Glenn Miller

At five minutes¹ before 2 p. m. on December 15, 1944, Army Air Force Major Glenn Miller climbed into a Noorduyn UC-64A Norseman at the Royal Air Force Airfield at Twinwood Farm near Bedford, England. This was about 50 miles north of London and was a convenient point of departure for this robust and reliable aircraft to cross the English Channel.

Since 1942 Glenn had been the leader of the Army Air Force Band - officially named the American Band of the Allied Expeditionary Force² - and Glenn and the Air Force Band had been playing concerts for the troops in England. Then following the D-Day landing in Normandy on June 6, 1944, Paris had been liberated on August 24. By December things had simmered down to where the band was planning to play a Christmas concert in Paris. Glenn was heading over early and the rest of the band would follow.

The early planning was necessary since no one was sure what kind of broadcast facilities would be available. So the idea was for the band to pre-record the tunes as a fallback in case the live concert wasn't possible.

Glenn had wanted to leave even earlier. Then bad weather hit. The fog was so thick that car trips that normally took an hour were now taking four. Flights and even combat missions were canceled and the weather wasn't expected to improve for a week.

However, by December 15, the fog had let up a bit although in the morning the cloud cover was still only 150 feet. Lieutenant Colonel Normal Baessell, a friend of Glenn, had arranged to cross the Channel with Flight Officer John Morgan. Norman offered Glenn a seat in the plane - the aircraft could accommodate eight passengers - and Glenn accepted the invitation.

Everyone knows the story that when Glenn climbed in behind the pilot he looked around.

"Hey," he said. "Where are the parachutes?" he asked.

Norman snorted. "What's the matter, Miller? Do you want to live forever?"

Glenn didn't like that it was a single engine plane, either. Again Norman dismissed Glenn's concerns. "Lindbergh had only one motor," he said, "and he flew clear across the Atlantic. We're only flying to Paris."

We said that's the story everyone knows³. The problem is this seems to be one of those famous instances of after-the-fact prescience that always impresses the hearer. But in his contemporary diary, Lieutenant Don Haynes, the only witness to the departure, didn't mention such banter. Instead, after Glenn climbed aboard, Don simply said, "Happy landings and good luck. I'll see you in Paris tomorrow."

"Thanks, Haynsie," Glenn replied. "We may need it."

The plane took off. Neither the plane, John, Norman, or Glenn were ever seen again⁴.

The official story is the plane fell into the Channel. But with the overly suspicious character of our own times, you'll read many other accounts of:

What

REALLY

Happened to

Glenn Miller

The Glenn Doubters - which actually included some of Glenn's friends and family - point out that there was never an official inquiry and no report was even written until five days after the plane disappeared. And the story wasn't announced officially until December 24. Even then the stories were particularly brief and sometimes relegated to the inside pages, for crying out loud! Surely, the Army Air Force was giving them everyone a "line" to cover up about

What

REALLY

Happened to

Glenn Miller

Well, as Joe Friday might have said, let's look at the facts.

For one thing the first report was not filed five days later but the next day, December 16. The plane had not radioed its arrival so a report was filed.

This report, we must point out, did not assume the plane was actually lost. After all, radios do sometimes break down and with the fog and bad weather it was possible the plane simply had to divert from its original plan. And with the near impromptu nature of the flight, we have to wonder how many people really had any idea that Glenn Miller was on board. Don Haynes, who did know Glenn and the others had flown off, had no way to know if the plane had arrived or not.

OK So...

What

REALLY

Happened to

Glenn Miller?

By far the most famous explanation was that a group of RAF bombers was forced to abandoned their mission and turned back because of the fog. Following the usual procedure before reaching England, they jettisoned their bombs over the channel. But some of the crew said they had spotted a small plane - a "kite" as they called it - in the path of the bombs. Then either the pilot of the small plane had taken too precipitous evasive action sending it out of control, or the exploding bombs had knocked the plane over and it fell into the sea.

