Matt Konop

• Comment: The added references help, but the entire lead is still unsourced. Please heed the previous reviewers advice and remove content that you are not able to source. Please make sure you completely address all previous reviewers concerns before submitting again. Seek help at the TeaHouse or on IRC if you need more help. As LaMona pointed out, this is obviously heartfelt and genuine, please stick with it and seek the help you need to complete this! Chrisw80 (talk) 05:04, 27 February 2016 (UTC)

• Comment: You still have major amounts of detail that are not sourced. You added a few sources, changed some wording (which doens't change the need for sources), and removed some of the [citation needed] tags. Unless you can provide sources for every fact in the article, you need to either not submit it here, or cut the article down to the facts that you can source. LaMona (talk) 00:29, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

• Comment: Look, I know that this is a heartfelt and lovingly crafted article about someone, but it cannot be in WP unless ALL facts are sourced to reliable, third-party sources. The information that you found in the basement cannot be the basis for a WP article. I'm sorry, but that's how it is. It's a great story, and you should find some place to publish it that is not WP. LaMona (talk) 00:30, 14 December 2015 (UTC)

• Comment: You obviously know much more about this subject than is found in your sources. For example, Konop is mentioned on only two pages in the Toland book, yet you use that book to support two full paragraphs. Everything in the WP article needs to come from a verifiable source. Where are you getting your information from? If it isn't from reliable sources, it cannot be included in WP. LaMona (talk) 20:01, 17 October 2015 (UTC)

---

Colonel Matt Konop (February 6, 1906 – May 12, 1983) was a United States Army officer during World War II, noted for his unique role in the Battle of the Bulge and in the liberation of Czechoslovakia near the end of the war.

In May 1945, Konop was made the commander of the 2nd Infantry Division advance party that coincidentally liberated the same Czech villages where his grandparents had lived before they emigrated to America. During the liberation, news spread throughout the region that “one of our own” had returned to free the people from six years of occupation by Nazi Germany.

Today, a bronze plaque of Konop is mounted on the Hruska building in the main square of Domažlice, in the Czech Republic, where he parked his jeep on May 4, 1945, and received a hero’s welcome in the closing days of the war.

Early Life

Konop was born in Stangelville, Wisconsin, twenty miles southeast of Green Bay in Kewaunee County. His grandparents were peasants who had emigrated to Wisconsin in the late 1860s from the Chodsko region in southern Bohemia, in what is now the Czech Republic. They joined an enclave of other Czech immigrants amidst the patchwork of German, Belgian, Irish, and other Western Europeans who were transforming the old growth white pine forest of northeastern Wisconsin into dairy farms.. Konop was raised speaking Czech on the family farm, the oldest of 11 children, and graduated in 1924 from Kewaunee High School.

World War II

In late 1940, Konop received a letter from the U.S. Army strongly encouraging him to enlist full-time as an officer. Konop enlisted and drove with his wife and three small children from Wisconsin to Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas, where he was stationed. He entered with the rank of Captain in the 2nd Infantry Division and had been promoted to Lt. Colonel by the time he joined combat forces for the landing on Omaha Beach on June 7, 1944, the day after D-Day. He was the division’s Commander of Special Troops and the Commandant of the Divisional Command Post for the duration of the war.

Battle of the Bulge

On the morning of December 17, 1944, Konop led a hastily-assembled group of cooks, jeep drivers, and MPs to defend the command post in Wirtzfeld, Belgium, against a German SS Panzer Tank platoon attack. It was the beginning of Germany’s massive surprise offensive known as the Battle of the Bulge. Konop’s Second Infantry Division command post was virtually unguarded, its defense platoon having been reassigned elsewhere by Second Infantry Division Commanding Officer General Walter M. Robertson. The goal of the German offensive was to break through the American line to the Meuse River and then to port city of Antwerp, Belgium, thus separating the Allied armies and reversing months of German losses. At Wirtzfeld, the plan nearly worked. Of the battle for Wirtzfeld, General Walter E. Lauer, Commanding Officer of the 99th Infantry Division said, “The enemy had the keys to success in its hand but didn’t realize it.” Konop led the cooks and drivers of the command post and held off the attack long enough for reinforcements to arrive and divert the German assault. At one point in the battle, German tanks were within 200 yards of the command post.

