16.4. 1943 Poorly navigated raid on Skoda factory

Especially towards the end of the Second World War, the area of the Škodovka factory in Pilsen was the target of bomb attacks. However, on 16 April 1943, a mistake was made and bombs showered the nearby Dobřany, where a psychiatric hospital was located.

The Allied air raids were one of the tactical steps to weaken the German position. Often, unfortunately, at the cost of many civilian lives. One such example is the bombing of Dobřany in the Pilsen region, which took place on the night of 16-17 April 1943. The original target was to be the factory of the Škoda factory. However, the poorly navigated raid ended up bombing the south-eastern part of Dobřany, where the psychiatric hospital was located.

Its appearance was probably one of the things that confused some of the guiding machines. The area of the hospital resembled the factory halls that were to be the original target of the air raid. The next target was a barracks with a Wehrmacht training centre about one kilometre from the hospital. The air raid killed 100 patients, 60 soldiers and 35 civilians. Out of 746 houses, only 200 were left undamaged.

"The tragic mistake was caused by a navigational error of the markers who dropped the illuminating bombs not on Pilsen but in front of it, between the villages of Nová Ves, Lhota u Dobřan and the town of Dobřan. The mistake was most likely caused by the similarity of the Pilsen and Dobřany objects," the journal History and Military Science, published by the Military History Institute, states directly.

The pilots were also probably confused by one of the homing planes that was hit over Plzeň and apparently needed to make an emergency landing. It got as far as Dobřany, where it crashed near the railway station. The air attack on the Skoda factory in Plzeň, scheduled for 16 April 1943, was named Operation Frothblower and was a raid by British Royal Air Force bombers.

"327 Lancaster and Halifax four-engine bombers were sent to carry out the attack. Their crews were experienced units and the tactics of the raid, using tracer and illumination bombs, dropping at the start of the attack, was established and tested at this time," the West Bohemian Historical Record states.

The reason the Allies targeted Skoda is clear. In the pre-World War II era, the military portion of the factory's production was 62 percent. It produced artillery tractors, military trucks, anti-tank guns, cannons, howitzers, mortars, mortars and LT-35 and LT-38 light tanks. After the occupation of Czechoslovakia, the Germans thus acquired one of the most important weapons bases.

"In the spring of 1945, due to the frequent bombing of the German interior, Škoda's production amounted to a full one-third of all armaments supplies to the German army. This was also probably the reason for the otherwise difficult to understand repeated bombing of this factory at the end of the war," write Milan and Roman Plch in their book Where to Go for Military Monuments.

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