World: RUSSIANS GO HOME!

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Then, TIME Correspondents Peter Forbath and Friedel Ungeheuer reported from Prague, the Czechoslovaks' mood began to change. Mobs of youths mounted squat tanks, forcing their crews to disappear inside the hatch. Like elephant trunks swatting at flies, their gun turrets swung around eerily in an effort to knock off the screaming, chanting Czechoslovaks, who also bombarded the tanks with bricks, painted their flanks with swastikas, and dumped garbage on their hot engine covers to create a stench. Daring youths in Prague and Bratislava even charged the tanks and set a few afire with flaming pieces of carpet and bottles of gasoline. In response, the tanks chased the youths into alleys and side streets with volleys of machine-gun fire. One tank retaliated by blasting away at the facade of the National Museum in Prague.

Soaked in Blood. Though the Russians had obviously been ordered to shoot only if seriously provoked, they had also been told not to brook any serious challenge to their authority in the streets. In Brno, an industrial city in Moravia, Soviet troops opened fire on a jeering worker and killed him. In Prague, a Soviet tank blasted a truckload of workers with machine-gun fire, blowing off the head of one and killing three others. A middle-aged man and his wife carrying a Czechoslovak flag jumped a Soviet paratrooper near the Central Committee building in Prague. Another paratrooper quickly turned and shot the man to death; his blood soaked the flag, which was later passed among crowds of street protesters as a symbol of Russian brutality and Czechoslovak heroism.

The only pitched battle in the first hours of occupation occurred when Russian troops tried to invest the offices of Radio Prague. About 40 staff members were barricaded inside, and snipers fired from the perches in and around the building. Three municipal bus drivers placed their vehicles at the corner of Italian and Vinohradska streets, near the Radio Prague building, as barriers to keep Soviet tanks from getting near the building. Street crowds watching the "battle managed to drag two giant steel derricks in the path of the tanks as well. Youths lobbed Molotov cocktails at the armor stalled along the street.

Finally, the tanks clanked over the obstacles, crunching them out of the way and moving within short range of the building. Paratroops darted inside and the battle was over. The station, which had been calling for support of the legal government, signed off by playing the national anthem, but came back on the air a short while later, transmitting from a secret studio. Flames poured not only from the Radio Prague office but also from other buildings along Vinohradska. In a scene recalling fiercer battles in the streets of Buda pest in 1956, a Russian tank and two armored ammunition carriers burned in the streets.