Profiles in History
Bohumil “Barney” Stejskal (1912–2004)
A load-bearing wall of Bohemia
Every community has a few people who quietly become its load-bearing walls — the names that turn up again and again behind the firehouse, the school board, the ambulance corps, the church hall. In Bohemia, that name belongs to Bohumil “Barney” Stejskal.
Across a life that stretched nearly the length of the twentieth century, Barney was a hotelier, a wartime Seabee who served thirty-two straight months in the Pacific, an undefeated firematic racer, a founding member of our ambulance company, an 18-year school board veteran, and one of the founders of this very Society. To understand him is to watch a Czech immigrant village reinvent itself, again and again, and refuse to disappear.
Much of what follows — especially the war years — comes from a recorded interview Barney gave on 10 August 1990, at the age of 78, to his son-in-law Bill Munch, along with the 33rd Battalion’s postwar history The Log, the battalion’s wartime Yankee Bee newsletter, and Barney’s own annotated map of the Pacific. His words appear here as he spoke them, forty-five years after the fact.
Industry Shift
A Czech village in transition
Barney was born in New York City on 16 January 1912, the son of Czech immigrants. The family came out to Bohemia at a moment of crisis. The hamlet had been built by Czech families fleeing the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and for decades its economy ran on a single skilled trade: cigar-making. By 1930, every one of the village’s primary cigar factories had closed, undone by the Depression and by the new automated machinery that made hand-rolling obsolete. The Huml factory burned in 1931. Bohemia needed a new way to sustain itself — and the Stejskal family was about to provide one.
1928
The Central Hotel: A fortress of home
In 1928, the Stejskals purchased a prominent property on Smithtown Avenue that had passed through several hands. Under the family, it was reborn as the Central Hotel, and for the next quarter-century it became the beating heart of Czech-American life on Long Island.
The Central Hotel became a destination for Czech immigrants from New York City, offering traditional Sunday dinners like pečená kachna (roast duck) and vepřo-knedlo-zelo. It served as the village nerve center — a place for hiring, community news, and cultural preservation through Czech-language theater. By the early 1940s, Barney himself was listed as proprietor, running a kitchen, a bar, a payroll, and a supply chain.
That last detail would decide the shape of his war.
July 1942
“We Build, We Fight”
The Seabees were born out of Pearl Harbor. Under international law, civilian construction workers in a combat zone could not fight back; if they resisted, they could be executed as guerrillas. Their formation was requested on 28 December 1941 and authorized on 5 March 1942: uniformed Naval Construction Battalions — “C.B.” — who could build an airstrip and defend it with the same set of hands. Their mottoes said it plainly: “We Build, We Fight” and “Can Do!”
Barney enlisted in July 1942, at thirty years old, and began active duty on 1 September 1942. On 21 October 1942 he joined the 33rd U.S. Naval Construction Battalion — 1,000 enlisted men and 25 officers — just three days after the battalion was entered into Naval records. His years of running a hotel kitchen and stockroom earned him the rating he would hold for the rest of the war: Chief Storekeeper (CSK), responsible for feeding and supplying a thousand men on islands where nothing grew and nothing arrived on schedule.
“I enlisted in the Seabees, and went on active duty on September the first, 1942. I never had leave or anything, and didn’t see my family again until May of 1945 when we came back from the Pacific after about 32 months.”
Barney Stejskal, 10 August 1990
December 1942
Forty-three degrees
The 33rd shipped out of Camp Rousseau, Port Hueneme, California, on 18 December 1942, aboard the Dutch vessel S.S. Sommelsdijk. They crossed the equator on 26 December. Late on 31 December, a typhoon caught them, and held them for roughly thirty hours.
“I went to speak to the Captain of the ship to get a chit for food, so our cooks could feed the crew… The Dutch Captain told me that the ship was listing at 43 degrees, and another 2 degrees and we would have been over. The storm swept away all of the life boats. We had 12 by 12 dock timbers on all the hatches which were chained down … they were swept away like they were match sticks… When we were in the holes — I had a crew of 50 men — we had two 10-ton steam rollers broke loose down in the holes… they were bangin’ from one side of the ship to the other. We finally secured them… So my crew and myself really had no time to be scared. It was only the followin’ day, after the Captain told me what actually happened, I felt a little scared at that time.”
Barney Stejskal, 10 August 1990
The captain put the wind at 142 knots and the swells at sixty feet. Then came something worse: spinal meningitis broke out aboard. Barney remembered burying five men at sea; both The Log and his own wartime map record a single meningitis death, and we note the discrepancy rather than resolve it — memory and paperwork rarely agree about a night like that.
They reached Magenta, New Caledonia on 5 January 1943, and sat outside the harbor at Nouméa under a five-day quarantine before transferring to the fast transport U.S.S. Crescent City. A day and a half out of Guadalcanal, they ran into what Barney called a wolf pack of Japanese submarines. The escorting destroyers kept them alive.
