Battle Flag of the 17th Klement Gottwald Anti-aircraft Battery

After barbaric air raids on civilian targets, the issue of effective anti-aircraft defence became one of the topics that connected the population deep in the hinterland with the war and with the Republican army. While civilians could only see their own fighter planes high in the sky, they were often in personal contact with the crews of anti-aircraft batteries. It is therefore no wonder that anti-aircraft gunners were warmly welcomed by the inhabitants of the cities they defended.

This was the case with the 17th Klement Gottwald Anti-aircraft Battery: the Czechoslovak battery formed within the International Brigades at the very beginning of 1937, named after the then General Secretary of the Czechoslovak Communist Party. The volunteers who had undergone training in the interwar Czechoslovak army or elsewhere, either directly with anti-aircraft guns or at least with field artillery, were specially selected. Thanks to their previous experience, training could be reduced to the bare minimum, and the battery, armed with relatively modern guns supplied by the Soviet Union, left for the front at Jarama as soon as in February 1937.

The battery gained its greatest fame in the spring of 1938, when it was deployed to protect an important metallurgical plant Altos Hornos de Vizcaya, S.A. in the town of Sagunto near Valencia. There, the Czechoslovak gunners defended the town in direct combat cooperation with Spanish anti-aircraft and coastal artillery batteries. As a token of appreciation and gratitude, the plant's employees presented the Czechoslovak battery with a battle flag, shown here, which is kept in the Military Museum in Prague.  

As a part of general memory of the Spanish Civil War, the memory of the Czechoslovak battery is still alive in Sagunto today. The locals named a street after it, made a copy of the battle flag, and commemorate its involvement in the defence of the city on various occasions. Several ruined remains of concrete anti-aircraft- and coastal gun emplacements have been preserved in the city, representing a unique memorial to an intense time of international cooperation.

ZM