OPERATION DAYBREAK
August 2009 marked the release of Quentin Tarantino’s recent movie “The Inglorious Basterds” (pardon my language). This is a movie that makes use of Nazi-occupied Europe during World War Two as a backdrop. Well before its release, the movie drew fire and controversy. Aside from examining this movie, I will also examine certain other war movies and the actual war itself. I will try to compare the aforementioned to the movie itself.
We looked at Quentin Tarantino’s recent movie The Inglorious Basterds and the 1978 war movie from which it was supposedly inspired from. In the past, there had been several war movies, both fiction and non-fiction, depicting a handful of Allied soldiers conducting clandestine operations deep inside enemy territory. Unlike that Tarantino movie, these operatives did not kill the enemy by caving in their heads with a baseball bat or taking scalps.
May 1942 in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia, seven Czech expatriates conducted an assassination attempt on a top Nazi who was the governor general in Prague. The catch was that this was not a work of fiction. This actually happened and was the basis for two movies chronicling the event. There was nothing Hollywood about it and there was no happy ending either.
The mission itself was to kill a top Nazi named Reinhard Heydrich. The reasons behind the mission were to demonstrate to the Europeans under Nazi oppression that the Nazis were not unstoppable or immune. One of the other more pragmatic reasons was because it was believed that Heydrich was a likely successor to Hitler, had he died.
Around 1940, many Czechs, Dutch, Polish, Norwegians, and French nationals had fled their respected countries and went to England to continue the fight against the Nazis. Although many had served in newly formed regular units/squadrons within the British armed forces, some had volunteered to conduct clandestine operations within their occupied homelands. This is where the seven Czech expatriates (there were actually eight of them) come in.
The expatriates were all volunteers and they were tasked in formulating the best opportunity to take out Heydrich. Despite the fact that the ambush had gone awry, the objective was successful and Heydrich died as an end result. Unfortunately, the Nazis were enraged and conducted a reprisal by destroying the Czech village of Ledice and executing many of the people living there. It did not stop there. Meanwhile, seven of the operatives were hiding in a church in Prague, waiting to make their trip back to England. Unfortunately, the other operative betrayed them to the Nazis and a long gun battle at the Church ensued. The expatriates were either killed by the Germans or they killed themselves, rather than to be captured alive.
The whole story was the basis for two movies. The 1964 post-war Czech made a movie titled Atentat (The Assassination). That movie was in black and white. Then there was the 1975 movie Operation Daybreak. The movie was incorrectly referred to as a Hollywood movie, when it was actually a British movie. The reason for the confusion was that it starred American actor Timothy Bottoms and the movie was distributed internationally by Warner Brothers. What was probably unusual about the movie was that it was filmed behind the Iron Curtain (1945-1991) in Czechoslovakia. Back then, it was not easy to film a movie in the Eastern Bloc. Probably the only goof in the movie was the shoot-out at the Church. The number of Germans killed was exaggerated by the dozens. The actual number of Germans killed was at 14. There was even a depiction of the operatives taking out a German tank with a bazooka. This never happened in the actual shoot-out.
Nonetheless, both movies stayed close to the actual event. Unlike Tarantino’s take on World War Two, this was the real thing and there was no happy ending. I would like to see Brad Pitt and his costars trade places with those seven expatriates. The Germans would easily make short work of those guys.
Three final footnotes: The village of Ledice was never really obliterated. Many countries, including the U.S., had towns named after Ledice in memory of the people executed. This was their way of standing up to Hitler. The actual village was rebuilt after the war. The church in Prague is still standing today and has a special memorial where the remaining expatriates died. The 1975 movie was originally available on video. The official DVD release, if it ever occurred, remains to be seen.