In recent years, this explanation had achieved considerable credibility and it appears in some articles as a widely accepted conclusion. After all, such accidents where men fell victim to their own forces were by no means rare.

But others doubt the story. For instance, one of the crewman who reported seeing the plane flip over said he hadn't remembered the incident. But after he saw the 1954 motion picture The Glenn Miller Story starring Jimmy Stewart his memory was refreshed. Certainly memories remembered from fifty years past and which were only "recovered" only after watching a movie are not necessarily the most reliable historical source.

More to the point other fliers on the same mission saw nothing. One of them pointed out that no one could have seen where the bombs exploded - much less spot a small plane that was in the area. The bombers jettisoned their bombs at 3000 feet where visibility was essentially nil.

The timing is also open to question. Some say the squadron's return fits with when Glenn's flight was heading over the channel. But another author checked with the records and found the bombs had been released an hour before Glenn's plane took off. If the crew did see a plane go down due to the bombs, it could not have been Glenn and so the story that Glenn was lost due to "friendly fire" remains dubious and indeed has increasingly fallen from favor.

Another account states that radio contact was lost with Glenn's plane a few minutes after takeoff. So the plane must have gone down over land. But the same author who looked at the flight logs found that the statement was made by someone who was not a radio telephony operator. Even more to the point the type of transmission reported wasn't possible given the equipment at the airfield.

Additional explanations abound and these range from the mundane to the creative. The trouble is the more adventurous explanations leave out an important point which we'll detail later.

One account is that Glenn had actually died from lung cancer either in England or in Paris. Naturally that would have looked bad at a time when virtually all adults smoked and packs of cigarettes were given to the soldiers as part of their rations. Far better for the public to believe that Glenn had gone missing in action on his way to entertain the troops.

Another explanation is that Glenn did indeed reach Paris but decided to take a welcome break. So he visited a commercial establishment devoted to gentlemen's relaxation. There through his exertions he succumbed to the ministrations of the employees. Naturally that story couldn't get out.

Another story actually has no real relevance to the flight. That was that Glenn was a spy and disappeared due to his clandestine activity.

Then there's the account that was mentioned by an individual known for his abstemious and financially prudent lifestyle when watching The Glenn Miller Story. At the scene where Glenn's plane is reported missing, he commented that that's wasn't what happened. Instead, he added, when the plane landed in France, Glenn simply wasn't on board. The supposition was that the others on board had pushed Glenn out of the plane.

There are difficulties with all these theories. For one thing Glenn was healthy enough to maintain his grueling regimen. As far as Glenn being a spy, he did make some anti-progaganda broadcasts directed to the German people (although Glenn didn't speak German he learned his lines phonetically). But there is in fact no evidence that Glenn went into actual espionage.

The story that Glenn was overcome from his exertions in a Parisan establishment is one of those stories that crop up in order to answer:

What

REALLY

Happened to

Glenn Miller

... in a way that no one else has thought of. But such scenarios are invented with no real evidence. And this specific story only showed up in 1997 and you might as well propose that Glenn was abducted by swing music loving aliens from outer space.

But as far as Glenn being pushed out of the plane, there's one objection that also applies to all the other theories. The other two men and the plane were never seen again either. So for the more conspiratorial theories to be correct, then John or Norman would have had to go into something like the witness protection program if they were going to cover up

What

REALLY

Happened to

Glenn Miller

... which is, of course, is an impossibility.

But, you ask, why wasn't there an inquiry, for crying out loud? And why the delay in filing a report? These are serious lapses in procedure and at the least are most suspicious.

Well, not really. Remember. There was, after all, a war on.

That the times were confusing is like saying you need a bit of arithmetic to understand Einstein's Theory of Relativity. For one thing, the flight was never properly cleared. The plane had arrived late at Twinwood and the control tower wasn't even manned. Nor was Glenn originally scheduled as a passenger. Given this near impromptu nature of the flight, there weren't many who knew when Glenn was taking off much less knowing when he would arrive.

