I’ve been reading an analysis written by Belyn Rodgers of Edward Murrow’s Orchestrated Hell.  The radio piece in question was an influential report delivered in 1943 by reporter and journalist Edward R. Murrow.  As a piece of influential rhetoric and effective storytelling the report is interesting to listen to in its own right, but it is also of historical importance due to the influence it had on the allied nations and Americans in particular.

But I digress.  Belyn’s analysis was quite good, in the humble eyes of this amateur, but he (I assume Belyn was a he?) did miss something of importance.  And since I have no better medium with which to voice my opinion, it gets a blog entry.

In the radio broadcast, Murrow uses the metaphor that,

“Berlin was a kind of orchestrated hell, a terrible symphony of light and flame.”

And Belyn’s analysis of this statement (arguably a statement of significance to Murrow, given his choice in a title) has this to say:

“Orchestration indicates careful organization or planning. While the word “hell” means different things to different people, it generally indicates an extremely frightening and threatening place. Murrow’s metaphoric title conveys the idea that the bombing was both meticulous in planning and devastatingly horrible in its realization. Many times metaphors of light and flame are used to indicate goodness or purity. In this case, they are indicative only of death. Perhaps the knowledge that many flight crews were actually burned alive influenced Murrow’s choice of these fiery words.”

While no doubt Belyn is correct that the execution of bombs is a devastating and terrible thing, it seems to me he misses the major import of Murrow’s statement.  Murrow was a man who believed that Hitler had to be stopped at any price, and was an embodiment of pure evil.  Throughout his radio broadcast, he punched the word ‘Berlin’, as the destination of the pilots, the seat of Hitler’s dominance, and the city which had to fall to allied forces before the war could end.

The point, then, of his statement was to make the association that Berlin represented Hell, that the fighters had been couragous enough to ‘go to hell and back’, and that the purifying symphony of light and flame would remove the element of hell from Berlin, or at least destroy the devil’s seat.

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