Czech Liberation

On April 30, 1945, the 2nd Infantry Division was moved under the command of General George S. Patton’s Third Army to partake in the liberation of southern Czechoslovakia. When the division’s commanding general learned of Konop’s ability to speak Czech (the division had no Czech translator), Konop was given the assignment to lead the division’s advance party into the country. With 500 men in his command, he traveled 200 miles behind enemy lines, from Leipzig, Germany, to the southern Bavarian border with Czechoslovakia. On May 2, Konop and his jeep driver entered Czechoslovakia by themselves, and headed to the village of Klenci, which happened to be the former home of his maternal grandmother. In the town, they found a secret meeting of the local resistance and told the regulars, in their language, that his division was coming to free their country. The men burst into a celebration of the news, and the Czechs were amazed that the first US Army officer to tell them they were free spoke their language and had a surname common to the area.

By the time Konop made camp that night at the Benda family house in Klenci, word had spread among the Czechs in the area that they had been “liberated by one of our own.” Two days later, on May 4, Konop entered the district capital city of Domazlice and found banners in the main square in Czech welcoming him as their liberator. As the citizens celebrated the end of the six-year Nazi reign of terror, a group of people in the square recognized Konop, hoisted him upon their shoulders, and paraded him around the main square as a hero who had returned to free his people. Domazlice was officially liberated the next day, on May 5. Celebrations like the raucous one in Domazlice's main square occurred throughout the areas of Czechoslovakia liberated by the Americans over those early days in May, with Czech and American flags hoisted together, and citizens donning their native costumes to greet troops.

On May 6, the division established its command post at its final destination of the war, the Czech city of Pilsen. The city was secured and the 2nd Infantry Division was positioned in the center of town. The 2nd Infantry Division's Indianhead emblem captured the imagination of the Czechs that spring, and today, a replica of the division's Indianhead is the logo of Pilsen’s professional hockey team.

Home life and return to Czechoslovakia

In the fall of 1945, Konop rejoined his wife, Eunice, and their three children in Two Rivers, Wisconsin. He sold insurance and joined the Army Reserves. The couple would have four more children after the war. Konop made two trips back to Czechoslovakia, in 1975 and 1979, while the Czechs were under Soviet totalitarian rule and part of the Eastern Bloc. The last trip he made by himself, where he spent several days in the Domazlice region, speaking in Czech with people about the American liberation in 1945.

Revival and The Accidental Hero

Twenty years after his death, Konop’s family discovered his typewritten autobiography about his time in the war, forgotten in the basement with his personal effects. Konop's grandson, Patrick Dewane, turned his writings into a one-man play titled The Accidental Hero, and incorporated his grandfather's reels of WWII film footage, war souvenirs, and more into the show. In the play, Dewane plays more than a dozen characters, including Konop and himself, sharing the extraordinary string of coincidences in Konop’s war time service, and the astonishment the people of Czechoslovakia felt, and still feel, about the Czech-speaking American hero who returned to his homeland to help free them from the Nazis.

Patrick Dewane, grandson of Matt Konop, performs The Accidental Hero

Since 2010, The Accidental Hero has been performed in more than 100 theaters and locations across the United States, including New York, Rochester, Dallas, the University of Notre Dame, and Minneapolis, MN. Since 2012, Dewane has made annual visits to the Czech Republic in the first week of May, performing the play throughout the country, including Prague, Pilsen, Domazlice, Klatovy and Klenci. Performances in Pilsen, Domazlice, and Klatovy have coincided with those cities' annual traditions of celebrating the American Army’s liberation of the area, events that include townspeople driving American WWII vehicles and dressing in period Army uniforms.

Bronze plaque dedication

On May 5, 2015, a bronze relief plaque reproducing the photo of Konop on the shoulders of the townspeople was installed on the outside of the Hruska building in the main square in Domazlice, and dedicated to Matt Konop’s role in bringing freedom to the area. The plaque's text is in both Czech and English. In Konop’s left hand is his Kodak movie camera.