That Glenn didn't show up in Paris could be for any number of reasons. The weather was certainly problematical and the plane was a type specifically designed to take off and land on rugged "unimproved" terrain. Maybe the plane got lost and landed on some farmer's field in Normandy. Glenn might have been walking down a road in France trying to hitch a ride to Paris.

But the biggest cause of confusion - or at least distraction - was the very next day the Germans took advantage of the poor weather by launching a massive attack on the Western Front. For over a month, this "Battle of the Bulge" diverted more men than ever to France and Belgium. And honesty compels us to point out that the attack also lowered the priority for investigating the type of event that regrettably had become all too routine.

By the end of 1944, planes were being lost every day. Fighter squadrons went out and some planes were never seen again. With every bomber that went down you lost ten men. Taking everything in perspective, one World War II Air Force veteran pointed out that the plane that took off from Twinwood Farm carried three men: the lowest ranking air force pilot, a "ground pounder" lieutenant colonel, and a major who played a trombone.

So when you get down to it, what you see is pretty much what you get. The plane with Glenn Miller took off in weather too poor to fly safely. Because of the vagaries of the flight plan plus the beginning of one the major battles of the War no one really knew if something was wrong for several days. Although the plane could have crashed on land - to this day people are uncovering aircraft wreckage buried in the farmlands of eastern England - it probably fell into the Channel.

The specific cause of the crash will almost certainly never be known even in the almost impossible event that the wreckage is found. Mechanical problems can't be ruled out, of course. The ground temperature was above freezing but quickly dropped at higher altitudes. Under certain conditions, the carburetor of the Norseman could ice up as high as 70 degrees ambient temperature. But even if the plane functioned perfectly, it may be that the pilot became disoriented due to the poor visibility.

The Air Force Band did perform their Christmas concert without Glenn. In another six months, the war in Europe was over and 99 days later, Japan surrendered. The men returned stateside.

Although Glenn's band was the most popular of the Swing Era it's easy to think of the orchestra as merely one out of many. But what really characterized Glenn's band was its ensemble nature. Usually band leaders who also played an instrument made sure they stood out. You can hear the individual playing of Duke Ellington, Tommy Dorsey, and Artie Shaw on their records.

So it's all the more exasperating for Glenn's fans that you never hear him strut his stuff. Sure, there's a 1926 recording led by trumpet player Earl Baker⁵ which features not only Glenn but also clarinetist Benny Goodman. On "Sobbin' Blues" we hear what sound's like Glenn playing a short solo in the Dixieland style.

Then there's the movie Orchestra Wives where we see Glenn rip off a hot riff. But he plays only a few notes and even then the music was clearly added after the filming. In all of his performances and the video clips still extant, you will never hear Glenn really play a solo.

Inserting the music in post-production was necessary. After all, the movie was fiction and Glenn played the part of the initialistically analogous big band leader "Gene Morrison". Other main characters in the band were played by professional actors. There was George Montgomery (as "Gene's" top trumpet player), Caesar Romero (as the pianist), and - get this - Jackie Gleason (i. e., Ralph Kramden of "The Honeymooners") as the stand-up bass player.

Orchestra Wives is not only notable because it shows that Elvis wasn't the first pop musician to make a movie. But it portrays a little known aspect of the big band era that it was quite common for the wives of the band members to go on along on the tours.

Even if the husbands bore the additional cost themselves, getting everyone alternatively settled and back on the move would make a bald man tear his hair. Jerry Duppler, who led a band under his stage name Tommy Tucker (and whose 1941 recording "I Don't Want to Set the World on Fire" sold a million copies), remembered such complex logistics when he was asked if his was a glamorous living. "Glamorous, yes," he replied. "Living I'm not so sure."

