Miller

Late on the morning of Friday the fifteenth of December 1944, at the small Royal Air Force satellite airfield of Twinwood Farm three miles north of Bedford, Major Alton Glenn Miller, forty years old, the Iowa-born American big-band leader who had been commanding the United States Army Air Forces Band in England since the summer of 1944, climbed into the back of a single-engined Noorduyn UC-64A Norseman six-seater utility aircraft for the cross-Channel flight to the small French airfield at Villacoublay outside Paris. He was travelling ahead of his Band to make the final administrative arrangements for the Christmas-Eve concert the Band was scheduled to give for the liberated American forces in central Paris on the twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth of December 1944. The Norseman, piloted by Flight Officer John Robert Stuart Morgan of the United States Army Air Forces with Lieutenant Colonel Norman Baessell of the European Theatre of Operations Air Service Command as the second passenger, took off from Twinwood Farm at one-fifty-five in the afternoon, climbed to seven hundred and fifty feet under the heavy winter cloud-base, set a south-by-south-east course across the Bedfordshire winter countryside and the Kent coast and the English Channel, and disappeared. No wreckage was ever recovered. No bodies were ever recovered. The Channel weather of the fifteenth of December 1944 was at the limit of the Norseman's flying envelope; the most-accepted modern reconstruction (the 1985 investigation by the United States Air Force historian Roy Nesbit) is that the aircraft iced up in the freezing winter cloud above the Channel and went into the sea at approximately three in the afternoon, somewhere along the line between Dungeness and Cap Gris-Nez. Miller's disappearance is the single most-famous wartime disappearance in popular-music history.

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