They were having breakfast, the fog lifted and slaughter started

On September 9th, 1944, the first Czechoslovak brigade was marching in a column of threes on a road, believing that in front of it were units of the Red Army. The brigade mainly consisted of inexperienced Volhynian Czechs, Rusyns, and Czechoslovaks. Many of them had gone through imprisonment in a Russian gulag. When the soldiers stopped and started to eat their breakfast, the fog lifted itself and it turned out that they were encircled by the German 75th infantry division, recently pushed forward, which started an artillery and a machine-gun fire. All hell let loose by the Wehrmacht, which had bracketed beforehand. Many of the soldiers did not follow their orders and instead, started to run away. One of the commanders, Oldřich Kvapil, recalls that in order to stop the fleeing soldiers he used a personal weapon and shot them for desertion. According to contemporary witnesses, for ten minutes only shrapnels and parts of human bodies were flying through the air. This is where 611 Czechoslovak soldiers died or were injured. The command of the brigade received incorrect information from the Red Army and their own reconnaissance was unsuccessful. After the battle on the night of September 10th marshal Konev, commander of the first Ukrainian front, dismissed the commander of the Czechoslovak corps, general Kratochvíl, and replaced him by Ludvík Svoboda, the present commander of the first brigade. By this act the Russians had breached an international agreement with the Czechoslovak government-in-exile, which had in its competence personnel requirements of the Czechoslovak army command. In the audio clip you can hear the memories of Václav Bouzek, Rostislav Čech, Marie Kvapilová, Miroslav Škrábala, and Jan Plovajko. “It was rainy and muddy... Nobody knew what was going on. It all started at dawn, they were firing at us until two o’clock. Everyone hid where they could, in order to avoid the gunfire... We decided with Jiřinka to get something to drink in the little house. As we left the car a mine blew up there. Libuška Mrázková was severely injured in her abdominal cavity. I gave her first aid, then we bandaged her and took her to the first-aid station. As we were driving, they were shooting both in front of me and behind me. At the first-aid station there were many injured, and they couldn't save her... Some of the soldiers ran away, they didn't know where they belonged. Then they ran back again... At dawn I wanted them to make trenches. The commander said, no, we are going to move ahead. I took my machine-gun apart and said, boys, today is going to be a hard day. We heard a whoooh and a grenade flew in and then another one, but it didn't fly close enough. I said, 'it’s bad, they are bracketing'. Without an order I ran for ammunition...”