Miller · 1944
Glenn Miller disappears over the English Channel
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.
A man is rarely lost in the way Glenn Miller was lost. Most public deaths come with a record of the moment: the bullet, the train-crash, the hospital bed, the witness. Miller went into the air over the south of England on a December afternoon with two other men in a single-engined aircraft, was on the radio-broadcast schedule for a concert in Paris on Christmas Eve, and simply was not on the runway when the aircraft was due. The Channel weather that afternoon was at the limit of the Norseman's tolerance. Whatever happened happened in the cloud somewhere over the grey water between Kent and the Pas-de-Calais. The aircraft was never found. He was forty.
THE IOWA FARM-BOY
Alton Glenn Miller was born at Clarinda in the southern Iowa farm country on the first of March 1904, second son of Lewis Elmer Miller, a small Iowa farmer who supplemented the farm income by teaching at the local Clarinda district school, and Mattie Lou Cavender. The family moved through his boyhood across the small farming towns of the southern Iowa-Nebraska-Missouri-Colorado wheat-and-corn country (Tryon, Nebraska; North Platte, Nebraska; Grant City, Missouri; Fort Morgan, Colorado) on his father's various small farming-and-teaching positions. He took up the trombone at thirteen at Fort Morgan, Colorado, on the strength of his elder brother Deane's encouragement, played in the Fort Morgan High School band, took his first paid musical engagement at fifteen at the Fort Morgan Sunday-evening church band for fifty cents a Sunday, and graduated from Fort Morgan High School in 1921 with a small scholarship to the University of Colorado at Boulder.
He dropped out of the University in the autumn of 1923 in his sophomore year to commit full-time to professional dance-band trombone work, joined the Ben Pollack orchestra at Hollywood as second trombone in 1926, played through the late 1920s in the leading Hollywood and New York dance bands of the Jazz Age (Pollack, Tommy Dorsey, Ray Noble, the Smith Ballew Orchestra, the Dorsey Brothers Orchestra), and from 1934 worked as the band-manager and chief arranger for the Englishman Ray Noble's American orchestra at the Rainbow Room on the sixty-fifth floor of the RCA Building in Rockefeller Center, New York. He formed his own first band in March 1937, was forced to disband it in the autumn of 1938 on the failure of the Boston commercial residency, and formed the second Glenn Miller Orchestra (the Orchestra of his subsequent international fame) in March 1939.
THE SOUND OF THE ORCHESTRA
The second Miller Orchestra was based at the Glen Island Casino on New Rochelle Sound from May 1939, took up the radio-network residency on the NBC Red Network from May 1939 (the Chesterfield Cigarettes Moonlight Serenade radio broadcast that ran three nights per week through the summer of 1939), and broke into the mainstream American popular-music market on the strength of the radio exposure. The Orchestra's signature sound (the clarinet-led-saxophone reed section that Miller had worked out in late 1938 for the practical reason that his first-trumpet Charlie Spivak's lip was injured and could not carry the upper-register lead) was the central single instrumental innovation of late-Swing-era American dance-band music. The Orchestra had its first national chart hit in November 1939 with In the Mood (the Joe Garland arrangement that Miller had bought from Edgar Hayes for two hundred dollars in 1938), and across 1940 and 1941 was the highest-paid dance band in America with a recording catalogue that included Moonlight Serenade, Tuxedo Junction, Pennsylvania 6-5000, String of Pearls and Chattanooga Choo Choo (the first commercial recording in any genre to be certified gold for sales of over a million copies, on the seventh of February 1942 by RCA Victor).
THE COMMISSION
Miller took the United States Army Air Forces captaincy on the seventh of October 1942 in his thirty-eighth year on a personal request to the Adjutant General of the Air Forces. He took the commission against the financial logic of his civilian career (his Orchestra was earning over twenty thousand dollars per week at the close of 1942); he wrote in his commission letter that he wanted to put me right where the army wants me, since they have helped me through the years.... The Army assigned him to the Army Air Forces Training Command at Maxwell Field, Alabama, to organise the radio-and-band programme for the Air Forces training centres. He reorganised the standard Air Forces marching-band instrumentation along Glenn Miller Orchestra lines (the clarinet-led reed section, the Tuxedo Junction-pattern brass), recorded the I Sustain the Wings radio series for the NBC network from late 1943, and on the strength of the Air Forces interest in the wartime morale-broadcast programme was promoted Major and transferred to the European Theatre Air Force headquarters in England in June 1944.
