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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.