A Soldier at Seventeen

Available in: English | Česky

As a member of the Czechoslovak battalion, Jan Perl participated in the siege of Tubruq in 1941. When he and his battalion came to the town, all the water wells were poisoned. Perl recalls: “One of the reasons Tubruq was so famous was that it was besieged by someone else every moment; one day by the Germans, then by the Italians, after that the Britons, South-Africans or Australians. The worst times were when it was besieged by Germans and Italians in one moment. When the Britons forced them to leave, they poisoned the wells and when we got there it was not possible to drink the water. It was too dangerous. The Britons brought in some machines for filtering seawater. So we had quite enough water, but it was horrible. It took time to get used to it. One could still sense the salt. The water was harmless, but absolutely distasteful.”

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Lieutenant Colonel (ret.) Jan Perl

Jan Perl was born in 1922 in a Czechoslovak family living in Vienna. He went to German schools in Vienna but after Germany annexed Austria in 1938 they went to Czechoslovakia. In 1939 he and a few of his friends fled from the Protectorate Bohemia and Moravia to the Polish city of Krakow where they joined the Czechoslovak expatriate army under the command of Colonel Ludvík Svoboda. After the surrender of Poland in September 1939, the entire Polish Legion of the Czechoslovak expat army went into Soviet captivity. Jan Perl was held captive in the camps Jarmolince and Suzdal. In April 1941, he departed to Palestine where he joined the British army. He was subsequently incorporated into the battalion of general Klapálek in the Egyptian city of Alexandria. He took part in battles in the Libyan Desert, in battles on the frontier of Syria and Turkey and in the siege of Tobruk in the fall of 1941. After he was retrained as an anti-aircraft artilleryman, he served in Haifa, Beirut, and Tobruk again. In 1943 he sailed on board of the Mauretania to England where he was trained as a tank crew and fought in the battle for Dunkirk in 1944 - 1945. On May 17 he participated in the parade march in liberated Prague. After the war, he worked for the ČSA for a while, but was fired in 1951 and thereafter could only perform manual labor. After a serious work-related injury, he was eventually able to work again for ČSA. At the end of the war, Jan Perl was in the rank of a second lieutenant. After 1989, he has been promoted several times reaching the rank of a lieutenant colonel in retirement. He also obtained several decorations, among others the Africa Star Medal.

Tobruk

Available in: English | Česky

The North-African port of Tobruk was the cause of a number of battles of WW2. The city was captured repeatedly by both sides. In October 1941, units of the Czechoslovak Army under Lt Col Karel Klapálek also took part in the defense of the city.