1975 vs 2016


Saw both versions, and they are vastly different.

My question is, which one is the more authentic/realistic one from what happend?

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They both have different parts right.
Operation daybreak is more accurate about their landing and getting to Prague (although they didn't kill any Germans that morning). They also didn't have a firefight with 2 Czechs or drive themselves to Prague.
Anthropoid has the ending correct with Jan dying in the first part of the assault and Josef dying in the crypt but they didn't start to try tunnelling till the firefight started., they would have been heard by passers by otherwise
Also Kurda was never a part of anthropoid. He was dropped later as part of another group called outdistance if I remember right.
They also kept their mission secret and the resistance worked it out by seeing what recce work they did. They were actually under orders to not contact the resistance as London was not sure how reliable they were but this would have meant even surviving was impossible.
It is worth remembering that operation daybreak was taken directly from the Alan Burgess book "seven men at daybreak" which is a novel based on what research Burgess could do during the Cold War and Anthropoid is based on the Callum McDonald book "the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich". Which is a factual book written with access to all the facts and declassified records.

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Yes, I did note that in Anthropoid, they did reference the secret mission aspect a little when Jan and Josef began surveillance and work with the young women.

They kept the target of the mission a secret as long as they could it seemed. They didn't tell people right away what they were actually doing there.

We saw the others express shock when they found out. And the young women seemed to be the last to find out--long after they'd been recruited blindly.

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They certainly wouldn't (and didn't) tell a group of people who they had never met and couldn't trust what the mission was just because they said they were resistance leaders

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