Tungsten Airdrop

A six-man airdrop led by Josef Otisk landed on the night of September 14, 1944 near Morávka in the Beskydy Mountains, in the area of the villages of Nytrová and Kotly. Its task was to carry out sabotage and organize partisan activity on the Moravian-Slovak border. CSM Karel Svoboda was captured by the Gestapo five days later and imprisoned in the Flossenbürg concentration camp until the end of the war. The others gathered in the area of the village of Mečová and, in early October 1944, they established cooperation with the 1st Czechoslovak Partisan Brigade of Jan Žižka and even managed to contact the Council of Three. On October 19, 1944, on his way to a meeting with its representative, the paratrooper Josef Bierský was murdered by the informer Stanislav Kotačka and robbed of the money he was supposed to hand over at the meeting As the partisan unit became the target of other informers, Tungsten moved to South Moravia, where he managed to form a partisan unit and successfully sabotage enemy supplies in the first months of 1945.