1943
Up the Slot — and the Central Hotel #2
The 33rd was attached to the 1st Marine Division and moved north through the chain of islands the men called “the Slot” — Guadalcanal, the Russell Islands, Bougainville, Nissan Island. By Barney’s own map, the battalion reached Guadalcanal on 18 February 1943 and left on 30 March 1943.
“In Guadalcanal, there was no sleep. You were either working, or in the fox hole trying to duck the Japanese bombers. Each succeeding operation became a little tougher as you came closer to Japan.”
Barney Stejskal, 10 August 1990
It was in Guadalcanal that he contracted the malaria that would follow him home for thirty years. His first attack ran a fever of 106.5°F — a degree and a half short of what the doctors called cerebral malaria.
And it was in the Russell Islands, on 3 August 1943, that Barney was photographed grinning in front of a plywood shack he had hand-lettered with two signs: Beer & Draught, Wines & Liquors on the left, Chicken & Duck Dinners Our Specialty on the right. He had named it the “Central Hotel #2.” Six thousand miles from Smithtown Avenue, the Bohemia hotelkeeper had opened a second location.
15 September – 27 November 1944
Peleliu: seventy-two hours that became seventy-three days
The battalion’s last major operation was the invasion of Peleliu, in the Palau group — an island a mile wide and five miles long whose highest point stood 237 feet above the sea. The National Museum of the Marine Corps has called it “the bitterest battle of the war for the Marines.” Roughly 47,500 Americans went against about 10,900 defenders dug into coral. The 1st Marine Division alone took 6,526 casualties, 1,252 of them killed in action.
“Major General Rupertus … stated to all the troops aboard the ships as we were nearing Peleliu that the island would be secured in 72 hours, and the American flag would be raised. Well, he was wrong by a few days. The raising of the American flag took 73 days and NOT 72 hours. The toughest part of that island was a notch called ‘Bloody Nose Ridge.’ … They built hospitals inside of Bloody Nose Ridge with tunnels and small railways. The buildings on Peleliu were 30 inches thick concrete reinforced with steel. Even the projectiles from heavy cruisers lying offshore hit the buildings directly and yet never penetrated that concrete.”
Barney Stejskal, 10 August 1990
A local newspaper account of Barney’s 1945 furlough describes what the Seabees did there: they landed with the Marines and helped evacuate the wounded from the front lines during the first hours of the invasion. American planes were landing on a fighter strip three days after the initial landing; the bomber strip was finished three days ahead of schedule. Roads were cut, carpenter crews put up camps, and eventually a base hospital rose to take wounded men from other islands.
They did it in heat that has to be read twice. Official accounts put the heat index near 115°F, with Marines falling out from heat exhaustion. Barney’s memory of the thermometer ran higher still:
“On Peleliu, the temperature between 11 AM and 2 PM would reach 134, 135. If it wasn’t for the trade winds, you couldn’t conceivably live on that island. Yet at night, whenever we had a chance to take a short nap, if you didn’t have a blanket wrapped around you, you would have almost froze … because your blood was so thinned out that 92 or 93 degrees felt cold compared to that blazing sun during mid-day.”
Barney Stejskal, 10 August 1990
One quiet reason we can see any of this: cameras were tightly controlled in the battalion, and unofficial photography required a registered permit. But Barney’s close friend R. W. Spencer, Chief Photographer’s Mate, was the man taking the official Navy photographs of the 33rd at work — which is why a Bohemia family ended up holding Navy-stamped images of the fighter operations tower going up on Peleliu on 21 September 1944, and of the road north choked with tanks and Marines an hour before the Ngesebus landing.
Letters
“Maminko, jsem na krásné zelené ostrově”
All mail was censored, and every outgoing letter carried the censor’s stamp. Barney wrote his mother in Czech — on a promise to his commander that he would never write anything of a military nature. He kept that promise exactly once short of perfectly.
“When we were on Nissan Island … the American operation called it ‘Green Island.’ When I wrote the letter to my mom, I wrote to her that ‘I was on a beautiful green island.’ In Czech, it would be: Maminko, jsem na krásné zelené ostrově. … It was not that beautiful!”
Barney Stejskal, 10 August 1990
The language his family had carried out of Bohemia had become, for one letter, a code the U.S. Navy could not read. His own family did not know the letters existed until after his death.
March – April 1945
The voyage home, with 500 prisoners
Only men with twenty months of continuous overseas duty were eligible to rotate home. The 33rd left Peleliu in March 1945 aboard the aging transport President Johnson — a ship of roughly 1900 vintage that limped into San Francisco on 15 April 1945 at four miles an hour, on two of its five boilers. The Log captioned the arrival photograph “A Shipload of Happy Seabees.”
They carried 500 Japanese prisoners of war — 250 put ashore at Guam, 250 at Pearl Harbor. Barney, whose job was feeding people, got to know the only commissioned officer among them, a young man educated at the University of Southern California. Anchored at Ulithi Atoll, where an armada was massing for Okinawa, the prisoners were brought up on the promenade deck for an hour of sun each day, and started pointing and talking among themselves.
