''Target for Today'' is a

documentary film A documentary film or documentary is a non-fictional motion-picture intended to "document reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction, education or maintaining a historical record". Bill Nichols has characterized the documentary in te ...

describing the preparation and mounting of a

United States Army Air Forces The United States Army Air Forces (USAAF or AAF) was the major land-based aerial warfare service component of the United States Army and ''de facto'' aerial warfare service branch of the United States during and immediately after World War II ...

raid on East Prussia. It contains much combat footage of

B-17 The Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress is a four-engined heavy bomber developed in the 1930s for the United States Army Air Corps (USAAC). Relatively fast and high-flying for a bomber of its era, the B-17 was used primarily in the European Theater ...

and

B-24 The Consolidated B-24 Liberator is an American heavy bomber, designed by Consolidated Aircraft of San Diego, California. It was known within the company as the Model 32, and some initial production aircraft were laid down as export models des ...

bombers and named for the phrase used at briefings before air raids. The October 1943 footage was filmed during Eighth Air Force attacks on

Nazi Germany Nazi Germany (lit. "National Socialist State"), ' (lit. "Nazi State") for short; also ' (lit. "National Socialist Germany") (officially known as the German Reich from 1933 until 1943, and the Greater German Reich from 1943 to 1945) was ...

industrial targets in

Anklam Anklam [], formerly known as Tanglim and Wendenburg, is a town in the Western Pomerania region of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Germany. It is situated on the banks of the Peene river, just 8 km from its mouth in the ''Kleines Haff'', the western ...

, the

22nd Air Base The 22nd Air Base ( pl, 22. Baza Lotnicza) is a Polish Air Force air base east of Malbork, Poland, near the village of Królewo Malborskie. It was officially constituted on 1 January 2001, replacing the disbanded 41st Fighter Aviation Regiment ...

in Marienburg (on the 9th), and

Gdynia Gdynia ( ; ; german: Gdingen (currently), (1939–1945); csb, Gdiniô, , , ) is a city in northern Poland and a seaport on the Baltic Sea coast. With a population of 243,918, it is the 12th-largest city in Poland and the second-largest in th ...

in occupied

Poland Poland, officially the Republic of Poland, is a country in Central Europe. It is divided into 16 administrative provinces called voivodeships, covering an area of . Poland has a population of over 38 million and is the fifth-most populou ...

. Prior to the combat footage, the documentary explains

Operation Pointblank Point-blank range is any distance over which a certain firearm can hit a target without the need to compensate for bullet drop, and can be adjusted over a wide range of distances by sighting in the firearm. If the bullet leaves the barrel paral ...

target selection and depicts planning, briefing, and preparation.

References

External links

* * * 1944 films 1944 documentary films Black-and-white documentary films Documentary films about military aviation Films directed by William Keighley First Motion Picture Unit films United States government films World War II aviation films American documentary films 1940s English-language films 1940s American films {{WWII-documentary-film-stub

See also

References

External links