Murrow's "orchestrated hell"

On the evening of 3 December 1943 listeners to the American radio network CBS heard a special broadcast from London. The announcer in New York said that the network’s correspondent had been aboard one of the RAF bombers that had attacked Berlin the previous night, that forty-one aircraft had been lost in the raid, and that of the five journalists who had flown with the crews, three had not returned. Then a familiar voice came on the air: “This is London.” For a quarter of an hour or so Edward R. Murrow described how, on the night of 2/3 December, he had flown over the Reich capital in a Lancaster called “D-Dog”. One sentence from that account – “Berlin was a kind of orchestrated hell, a terrible symphony of light and flame” – gave the broadcast the name under which it passed into the history of journalism.

An American voice from London

In 1943 Murrow was the best-known American radio reporter. He had headed the European bureau of CBS since 1937, and in the autumn of 1940, during the Blitz, his reports broadcast live from London’s rooftops, streets and shelters meant that millions of Americans heard the war in their own homes for the first time. He also reported on Churchill’s speeches of those months – of the Prime Minister, the author of the speech of June 1940, he later said that he had mobilised the English language and sent it into battle. Murrow’s reports helped the United States, still neutral, to see Britain as a country worth supporting. He gathered around him a team of correspondents, later known as the “Murrow Boys” – from William L. Shirer to younger reporters who during the war covered the fighting in Africa, Italy and the Pacific.

By 1943 Murrow no longer had to describe bombing seen from the ground. Now it was the Allies who were bombing Germany. RAF Bomber Command, under Air Marshal Arthur Harris, was waging a night campaign against German cities, and from November 1943 its main target was Berlin. The first raid of the new series, on the night of 18/19 November, did little damage, but three more great attacks on 22–27 November laid waste whole districts of the city. Harris believed that destroying the capital might shorten the war.

Journalists wanted to see this campaign at close quarters, and the air force commands – British and American – saw their reports as a way of showing the public the airmen’s effort. Correspondents’ flights over Germany were, however, dangerous. On 26 February 1943, when American day bombers attacked Wilhelmshaven, Robert Post of the New York Times was killed – one of six reporters who had flown over the Reich for the first time with the crews of the Eighth Air Force. Murrow, despite objections from his superiors at CBS, flew many times; his biographers estimate that over the whole war he took part in some 25 combat missions.

The night of 2/3 December

After the great attacks at the end of November Harris paused for a few days. On 2 December 1943 458 aircraft were sent to Berlin: 425 Lancasters, 15 Halifaxes and 18 light Mosquitos. This time the German defences could not be deceived. The night-fighter controllers recognised early that the capital was the target and directed their forces there. On top of this, a strong crosswind that the meteorologists had not forecast was blowing over the North Sea and Germany. The bomber stream stretched out and scattered, and many aircraft strayed from the planned route and found themselves over heavily defended areas.

The losses were severe. According to Bomber Command figures 40 aircraft failed to return – 37 Lancasters, two Halifaxes and one Mosquito – about 8.7 per cent of the force dispatched; the CBS announcement spoke of 41. At the time, around 5 per cent was regarded as the threshold of losses that the air force could not sustain for long. The results of the bombing were meagre into the bargain. Many of the markers and bombs fell on the southern outskirts and surroundings of the city, although according to British and German reports further Siemens works in Siemensstadt, a ball-bearing factory and several railway installations were damaged. The following night the bombers again headed towards Berlin, but only to turn at the last moment towards Leipzig; according to British studies it was there, and not in Berlin, that the Erla aircraft works, among other targets, were hit.

The flight of “D-Dog”

Murrow flew from one of No. 5 Group’s airfields in Lincolnshire. Most accounts say that the aircraft was a Lancaster of No. 619 Squadron RAF from Woodhall Spa, bearing the letter D – “D-Dog” in the radio alphabet. It was flown by the squadron commander, Wing Commander William Abercromby, known to the crew as “Jock”; some authors, however, link the flight to No. 50 Squadron, and the pilot’s name is sometimes spelt Abercrombie. Seven airmen and the reporter – eight men in their own small world in exile, as Murrow put it – took off at dusk.

Over Berlin the Lancaster was caught in a cone of searchlights. Suddenly and without any warning, Murrow recounted, D-Dog was filled with an unhealthy white light. The pilot threw the aircraft into a dive to escape the beams, while the reporter remembered that a 4,000-pound (about 1.8-tonne) high-explosive bomb, known as a “cookie”, and canisters of incendiaries were still hanging in the bomb bay. They got away. The bombs were dropped on the target marked by the Pathfinders, and on the way home the crew saw aircraft burning – they did not know whose. After midnight “D-Dog” landed in England. In the briefing room Murrow saw on the board that two airmen he had met before take-off – a big, slow-smiling Canadian and a red-headed English boy with a fortnight-old moustache – had not come back.

