Pařez, Joe

xxx Joe Stump


"...the plane was quiet, nobody wanted to talk. The tired fighters were resting. Everyone would have preferred to curl up in their little ball to sleep away all the horror that was only now beginning to haunt us..."
I unlock the mailbox at the door of our house and a colorful envelope of airmail flies to the ground. I eagerly pick it up and inspect it, to my amazement it was sent from far away Port Elizabeth, South Africa. It has flown halfway around the world to bring the dramatic story of another of the heroes who helped write the glorious history of our nation with their lives and blood, a former member of the 311th (Czechoslovak) Bomber Squadron of the RAF, a deck gunner, later a radio operator, Joe Parez, written on long patrols over the endless bottomless ocean...
Josef Pařez was born on December 6, 1921 in Litovice in the Prague-West district in the family of a railwayman. After the German army began its occupation of Czechoslovakia, he decided to go abroad. His goal was overseas, but the problem was how to get there. One day he read in the newspaper about a job offer in Germany. He applied and got a travel permit to Hanover. He erased the name of his destination and changed it to Hamburg, as it was a place where there was a good chance of getting on an ocean liner.
In Hamburg he managed, despite language difficulties, to get into the office of the shipping company Hapag. He asked the local security guards to help him apply for a job on the ship. He was very lucky because the man he applied to was from Chomutov and spoke Czech very well. He showed him to the office and translated from and into German. He was accepted, sent to the doctor the next day to undergo the obligatory examinations and then received his ship's book. The next day he was already aboard the old steamer S.S. Sesostris. As a fire lookout he was to look after the ship's coal stores all the way, which was very hard and tiring work. The sea was very rough, especially at night in the Channel area. After a week of sailing, again at night, the ship stopped. What was Stump's dismay when he learned the reason. It was an encounter with a German submarine, according to the inscription on the side of the captain's bridge, a U-88, which had loaded something from the ship and disappeared again. The ship then continued on, following the route Mexico, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Panama, Columbia and Venezuela...
In the Mexican port of Vera Cruz, Stump wanted to abandon ship. However, it was impossible, none of the crew was allowed to leave the deck. The same was true in other places. In Venezuela, he even had thoughts of jumping off the anchored boat into the sea and swimming to shore. But he could hardly have succeeded, for the sea in those parts was full of sharks. Disappointment reached its peak when the ship started its return journey to Germany...
Two weeks later, the war began. The captain ordered the German flag to be taken down from the mast and the Finnish flag put up instead. He had the ship turned around again and headed for a neutral country. He chose Venezuela again, the port of Puerto Canello. The ship was seized and all the German sailors were interned in prison camps. After a few days, the crew learned of a naval battle and the destruction of the German pocket battleship Admiral Graff Spee off the port of La Plata in Uruguay.
Josef Pařez was released as a Czechoslovakian and was free to move wherever he pleased. This was great, of course, but the trouble was that he was absolutely destitute, without food, without money, living only on what people gave him. He slept on the shore on the lid of a big box with the inscription "Made in Czechoslovakia", which after such a long time away from home was very touching for him, despite all the difficulties, the swarms of hungry mosquitoes, hunger and misery. It is hard to imagine such a situation today...
The next day an employee of the American shipping company came to him and asked if the Czechoslovakian was from a German ship. Then he gave him some money and bought a bus ticket to the capital Caracas. He added a cover letter for the British consulate staff, as there was no Czechoslovak consulate in Venezuela at that time. The British representatives found him accommodation, provided him with some clothes and money for food. More importantly, they arranged for him to have a Czechoslovak passport issued at the embassy in Washington. When the passport was handed over, Pařez was also given a letter of recommendation for the captain of a British tanker anchored in Curacao harbor on Dutch Island in the Dutch West Indies. The year was 1940...
On arrival at Dutch Island, he was immediately accepted by the captain, received his British Navy uniform and was assigned to the crew as a gunner. They then sailed to Halifax, Canada, to be included in a convoy of forty ships bound for England with supplies. By this time, however, the German U-boat blockade was in full force. Twenty of the forty ships were torpedoed and sunk, a fiery inferno. Those who did not perish on board had little chance of survival in the icy waters of the North Sea. In fact, virtually none...
On arrival in England he was posted to the Czechoslovak Army, whose headquarters were in Leamington Spa. After a few months, he joined the air force. He was sent first to a training course for deck gunners in Evanton, Scotland. After graduating, he was sent to the 311th (Czechoslovak) Bombardment Squadron at Beaulieu and assigned to Jan Irving's crew, with whom he took part in the Battle of the South Atlantic. After completing several operations, he was sent to the Radio Operators Course at Cranwell. He subsequently underwent operational training with 111. OTU in the Bahamas. On his return to England, he was sent to a transit camp at South End-on-Sea , which at that time housed, among others, Czechoslovak tankers. By the time he was reassigned to an operational unit, the war had ended...
The other fates of Josef Parez are not without interest. After the war he did not return to his native Czechoslovakia, but went overseas again, to Venezuela, where he remained until his demobilisation in 1946. This was in charge of the Czechoslovak consul in Bogotá, Mr. Modrák. He took a job with La Linea Aero Postal Venezuela, and later with the United Geophysical Company (Seismograph) of Pasadena, California, owned by one Edgar J. Hoover (later director of the FBI). Mr. Stump's place of employment became Maracaibo on the Colombian-Venezuelan border.
In 1950 Joe Parez returned to the UK, from where he went to South Africa in 1962. He still lives in Port Elizabeth, South Africa...
And a funny story at the end. During his visit to Prague in late May/June 2002, Joe Parez met some of his fighting comrades at the Duo Hotel in Prague. Among others, Colonel Hofrichter, Colonel Novak, Gen. Nedved and Gen. Hartman. That despite their great age these gentlemen retained a great optimism and sense of humour is evidenced by the conversation that took place between Messrs Parez (JP) and Novak (JN)...:


JP: "Once during a patrol, as a side gunner, I opened fire on "enemy fighters". But it was a British Mosquito..."
JN: "I think it was more likely to have been Beaufighters and not Mosquitos. You weren't very good at aircraft recognition, were you?"
JP: "I'm not sure, they were too far away..."
JN: "Then why did you shoot at them if they were so far away and you couldn't hit them? I'm pretty lucky I was on a different crew..."

I admittedly didn't know much about Joe Stump until now. Just a little bit from Honza and the internet, some basic stuff from books. I was about to contact him and ask for an autographed photo, just wanted to make sure his address was still valid. Well, suddenly the letter. I was surprised, but everything soon became clear. In my collecting and searching efforts I was replaced by our mutual friend, Colonel Jarda Novak from Australia...
URL : https://www.valka.cz/Parez-Joe-t19452#72457 Version : 0
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