Radola Gajda, born as Rudolf Geidl (14 February 1892 – 15 April 1948) was a Czech military commander and politician.

[1] Following the collapse of the Montenegrin Army in 1916, Gajda escaped into Russia where he joined a Serbian battalion as a physician.

At the end of 1916 the battalion was destroyed and Gajda joined the Czechoslovak Legions (30 January 1917) as a staff captain.

Aggressive tactics, sometimes against the orders of his superiors, helped to defeat the Bolshevik forces and connect all units of the Legion.

This contributed to his conflict with Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk,[3] who wanted the Legions to stay neutral in the Russian Civil War.

The most successful operation was the capture of Perm (24 December 1918) where the Legion took 20,000 prisoners and seized 5,000 railway cars, 60 cannon, 1,000 machine guns and the fleet frozen in the Kama River.

After involving himself in the unsuccessful mutiny of Esers against Kolchak (17 November 1919) he escaped from Siberia and sailed to Europe.

[citation needed] Under pressure from president Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk Gajda was forced to retire, because he had publicly shown himself sympathetic to Italian fascism.

At this time, the NOF had a strong anti-German orientation, supported a military buildup and favored war with Nazi Germany over the Sudetenland.

(After the Munich Agreement Gajda, as a gesture of defiance, returned all French and British honors and medals.)

He also became active in the newly established Party of National Unity (Czech: Strana národní jednoty).

These amateurish coups ended in fiasco and several days later the remaining Czech lands were occupied by Nazi Germany.

Gajda's guilt was far from clear and the resulting sentence of two years allowed him to leave prison shortly thereafter.