Otto Smik DFC (20 January 1922 – 28 November 1944) was a Czechoslovak pilot who became a fighter ace in the Royal Air Force. He joined the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve in July 1940 and was in training until the end of 1942. Between March 1943 and June 1944 he shot down 13 Luftwaffe fighter aircraft probably shot down one more and shared in the shooting down of two others. In July 1944 he shot down three V-1 flying bombs.
Smik was born in the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic to a Slovak father and a Russian mother. When he was 12 the Smik family moved to Slovakia. He was the highest-scoring Slovak fighter ace in the RAF.
In October 1944 Smik survived being shot down behind enemy lines in the Netherlands, successfully evaded capture and returned to Allied-held territory. In November 1944 the RAF promoted him to Squadron Leader and put him in command of No. 312 (Czechoslovak) Squadron RAF. On 28 November he was shot down again over the German-held territory in the Netherlands and was killed.
Early life
Smik was born in Borjomi, a spa town in the Georgian SSSR. His father Rudolf Smik was a Slovak from Tisovec who had served in the Royal Hungarian Honvéd in the First World War, been captured by the Imperial Russian Army and interned at Borjomi as a prisoner of war.
Smik's mother Antonina (née Davydova) was the daughter of a Russian army officer who had guarded Rudolf Smik. After the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk Rudolf and Antonina were married and the couple lived in Borjomi in the briefly-independent Democratic Republic of Georgia, which in 1921 was taken over by the Bolsheviks and became part of the Soviet Union in 1922.
Antonina bore Rudolf Smik three sons, of whom Otto was the second. Smik grew up fluent in Russian and Georgian and with some knowledge of Hungarian. (Tisovec had been in the Hungarian part of Austria-Hungary when his father lived there.) In 1934 the Smik family moved to Czechoslovakia, initially to Hájniky near Sliač in central Slovakia and then to Bratislava.
Smik learnt Slovak, which he spoke with a Russian accent. He also learnt English. As a child his hobby was aeromodelling. As a teenager he became a glider pilot, and by the age of 17 he had completed 22 flying hours. From 1937 to 1939 he trained at a private business school. He then got a job as a clerk in the head office of a power station in Bratislava.
Battle of France
On 15 March 1939 Nazi Germany partitioned the Second Czechoslovak Republic. Bratislava remained the capital of the Slovak Republic, which became a client state of Germany. Smik decided to escape to France to fight Germany. On 18 March 1940 he crossed illegally into Hungary, planning to reach the French Consulate in Budapest. Hungarian authorities arrested him and detained him in Toloncház prison, but was soon released.
Smik obtained a false passport and joined 12 other Czechoslovak refugees. People smugglers got them into Yugoslavia by helping them to cross the River Drava near Terezino Polje in Sava Banovina. They reached Zagreb, where they joined a larger group of Czechoslovak refugees. The group travelled through Bulgaria to Thessaloniki in Greece, whence they went by train to Istanbul in Turkey. There they crossed the Bosphorus and continued by train to Beirut in French-ruled Lebanon. There they embarked on the Messageries Maritimes passenger ship Mariette Pacha which took them to Marseille in France.
By now Germany had conquered the Netherlands and Belgium and reached the River Somme in northern France. Smik and his compatriots disembarked in Marseille in the south of France just as Operation Dynamo was evacuating encircled British, French and Belgian troops from Dunkirk in the north.
On 3 June 1940 Smik joined the Czechoslovak Army, which the Czechoslovak government-in-exile had reconstituted in France since October 1939. He was posted to a Czechoslovak training unit in Agde on the coast of Languedoc, where he applied to transfer to the Czechoslovak Air Force group in the French Armée de l'Air.
But the Armée de l'Air was now fighting the Luftwaffes increasing air supremacy and had no spare resources to train any more Czechoslovak recruits. On 5 June German forces launched Fall Rot to advance west and south from the Somme, and on 22 June France capitulated. Czechoslovaks based in Agde evacuated west to Vendres, where on 24 June the Elder Dempster Lines ship Apapa rescued them. The ship brought them to Liverpool in England on 7 July.