“Orchestrated hell”

The next day Murrow sat down at a microphone in a BBC studio in London, from where the broadcast went out on short wave to New York. The report lasted a quarter of an hour or so – some authors say 18 minutes – and was built like a story. It opened with Murrow telling his listeners that the previous evening a few young gentlemen of the RAF had taken him to Berlin. He described the briefing, where the atmosphere was a mixture of school and church, the meteorologist, the intelligence officer listing the anti-aircraft guns and searchlights, the take-off at sunset, and the clouds over the North Sea tinted red and shaped into castles, battlements and whole cities. He introduced the crew by their first names: Jock at the controls, Dave the navigator, Titch the wireless operator, Wally in the mid-upper and Jack in the rear gun turret.

The most powerful passages concerned the target itself. Below, the high-explosive bombs burst like huge sunflowers gone mad, the small incendiaries showered down like a handful of white rice thrown onto black velvet, and Berlin, lit up by them, resembled a badly laid-out city with its street lamps on. The Lancaster caught in the searchlights was like a black bug on a white sheet. Then Murrow broke off his description and turned to the reflection that made the broadcast famous: “Berlin was a kind of orchestrated hell, a terrible symphony of light and flame.” This, he went on, was not a pleasant kind of warfare, and the men who waged it spoke of it as a job. Men were dying in the sky while others were being roasted alive in their cellars; Berlin the night before had not been a pretty sight. In some thirty-five minutes, he said, it had received about three times as much as London had ever received in a whole night of the Blitz – a calculated, remorseless campaign of destruction.

These words were neither praise nor condemnation of the bombing. Murrow admired the composure of the airmen, who talked about it in the tone they might have used to describe a field of daffodils, and he made no secret of having been very frightened in the searchlights. At the same time he was one of the few war reporters to tell American listeners plainly that people were dying in the shelters of the burning city. He ended simply: in all probability the ground crews were at that very moment working on “D-Dog”, getting it ready for its next flight.

The journalists who did not return

According to the CBS announcement five correspondents flew with Bomber Command crews that night; Murrow himself spoke of four reporters taking part in the operation, two of whom had not returned, and called them his friends. The Australian Norman Stockton, a correspondent for the Australian press (Murrow named Australian Associated Newspapers; other sources mention the Sydney Sun), was killed in a Lancaster that was shot down. The American Lowell Bennett of the International News Service baled out over Germany and was taken prisoner; he lived to see the end of the war in the Stalag Luft I prisoner-of-war camp at Barth, liberated by the Red Army at the turn of April and May 1945. Bennett had been due to act that night as the “pool” reporter for the American agencies. Following the custom Murrow cited, whoever came back stood in for colleagues whom circumstances had prevented from filing their stories, and so a shortened version of his account also went to the news agencies.

The third victim among the journalists was the Norwegian poet and writer Nordahl Grieg, who, as an officer and correspondent of the Norwegian forces in exile, was flying in a Lancaster of No. 460 Squadron RAAF from Binbrook. The aircraft did not return, and for many years Grieg’s burial place remained unknown. In occupied Norway his death became a symbol; many Norwegians knew Grieg’s poems, recited in broadcasts by the London radio.

The broadcast and the bombing controversy

The broadcast immediately attracted attention. As early as 4 December the radio critic of the New York Daily News called it an unforgettable piece of radio reporting, and the text was reprinted and repeated many times. It became a model for war reporting: concrete detail instead of pathos, ordinary people instead of abstractions, the reporter’s personal experience instead of staff communiqués. At a time when American war propaganda, co-ordinated by the Office of War Information, liked to speak of the “precision” bombing of industrial targets, Murrow described an RAF raid as it really was: a night attack on a great city in which airmen and civilians alike were killed.

This did not mean that Murrow questioned the purpose of the campaign. Like most Britons and Americans in 1943, he regarded the bombing of Germany as a response to the war the Reich had unleashed and as a way of shortening it; he also remembered London in 1940. Yet his words about a calculated, remorseless campaign of destruction were closer to the truth than the official British communiqués, which avoided saying that Bomber Command’s targets were entire residential districts. The dispute over the moral judgement of area bombing – conducted even during the war by a few critics, such as the Anglican Bishop of Chichester, George Bell, in the House of Lords – returned in full force after the war, and Murrow’s broadcast is cited in it by both sides: as testimony to the courage of the airmen, and as one of the first public accounts of what area bombing of German cities looked like at close quarters.

Place in the war

The raid of 2/3 December was one of the dozen or more great attacks of the air Battle of Berlin, which Harris waged until the end of March 1944. The campaign broke neither Berlin nor the Reich, and according to commonly cited figures it cost Bomber Command more than a thousand aircraft lost over that winter; the night of 2/3 December, with losses of over 8 per cent, was a foretaste of how high the price would be. In March 1944 the raid on Nuremberg brought the heaviest losses in Bomber Command’s history, and soon afterwards the command itself was switched to supporting the invasion of France.

For Murrow the “D-Dog” broadcast was one of his greatest wartime achievements. He went on flying and reported the last months of the war in Europe, and in April 1945 he was one of the first reporters to enter Buchenwald, from where he made a broadcast that shook America. “Orchestrated hell” found its way into anthologies of journalism and into the curricula of journalism schools as an example of radio reporting in which precise description does not crowd out the question of the meaning of what the reporter sees.