THE FIGHTER pilot Frantisek Perina was one of the formidable group of exiled Czechoslovak and Polish pilots who provided crucial support for the French and British air forces during the dark days of 1940. Perina’s success was especially marked during the Battle of France, where he was credited with more than ten “kills”, and was wounded after heroically confronting a large group of German fighters. As France fell, he escaped to Britain to serve with the RAF.

After the war and his return to Czechoslovakia, he was forced into exile again, as the communist regime which seized power in Prague began to persecute former pilots associated with the “imperialist” West. But after decades back in Britain and in North America, Perina returned to live in the Czech Republic in the 1990s, once communist rule had ended. He and other surviving Second World War Czech pilots were finally honoured for their bravery in challenging Nazi rule.

Perina was born in 1911 in a remote farming area of Moravia, and did not visit the nearest large town, Brno, until he was 14. A few years later, however, he saw an air show and was smitten with flying, abandoning his engineering apprenticeship to sign up for the Czechoslovak Air Force. He trained as a fighter pilot, and was a noted performer at international air shows in the 1930s, meeting German pilots who would soon be his opponents in combat. They were, he recalled in an interview with Military History, mostly “gentlemen, not Nazis”.

However, Perina and his colleagues had to watch in frustration as Czechoslovakia’s security was abandoned to Nazism through the Munich agreement transferring the Sudetenland to Germany in 1938 and the German invasion of the remaining Czech lands in 1939.

Perina decided to escape to take up resistance abroad. Two days before leaving in June 1939 he married Anna Klimesova, who was unable to come with him and paid heavily for her loyalty as she was imprisoned by the Nazis during the war. Perina made his way via Poland to the French Foreign Legion, from which he was transferred to the Armée de l’Air as the Second World War began.

When battle was joined in earnest in May 1940, Perina had great success against often overconfident waves of German bombers attacking France. However, when he took on a large formation of German fighters more or less single-handedly he was badly wounded, with 18 fragments of a cannon shell in his leg. He managed to land and make his way to a convent hospital near Paris. But after a few days, as German forces approached, he caught one of the last trains to Paris, and eventually found an airfield with an unattended plane he could fly to Algiers.

From there he reached Britain in August 1940, and was assigned to RAF 312 Squadron, where many other Czech and Slovak pilots were based. Perina’s role in the Battle of Britain was limited as he developed acute appendicitis. But later he was involved in further dogfights escorting RAF bombers, and worked in staff jobs.

On his return to Czechoslovakia in 1945 he was made commander of a gunnery school. But once the communists had taken power in 1948 the former RAF pilots were treated with great suspicion by the Stalinist authorities. Perina had a public confrontation with the head of the secret police and was expelled from the Czechoslovak Air Force. He escaped the fate of many of his former colleagues — who were imprisoned and sent to work in uranium mines — by flying a sports plane with his wife and a friend over the border into West Germany, where they crash-landed near Passau.

Perina made his way back to Britain and rejoined the RAF, where he was an accomplished member of the rifle team. But his opportunities for flying and promotion were now limited, and in the 1950s he and his wife emigrated to Canada. Perina later settled in Los Angeles, working for the Webber Aircraft corporation, and then retired to Las Vegas before the end of communism in Czechoslovakia tempted Perina and his wife back to Prague.

Perina came to symbolise the rediscovery by many Czechs of the history of those who had so resisted Nazism despite their country’s invasion, and who had suffered persecution in the communist era. He was made an honorary major-general and received other state honours.

His wife predeceased him. They had no children.

Frantisek Perina, pilot, was born on April 8, 1911. He died on May 6, 2006, aged 95.