Glenn's band continued to perform and still does to this day. This raises the philosophical question whether a famous band that endures long enough to replace all the original personnel should still be called by its original name. Not only Glenn's band, but Blood Sweat and Tears, The Hollies, Canned Heat, Three Dog Night, and the Kingston Trio are groups that have undergone such complete transmogrification.

Although there are big bands still around, they are fewer and further between. In fact many people tag the end of the Big Band Era with the disappearance of Glenn Miller. But there were certainly Big Bands that kept going well after the War's end.

Usually you'll hear the Big Bands petered out because they were just too dang expensive. This explanation, while not necessarily incorrect, leaves us wondering why the swing orchestras were economical from the 1920's to the 1940's but not in the years afterwards.

The truth is that the Fall of the Big Bands was, like the proverbial doctor's prescription, due to a combination of ingredients. Yes, after the War, labor costs went up. But it's also true that after the War the Era That Good Music Must Be Live Music was definitely over. So more and more people were staying home and listening to the radio. Then in 1948 came the first long-playing (LP) record. You no longer had to get up and change the record every three minutes. Why, with an LP you could actually have 15, maybe 20, minutes of uninterrupted listening pleasure!

The style of jazz was also changing. Even before the war ended, be-bop was taking over and with the rapid unison playing that was characteristic of the boppers, the music was most suited for smaller combos.

With the smaller combos came smaller clubs. With less room available, "No Dancing" signs went up and in more and more clubs there was, well, there was no dancing. Even the larger venues began putting additional tables on what had been dance floors and the real raison d'être for the Big Bands disappeared.

But above all the bands may have been a victim of their own innovations. In the late 1930's and 40's, the big bands began featuring solo singers. The instrumentalists, until then the stars, began playing second fiddle even if they played something else. Eventually, the bands needed the singers more than the singers needed the bands.

Arguably the first modern stand-alone megastar pop singer was Harry Lillis Crosby. Known as "Bing" to his friends, he was not tied to any orchestra and yet his records still sold in the tens of millions of copies.

Other singers followed suit. For some time, the young ladies who now preferred socks that rolled up at the ankles had been going nuts when they heard Tommy Dorsey's lead singer. The son of Hoboken boxer Marty O'Brien he had been singing under his real name of Sinatra. Young Francis had become so popular that he realized he could do better if he could get out of Tommy's contract and so give Bing a run for his money.

How Frank extricated himself is the subject of another famous story - or rather stories. Frank's own telling did shift from time to time. Once he simply said he told Tommy he was going to strike out on his own. Tommy simply said "Sure". And that was that.

But in another telling Frank said when he told Tommy he was going to leave, Tommy pointed out he had a contract that he, Tommy, expected Frank to honor. Frank objected and said that he had also had a contract with Harry James. Then when he told Harry he wanted to sing for Tommy, Harry simply tore up the contract and wished Frank luck.

Tommy still demurred. By then it was clear Frank was going to be a highly marketable commodity and Tommy wanted a piece of the action. By the same token, though, Frank had been making his own contacts with the network and recording company bigwigs. When he told them of his difficulty, they went to Tommy and said if he wanted to keep playing on the air and making platters, then he should let Frank out. Tommy gave in and went to Frank and said he agreed to cancel the contract. "I hope you fall on your [heinie]," he said.

But the most popular story of how Frank got out of the contract is that Frank's godfather (literally) was the New Jersey mobster Willie Moretti. He went to Tommy and made him that type of offer that was so hard to refuse. Obviously this story was the one incorporated into the 1972 movie The Godfather. Supposedly Willie bought Frank's contract for $1.

Obviously such a story is a simplification at best. Tommy himself was quoted as saying a couple of tough looking men showed up one day and said they hoped to "reason" with Tommy about letting Frank out of his contract. Later Willie came over and smilingly said he was happy that Tommy had let Frank out of the contract. Tommy needed no further discussion.

However, "Tommy's" account is at best second hand. One friend of Frank's said that the tough looking fellows were not really gangsters but just people Frank knew and they had gone to Tommy without Frank's knowledge. Willie's involvement was mentioned in an article in Parade Magazine in 1964. But that was eight years after Tommy died.

