The RAF raid on the Amiens prison holding so many members of the French resistance has become legend. And some of the usual narrative really MAY be legend.
Here is the meme. The Amiens prison holds more than a hundred members of the resistance. All are doomed to be executed by the Gestapo. The RAF therefore mount an air raid. Some dozen or so fast Mosquito bombers fly at tree top height, blast the walls open, then bomb the barracks of the Nazi guards, and the doomed prisoners flee through the broken walls. The end.
What impresses me about this exceptional series is that it really never just presents the narrative that's already so familiar. Many documentaries about the war, particularly the earlier ones, give us a picture of war as chess game. Two sides battle it out. One side is white. The other side is black. Our side (the white) wins. This mindless model isn't as commonly encountered as it used to be but it's still with us.
Not here, however. What we get is a picture of a generally "good" side and a generally "bad" side but with a lot of confusion, insinuation, and fabrication to make the "good" side look "better", if not "damned near perfect." Life isn't that way. Why should war be? As grown ups we can look horror and error in the face. We don't need fairly tales with happy endings. In the earliest story of Little Red Riding Hood, the wolf eats both Grandma and the girl. Why shouldn't we know about it?
It WAS a daring raid. The Brits pulled off some lulus, like St. Nazaire. And the Mosquitoes DID blow out the walls and destroy the German barracks. And some prisoners DID escape.
But some facts are usually left out of the tale. Two Moquitoes were lost in the raid, including the airplane carrying a national hero, Charles Pickard. About fifty prisoners out of the inmate population were able to get out into the fields, most to be recaptured shortly. There is no evidence that any of them were scheduled to be executed. The prison complex itself was a shambles, many of the prisoners killed during the bombing.
None of that detracts from the bravery and sacrifice of the men who flew the raid. For me, anyway, the irony that lurks behind the popular story just enhances their gallantry. We should all have that kind of courage, or even a small part of it, when we paint our narrative histories. Wyeth or Eakins, say, not "Big Eye" art.