He arrived at the Air Force base at Bovingdon in Hertfordshire on the twenty-ninth of June 1944, three weeks after D-Day. He took up the directorship of the Army Air Forces Band of the European Theatre, the consolidated forty-piece big band assembled from drafted American professional musicians (including the future jazz bandleaders Mel Powell, Peanuts Hucko, Trigger Alpert and Ray McKinley), and through the summer and autumn of 1944 conducted the Band's three hundred and twenty BBC broadcasts and live-concert performances at American Air Force bases across the south of England. He flew personally over forty broadcast-organisational trips between English bases through the period.
THE FIFTEENTH OF DECEMBER
On the twelfth of December 1944, with the Christmas-Eve concert programme for the Band confirmed for Villacoublay on the twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth of December, Miller arranged through the Air Service Command for personal transport to Paris ahead of the Band to make the final administrative arrangements. The Band was scheduled to fly on the seventeenth of December. The arrangement was for Lieutenant Colonel Norman Baessell, the Air Service Command Engineering Officer at Bovingdon, to provide a Noorduyn UC-64A Norseman utility aircraft from the Bovingdon strip for the fifteenth.
The weather across the fifteenth of December 1944 was the worst of the English winter to date. The Channel was overcast with a freezing nimbostratus cloud-base at six hundred to eight hundred feet, freezing fog over the Bedfordshire-and-Kent country, visibility down to a quarter-mile at the Twinwood satellite field. The Norseman pilot Flight Officer John Morgan and Baessell briefed the trip at Bovingdon at noon, decided to push through on the grounds of the operational urgency of the Christmas-Eve concert, took the Norseman across the four-mile flight from Bovingdon to Twinwood at twelve-forty in heavy cloud, picked up Miller from the Twinwood operations hut at one-thirty, and took off from the Twinwood east-west runway at one-fifty-five in the afternoon on the south-by-south-east course toward the Channel.
THE EMPTY HANGAR
The Norseman did not reach Villacoublay. The Air Service Command had no radio contact with the aircraft after take-off (the Norseman carried no long-range radio for the Channel crossing). The aircraft was not on the Villacoublay runway at the expected arrival time of approximately four-thirty in the afternoon. The Air Service Command duty officer at Bovingdon noted the missing arrival in the operational log at six-thirty in the evening. No search-and-rescue operation was initiated through the night (the bad Channel weather made any small-aircraft search impractical). The aircraft was officially listed missing on the morning of the sixteenth of December 1944.
The Battle of the Bulge began at dawn on the same morning, the sixteenth of December 1944, on the Ardennes front three hundred miles east. The Army Air Forces Headquarters in Europe was preoccupied with the Bulge for the next four weeks; the Miller disappearance was not formally investigated until February 1945. The Channel was searched by Air-Sea Rescue aircraft across late February and March 1945; no wreckage was recovered. The aircraft, the pilot, the engineering officer and the bandleader were officially declared lost on the twenty-fifth of January 1945. Miller's wife Helen received the personal telegram from General Carl Spaatz on the twenty-fifth of January at her Tenafly, New Jersey, home.
THE NORSEMAN AT THE BOTTOM
The standard United States Air Force position on the Miller disappearance through the late twentieth century (the 1947 Office of Strategic Services review, the 1949 Pentagon review, the 1985 Roy Nesbit investigation) was that the Norseman iced up in the freezing nimbostratus cloud over the Channel and went into the sea at approximately three in the afternoon of the fifteenth of December 1944, somewhere along the Dungeness-to-Cap Gris-Nez line. A 1985 Roy Nesbit reconstruction added the possibility that the aircraft was struck by jettisoned bombs from a returning Royal Air Force Lancaster squadron that had aborted a Siegen bombing-run that afternoon (the jettison-zone for the aborted Lancasters was in the area of the Channel where the Norseman would have been crossing). The two reconstructions are not mutually exclusive. Whichever happened, the aircraft is somewhere on the bottom of the English Channel between Kent and the Pas-de-Calais and has not been found.
The Glenn Miller Orchestra played the Christmas-Eve concert at Villacoublay on the twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth of December 1944 under the deputy command of Sergeant Jerry Gray. The Orchestra continued through the rest of the war under Gray and Ray McKinley (the McKinley orchestra under Miller's name has continued as a continuously-operating professional orchestra under licence from the Miller estate to the present). Miller's 1939-1942 recording catalogue has been continuously in record-store-and-streaming-service circulation for the eighty years since his disappearance. Moonlight Serenade is the central single instrumental standard of the late-Swing-era American popular tradition. The Glenn Miller Museum at the former RAF Twinwood Farm site at Clapham in Bedfordshire opened in 2002 on the site of the operational hut from which Miller took off on the afternoon of the fifteenth of December 1944. The Miller name in modern popular-music history carries the weight of the Twinwood take-off.