As always money was a big factor in any decision. A common story is that Frank's contract had guaranteed Tommy 43 % of Frank's future income for life. That, we must point out, is patently absurd. Sure, Frank was a good singer, but even Tommy didn't know Frank would eventually become Old Blue-Eyes, the Chairman of the Board, and the biggest draw at Las Vegas. As far as we know Frank's contracts were typical fare for the time, stipulating a standard weekly pay, and extending for a specific length of time.

So what happened? Well, the following is a "reconstruction" based on various writings and statements recorded by scholars. It's probably as good a guess as any.

When Frank told Tommy he was going to leave, he had 10 months left of a three-year contract. Anyone as smart as Tommy realized forcing Frank - who could be somewhat difficult on his best days - to remain would ultimately be a losing battle. But Tommy also had his own cards to play and he wasn't going to release Frank for nothing.

Now if it had been Tommy to tell Frank he was going to be replaced, Tommy would have had to buy out Frank's contract. But since it was the other way around, Tommy was the one who should get the extra compensation. So we can surmise that for the duration of the contract - maybe a bit longer than the remaining 10 months but scarcely for the remainder of Frank's life - Frank did turn over a percentage of his pay. It may very well have been over 30% plus what Tommy could wrangle from the various record moguls and broadcasters who were aligned with Frank. The number often quoted for what Tommy realized - $60,000 - is perhaps a bit overly generous but not impossible. We have to assume that Tommy got more than the $1 we hear that Willie Moretti supposedly paid.

A particularly interesting theory is that the decline of big bands was from the bandleaders' quest for respectability. Jazz, they said, was an art, by golly, and "Take the A-Train" was equal in artistic parity to Brahms's Piano Concerto #1. So instead of playing in nightclubs, the big bands began to appear in concerts before the sit-down audiences. Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, and yes, Glenn Miller, all appeared in Carnegie Hall.

This demand for respect became particularly acute after the war. "Jazz bands don't belong in ballrooms or hotel grills," pianist Stan Kenton said in 1947. But you can't appear at Carnegie Hall five nights a week for two months. And arranging prestige concerts was time consuming and expensive. For what it's worth Stan's quest for respect never worked out and by the 1970's, he was playing at the Lancer Steak House in Schaumberg, Illinois.

Ultimately be-bop evolved even further into "progressive jazz". Maybe the change wasn't quite as extreme as the move from Beethoven to John Cage, but it is true that there are fewer fans of jazz than ever before. Today jazz barely cracks 1 % of recording sales. Fewer people like jazz than classical music, for crying out loud! And there's not that many people that like classical music, and particularly they don't like modern classical music.

When listeners of modern music complain that modern orchestral music stinks, the fault is laid squarely upon the shoulders of the audience. They are not, say the critics, sophisticated enough to appreciate it. After all, the audiences didn't like Beethoven at first either. His first symphony was even dismissed as the "confused explosions of the presumptuous effrontery of a young man."

Well, yes, Lüdwig got some bad reviews. But he also got a lot of good reviews. As much as he railed against the critics you wonder if he ever read the reviews.

There is one curmudgeonly explanation as to why Händel⁶, Mozart, Beethoven, and Wagner are popular with the masses but Hindemith, Schönberg, and Webern - by no means the craziest moderns - aren't. That's because the classical composers had to write music that people wanted to listen to. Todays "serious" composers don't.

Remember the earlier composers got their funding from rich noblemen who were not particularly interested in atonal discordant works without any semblance of melody. Composers also sold works to music publishers who had to print sheet music that would sell. After all, Prince Leopold wasn't going to pay Lüdwig for writing a completely silent opus. And Hoffmeister & Künel weren't going to buy something that sounded like cats running up and down the keyboard.

