In the race to liberate Prague at the end of World War II, Eugene Fodor won. The founder of the eponymous travel-guide series was a U.S. Army lieutenant and officer of the Office of Strategic Services when he bounced into the Czechoslovak capital with two other Americans in a lone jeep on May 8, 1945, V-E Day. Though Berlin had fallen to the Soviets almost two weeks before, Prague was still something of a no-man's land, with Russian forces hundreds of miles east of the city, American troops stalled just to the west and Czech insurgents battling it out against scattered Nazi diehards.
Fodor and the rest of his groupâ??Sgt. Kurt Taub and Pvt. Nathan Shapiroâ??made it 100 miles through disintegrating German lines armed with only a rifle and a few pistols. Along the way, they managed to depose the pro-Nazi mayor of Karlsbad and pick up a shipment of insulin to deliver to Prague's besieged hospitals.
The soldiers' arrival in the city could have marked the beginning of a free and prosperous postwar future for Czechoslovakia. Instead it was a false dawn; a communist coup d'etat in 1948 left the Czechoslovakians under Moscow's thumb for four decades, until the collapse of the Soviet Union. As Igor Lukes shows in "On the Edge of the Cold War," his engrossing chronicle of the days when Czechoslovakia hung in the balance, the country's place behind the Iron Curtain was anything but foreordained. But the U.S. government's carelessness and indifference to the Czechoslovakians' fate conspired to give an easy victory to the Soviet Union in the embryonic stages of the Cold War. By the time American officials felt roused to act, it was too late. They had already been outfoxed by Stalin, who had a keen appreciation for Bismarck's maxim: Whoever rules Bohemia holds the key to Europe.
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