Thousands of Czechs joined U.S. veterans Saturday for a sun-kissed streetfest in the first celebration ever of the liberation of this beer-brewing city by American troops in World War II. Pubs were turned into imitations of Wild West saloons, and youths with American Army paraphernalia rode the streets on vintage Harley-Davidson motorcycles inherited from their parents. Up to 150,000 visitors were expected to descend on Pilsen, a city of 130,000, on Sunday, when President Vaclav Havel and U.S. Ambassador Shirley Temple Black were to preside over the close of the two-day celebration. Gen. George C. Patton's 3rd Army liberated Pilsen on May 6, 1945, just three days before World War II ended in Prague. By agreement with the Soviets, American troops came to a halt at the demarcation line cutting southwest through Czech territory, leaving the Red Army to conquer the Czechoslovak capital. ``Boy, everybody wanted to go on to Prague and get it over with,'' said Cpl. Ross Johnston, 75, an attorney from Zanesville, Ohio. ``But we had to stop here, wait for two weeks and then we were pulled out.'' The Communists barred any commemoration of the U.S. liberation of about 3,600 miles of Czechoslovak territory and marked May 5 as a day of liberation by Soviet troops. Six months after Czechoslovakia's peaceful revolution in December, however, the atmosphere in this grim industrial city had changed remarkably. American flags adorned the former bastions of Communist officials, and scores of U.S. veterans were in town for the celebration. Tens of thousands of people turned out Saturday morning to see the ceremonial inauguration of a monument to the 2nd Infantry Divison on Pilsen's downtown Republic Square. Those who lived long enough to see the return of Patton's men still remember the postwar atmosphere. ``It felt so right that our town was freed from the Nazis by a western army,'' Frantisek Kotva, a pensioner, mused over a mug of the city's famous beer. ``We all loved the GIs, but then we had to forget about them for a long time,'' he said, alluding to the four decades of Communist suppression that followed. Elsewhere in Czechoslovakia, the occasion was marked with quieter ceremonies. Ambassador Temple Black joined Jan Urban, the leader of the Civic Forum movement that led the revolution against the Communists, at the unveiling of a memorial to the U.S. Army in Vitejovice, about 70 miles southwest of Prague. A similar plaque was unveiled in the nearby town of Chodov. In Lipnik and Bevcou, crowds gathered to remember Martin Zeberski, a U.S. pilot killed there in August 1944. Havel and Temple Black will lead Sunday's festivities in Pilsen, which were to begin with a morning ceremony at the demarcation line and end with a ``country ball.'' ``I've been to several similar events, but this is much bigger than any of us expected,'' Johnston said. ``If the very president of the United States came here in person, he could not be shown more courtesy and respect than we were.''