In short, modern innovative composers are writing for themselves, not the audience. So if Lüdwig was composing music today, he'd be a college professor and get a government grant. Then he could write whatever he liked. The music would be premiered by a conductor who was one of his friends, and to make sure people listened to it, the new work would be sandwiched in the middle of the concert between something by Haydn and Mozart so people couldn't get up and leave. It might show up on the program of other orchestras a few times and then would fade from the music lovers' collective consciousness.

Certainly the predictions that the atonal and non-melodic music would eventually become as beloved as Eine kleine Nachtmusik has not materialized. So some explanations other than having an uneducated public must be given some consideration.

Recently physiologists have gotten into the act and their research indicates that music appreciation is hardwired into the human brain. When listening to a song the mind automatically tries to find certain musical patterns and creates expectations from what the senses transmit.

But it is almost impossible to listen to modern music and find a pattern that the brain can anticipate. So the listening becomes literally a frustrating and painful experience. And who's going to pay $20 for nosebleed seats for an hour and 45 minutes of acoustical agony?

There is, though, A Modest Proposal that may solve the problem.

If you listen to modern orchestral music, you'll notice something strange. A lot of it sounds like background music from a motion picture. In a movie what the eye sees provides the link between the action and the sound and the combination creates a pattern the mind can understand. For instance, if you listen to Hindemith's Kleine Kammermusik, you can almost see Elmer Fudd trying to sneak up on Bugs Bunny.

So maybe for the premiere of the next Pulitzer Prize winning composition, the audience should also be treated to a series of animated cartoons shown at the same time. At least that way if they laugh they won't hurt the composer's feelings.

References and Further Reading

Glenn Miller and His Orchestra, George Simon, Thomas Crowell Company, 1974.

Glenn Miller Declassified, Dennis Spragg, University of Nebraska Press, 2017.

"Maj. Glenn Miller Lost in Flight Across the Channel", Washington Evening Star, Page A-7, December 25, 1944, Chronicling America, Library of Congress.

"75 years ago, Glenn Miller vanished on a flight over the English Channel", Michael Ruane, The Washington Post, December 24, 2019.

"Glenn Miller", Leonard Nimoy (Presenter), Histories Mysteries, Alan Landsburg Productions, Internet Movie Data Base, March 7, 1980.

"Glenn Miller Book Clears RAF of Accidentally Killing Band Leader", Dalya Alberge, The Guardian, August 29, 2017.

Glenn Miller's Plane Mystery Revived After 70 Years", Bart Jansen, USA Today, July 7, 2014.

"The Disappearance of Glenn Miller", Brian Dunning, Skeptoid, March 18, 2014.

"Twinwood Airfield, Bedfordshire. The Last Flight of Major Glenn Miller. December 15, 1944", mboss.f9.co.uk.

"Noorduyn Norseman Mk.IV (C-64A, UC-64A)", The Skytamer Archive.

"The Legendary Earl Baker Cylinders - 1926", Discogs.

"Tommy Tucker", Richard Lamparski, Whatever Became Of ...?

"Sinatra and the Mob", Yo Zushi, New Statesman, December 15, 2015.

"Why the Big Bands Died", Eric Felten, Weekly Standard, September 08, 1996.

Jazz in America, Scott DeVeaux, Research Division Report #31, National Endowment of the Arts, 1995.

"Latest Stats: Americans Like Jazz Even Less Than Classical Music", Norman Lebrecht, Slipped Disc, March 12, 2015.

"Share of Total Music Album Consumption", Statista, April 9, 2019.

"Does Anyone Like Modern Classical Music?", Alexandra Coghlan, The Independant, October 2, 2012.

"Audiences Hate Modern Classical Music Because Their Brains Cannot Cope", Richard Gray, The Telegraph, February 20, 2010.

Beethoven - Biography of a Genius, George Marek, Funk and Wagnalls, 1969.

The Sinatra Files: The Secret FBI Dossier", Tom Kuntz and Phil Kuntz, Three Rivers Press, 2000.