“I said to the Lieutenant, ‘What are they saying to themselves? They’re all pointing out at the ships lying out there in the atoll.’ He says, ‘Well, they’re wondering whose ships they are, because the Japanese government told them that the allied fleets were lying at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, all sunk.’ … But they couldn’t believe they were the allied armadas, until he explained to them that they were lied to, to keep them fighting.”
Barney Stejskal, 10 August 1990
Summer 1945
The advice that may have saved his life
After thirty-two months overseas and a 30-day leave — during which he and Elsie Hindla became engaged — Barney reported to Camp Shoemaker, California, a Navy hospital and Seabee receiving and shipping center. As Chief Storekeeper he was put in charge of the base’s warehouses and galleys: 52 warehouses and 27 galleys, under supply officer Captain McDonald.
It was boring work after Peleliu, and at the end of July 1945 Barney asked to ship back out to where the fighting was. Captain McDonald told him to sit down.
“‘You stay at this base. Take my advice. Don’t go out into the Pacific … The reason that I say that is because in my opinion this war will be over within possibly 4 weeks.’ … I don’t think Captain McDonald had an inkling of the atomic bomb, but he apparently knew that something was happening. … I’m glad I took his advice.”
Barney Stejskal, 10 August 1990
On 6 August 1945, the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Barney was honorably discharged on 10 October 1945, after a full commander spent two and a half hours trying to talk him into staying in the Navy. On 27 October 1945, Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal sent him a personal letter commending his record; he kept it for the rest of his life. Two weeks later, on 11 November 1945 — Armistice Day — he married Elsie.
What He Brought Home
Thirty years of fevers
The war did not end for Barney in 1945. The morning after the wedding reception, Elsie had to drive the car out of New York City because her new husband was down with a malaria attack. The recurrences came often for the first four years and continued, gradually weakening, until roughly 1970 — almost thirty years. Alongside malaria came dengue fever, with the same lurch from burning to freezing, and “jungle rot,” treated with a 5% salicylic acid solution he said you wanted to be holding onto something for.
The permanent cost was his hearing. Barney came home with 100% hearing loss in one ear and 90% in the other — nerve and bone damage he attributed to the combination of an overdose of quinine given to break his fevers, the tropical diseases, and years of shelling. He lived with it for the next six decades, and it never once kept him out of a meeting.
Fire & Rescue
Fire Department & Ambulance
Barney gave 66 years to the Bohemia Fire Department. In the 1930s, he was a key member of the legendary “Suicide Squad” firematic racing team, undefeated across Suffolk County for five straight summers. In 1950, he became a charter founder of the Community Ambulance Company, helping raise the $11,000 needed to launch the organization that protects the area to this day.
Legacy of Leadership
Barney served 18 years on the Connetquot Central School District Board of Education, steering the district through explosive suburban growth. The district honored his leadership by naming its main boardroom the Barney Stejskal Boardroom. A founding member of the Bohemia Historical Society, he provided the oral histories that document much of the village’s early life. He also returned, year after year, to the Seabees reunions.
At his 80th birthday party, friends and neighbors took up a collection rather than give gifts. It became the Barney Stejskal Scholarship Fund, and since 1992 it has gone each year to a graduating high school senior headed on to further education — awarded not for grades, but for community service. It is difficult to imagine a criterion that fits the man better.
His legacy is enshrined in the institutions of Bohemia. The village he helped hold together after the cigar factories closed, the men he fed on a listing ship in the South Pacific, the ambulance that still rolls out of the barn — his life remains a testament to what a community can be built out of, and to Bohemia’s evolution from a tight-knit immigrant settlement to a modern suburb.
Sources & Acknowledgements
Quotations are drawn from a recorded interview with Barney Stejskal conducted by his son-in-law Bill Munch on 10 August 1990 on Fire Island, New York, and presented by Mr. Munch in his talk “33rd Seabees Battalion, WWII” (Bath Public Library, Bath, Michigan, 19 May 2025). Additional detail comes from The Log of the 33rd U.S. Naval Construction Battalion; the battalion’s Yankee Bee newsletter (Vol. 1, No. 9, 24 December 1944); Barney’s personal annotated map of the Pacific; the newspaper article “Stejskal Ends 30-Day Furlough” (May 1945); and Jim Moran, Battle of Peleliu, 1944: Three Days that Turned into Three Months (2021). Official Navy photographs of the 33rd on Peleliu and Pavuvu were taken by R. W. Spencer, CPhoM, 33rd U.S.N.C.B. Our thanks to the Stejskal and Munch families.
Note: an earlier version of this article stated that Barney arrived in France in May 1945 and served as a military policeman. The 1990 interview and the battalion record establish that he returned from the Pacific to San Francisco in April–May 1945 and spent the remainder of the war at Camp Shoemaker, California. The text has been corrected.