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Target for Tonight was carefully packaged propaganda designed to bolster morale by showing how the RAF was inflicting major damage on German war industries. But it also reinforced wartime needs to ensure that everyone had a part to play in securing victory, and offered something new and quintessentially British: a new cinematic form, the story-documentary: a prototype for realist film. Within the wider narrative of the work of Bomber Command, was the story of a single bomber on a single mission. The dialogue was authentic, the personnel were serving airmen who had carried out such missions and would do so in the future (sadly, most of those featured in the crew would later be killed on active service). The filming took place at RAF Mildenhall, using service machines; only the aircraft interior scenes were shot on the sound stage at Denham Studios. By and large it was an authentic picture of Bomber Command at war. Yet, at the same time, it employed the narrative mode and melodramatic devices to draw the spectator into the unfolding narrative, and we share the drama, excitement and apprehension of the crew. As an attempt to create a new type of realistic film it succeeded far more than could have been anticipated and inspired a number of other story documentaries produced by the MOI: most notably Coastal Command (1942), about the RAF's contribution to winning the Battle of the Atlantic; I Was a Fireman (1943), the Auxiliary Fire Service during the Blitz, and Western Approaches (1944), dealing with the Merchant Navy. It was equally influential on subsequent feature films which adopted the documentary approach - The Gentle Sex (1943) and The Way Ahead (1945), for example, and in the long term contributed to the development of realism in British film. Yet its very success depended upon a major distortion of reality - suggesting that the RAF could locate targets deep inside Germany, bomb them with precision and avoid causing civilian casualties. In so doing created a particular and enduring image of the RAF's bomber offensive that was less than truthful, and quite at odds with its claim for realism.

From June 1940, the RAF had prioritised targets for its night bombing campaign: oil production and storage facilities, aircraft factories, railway junctions and other heavy industrial centres. The RAF was careful to emphasise that these were legitimate military targets - thus drawing a distinction between their bombing raids and the indiscriminate bombing campaign of the Luftwaffe, which clearly targeted civilians in urban centres in order to undermine British morale. The RAF claimed its own attacks were accurate and were causing considerable damage to the German war effort, but not civilians. Target for Tonight provided explicit visual evidence that supported the claim that bomber crews were capable of locating and destroying military targets deep inside Germany at night. In reality, during the early years of the war, it was difficult for bombers to locate their targets let alone bomb them with any precision. Quite simply the RAF lacked the navigational aids, bombsights or training that would allow them to do so.

On March 19 1940, for example, during the first night raid of the war, fifty bombers were detailed to bomb the German seaplane base at Hornum on the Isle of Sylt. On their return, the crews reported that they had located the target and caused considerable damage hangers, workshops and other buildings. A photo- reconnaissance mission over the base later revealed little evidence of this, while the Luftwaffe reported only minor damage to some of its aircraft.Clearly, then, whatever the RAF crews believed they had destroyed, it certainly wasn't Hornum. In August 1941, a Cabinet Secretariat survey based upon photographic evidence revealed that one-third of all bombers did not attack the right target, and of those that did, only one-third bombed within five miles of their aiming point. Yet in films that subsequently dealt with the bomber offensive, Target provided the model, and in commercial feature films like One of Our Aircraft is Missing (1941) and Flying Fortress (1942), we see only the image of successful raids and the precision bombing of purely military targets. Clearly, wartime audiences could not be told of such failures, nor of the heavy losses incurred by RAF without seriously damaging morale. Consequently, Target for Tonight, for all its intended veracity to represent the bombing of Germany was only able to tell part of the story. But what is curious is that even in post-war films there was little attempt to set the record straight and admit the difficulties the RAF encountered.


The enormously successful Dam Busters (1955), the best known of the post war films about Bomber Command, is remarkably similar in structure to Target for Tonight. Both deal with the planning, preparation and execution of a raid against a specific target - in this case the Eder, Mohne and Sorpe Dams that supplied power to the industry of the Ruhr. While it cannot be denied that the accurate bombing of the dams, in 1943, was a remarkable feat of precision bombing, it should be noted that 617 Squadron, the unit responsible for the raid, was an elite group chosen from the best RAF crews available and created for this single operation. It should also be pointed out, that the damage to the dams had less effect on German production than had been expected and that RAF losses were high - four fifths of the aircraft attacking the Sorpe Dam were lost.


Of the other films dealing with the bomber offensive - Appointment in London (1952), 633 Squadron (1964) and Mosquito Squadron (1967), all deal with precision attacks on specifically military targets, thus avoiding any suggestion that the RAF used indiscriminate bombing of enemy cities. In fact, considering the endurance and heroism of RAF bomber crews and their contribution to the final victory, it is surprising that so few feature films have been made about their activities. The most likely explanation for this is the moral doubt about aerial bombardment which had emerged during the war itself and which was compounded by morally dubious raids such as the attack on Dresden in the spring of 1945.22

 

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NOTES AND REFERENCES:


22. On later RAF films see, Mackenzie, British War Films, and Michael Paris, From the Wright Brother to Top Gun: Aviation, Nationalism and Popular Cinema (Manchester University Press, 1995).