ABSTRACT
The Swedish Protestant armies, which almost reconquered Bohemia, included numbers of Czechs who, under the banners of Gustavus II, fought to deliver their fatherland from Habsburg rule. Most emigrants were poor farm laborers who left for America to better them economically and, one day; send their children to schools, inaccessible to such trash in Bohemia. For the first time since the seventeenth century when Protestant bibles printed by the Moravian Brethren in exile were smuggled into Bohemia, Czech-American papers were imported clandestinely and read in private. Czech exiles joined the French—and after the debacle of France, the British army and air force—and fought under the Union Jack in the Battle of Britain, in North Africa, and after the invasion of France in 1944, in Normandy. The Czech soldiers of the Union Army were the first Czechs since the Thirty Years War who fought for a just cause, even though in a foreign country.
