, about 55 km south-west of the Scilly Isles, Korda received a warning that enemy aircraft were in the area. With the Scilly beacon almost in range, he held his course. Rather than diverting north, he landed theLiberator at RAF Beaulieu at 19:15.
Breitcetl’s aircraft appears to have received the same warning but did not acknowledge it. The last fix on BZ780 was taken by 19 Group at 18:19, at approximately 49°00’N 07°16’W, roughly 220 km west-north-west of Brest and 130 km south-west of the Scillies. Kubita’s diary entry for the day ends bleakly: no further signal, and the station had twice intercepted German radio transmissions of “attacking”.
The men of 311 Squadron waited all night for news. The next morning Korda took a Liberator out to search for a dinghy or any sign of life, and found nothing. More searches followed; there were Luftwaffe Fw 190s reported in the area. On 27 August the Air Officer Commanding Coastal Command, Air Marshal Sir John Slessor, told Kubita he was very sorry about Breitcetl, who had probably been shot down by Fw 190s. In a letter to the exiled Czechoslovak foreign minister, Jan Masaryk, Slessor called the loss a cruel blow to 311 Squadron and described Breitcetl as one of the best commanding officers in Coastal Command.
What happened
Slessor was wrong about the German Fw 190s. Luftwaffe records were examined after the war by the Czech historian Jiří Rajlich. His research shows that BZ780 was shot down by twin-engined Messerschmitt Bf 110G-2 long-range fighters of II./ZG 1 who were operating from Brest in France. The Gruppe had arrived on the Atlantic coast from Italy only two weeks earlier, and were ordered to specifically to hunt Allied anti-submarine aircraft over the Bay. Breitcetl’s Liberator was its first kill in the new theatre.
The German claim is timed at 19:20 German time, 18:20 British, one minute after the last fix, in a position that tallies closely with it. The victory was credited as a Gruppenabschuss, a shared group kill, which was usually done when the attacking pilots could not agree who had actually brought the aircraft down. That in itself says the Liberator was up against several fighters. Oberfeldwebel Lothar Uhlig is the pilot most often named as the pilot responsible for downing the Liberator.
The Czechoslovak gunners did not go quietly. A Bf 110G-2 of 5./ZG 1, works number 6406, coded S9+GN, failed to return from the same engagement. Its crew, Unteroffizier Georg Planer and Unteroffizier Horst Hofmann, were killed. The leader of the German section, Oberleutnant Gottfried Kayll, reported that they had sighted the Liberator at about 400 metres, that he had attacked from ahead and below on the left, and that Planer, flying as his number two, was suddenly gone. His wireless operator shouted that Planer had crashed. Kayll turned and saw only a burning patch on the sea.
Which of the Liberator’s gunners fired the fatal burst will never be known. Jakš was one of two, and the beam and tail positions would have been exactly where a frontal attack from below and to the left ended up. Kayll himself was shot down a month later, on 24 September 1943, in combat with Czechoslovak Spitfires near Brest.
The room with the envelope
There is an incredibly poignant aspect to the story that says a great deal about Breitcetl, and also about the state of mind of men flying these patrols.
Three days after the loss, Korda and the squadron’s Roman Catholic chaplain, Squadron Leader František Pouchlý, went to open Breitcetl’s room in a hut at RAF Beaulieu. The room was tidy, and on the table, propped against a vase of flowers, stood a large envelope marked “My last will”. Breitcetl’s batman told them his commanding officer had never done anything like this before.
Korda later wrote that Breitcetl could have stood aside from the first Liberator operation if he had not felt fit for it, physically or mentally. But he flew anyway, because he believed a commanding officer had a moral duty to take the first operation on a new type. He flew, and like Jakš, did not come back.
The darkest month
BZ780 was the first aircraft 311 Squadron had lost since arriving in the New Forest, and its disappearance opened what was to be pary of the darkest month in Beaulieu Airfield’s history. Within nine days the squadron had lost three Liberators and 23 men. On 29 August, BZ775 ‘G’, the very aircraft Korda had flown alongside Breitcetl on the 21st, crashed in woodland a mile from the airfield with the loss of all eight aboard.
The next day another Liberator came down near Brockenhurst, killing six more, and a gunner on a third was killed by fire from a German aircraft over the Bay of Biscay. The Luftwaffe had moved its long-range fighters to the French Atlantic coast precisely to contest the anti-submarine patrols, and in late summer 1943 the Bay was the most dangerous stretch of sea in Europe for Coastal Command crews.
Commemoration
The sea gave up none of the eight men. They are commemorated on the Runnymede Memorial in Surrey, which records the names of more than 20,000 airmen lost from bases in the United Kingdom and north-west Europe who have no known grave.
Breitcetl is on Panel 118, Fencl on 119, Pavelka on 128, Mrázek on 132, Jakš on 134, Halada on 136, Pizúr on 138 and Felkl on 149.
On the wall of the house where Jakš was born in Bratčice there is a memorial plaque bearing three names. Alongside Vilda are his father Josef, missing on the Eastern Front in 1916, and his younger brother Jožka, his sparring partner from the backyard in Bratčice. Jožka Jakš who was a member of an underground resistance group and died at Mauthausen concentration camp.
After the war, in Communist Czechoslovakia, airmen who had served with the RAF were treated as politically suspect, and Jakš’s story faded from public memory. It resurfaced in 1986, when the director Jaroslav Soukup’s film ‘Pěsti ve tmě’ (Fists in the Dark), starring Marek Vašut as a boxer named Vilda Jakub, drew loosely on his life. In 1991, after the fall of the regime, Vilém Jakš was promoted in memoriam to the rank of lieutenant colonel in the Czechoslovak Army. A book about the two brothers, Vilda & Jožka Jakš, was published in 2023 to mark the eightieth anniversary of his death.
He was, in the words of one of the authors of that book, no storybook hero, and that is what makes him worth remembering. He was a man who had nothing to prove, who was afraid of the aircraft and said so, and who climbed into the turret anyway.
Sources
- RAF Beaulieu Station Operations Record Book, 21 August 1943 (National Archives, AIR 28 series)
- Jiří Rajlich, Na nebi hrdého Albionu (parts 4 and 7), extracted in ‘První let Liberatorů dopadl tragicky’, Vojenský historický ústav Praha, 21 August 2023 – for take-off and fix times, crew experience, the Korda and Kubita accounts, the German records of II./ZG 1 and Oberleutnant Kayll’s combat report, and the Runnymede panel numbers
- Václav Korda, Nad zeměmi a moři (memoir), as quoted by Rajlich
- Miroslav Vild, Osud byl mým přítelem (memoir), as quoted by Paměť národa – for Jakš’s conversation about his fear of flying
- Helena Kalendová, ‘Příběh boxera a palubního střelce RAF Vildy Jakše’, Magazín Paměti národa, 17 April 2025
- Ivo Pujman, ‘Vilém Jakš se nevrátil’, Armádní zpravodaj, 27 June 2022
- Lukáš Kratochvíl and Marek Těšík, Vilda & Jožka Jakš (2023), and Český rozhlas Brno interview with the authors, 29 August 2023
- Commonwealth War Graves Commission, Runnymede Memorial, Panel 134
