Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The Disappearance of Glenn Miller

Starting point is 00:00:00 Throughout the Second World War, one of the world's most popular musicians was the American big band leader Glenn Miller. He had a string of hits over a very short period of time, and his music is so synonymous with that period that it can be heard in almost every movie and documentary about the war. However, just before Christmas, 1944, just a few months before the war in Europe would be over, Glenn Miller disappeared in a flight over the English Channel. Learn more about Glenn Miller and his disappearance on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day into night. And how it shaped the world now.

Starting point is 00:00:58 Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. I have a wide range of people who listen to this podcast, and that includes people from not only different parts of the world, but also from my a wide range of ages. So while some of you might know who Glenn Miller is, there's a good chance that many of you don't know who he is, or at least only know of him vaguely. The generation of people who may have listened to Glenn Miller when he was alive have either passed away or are now well into their 90s. Glenn Miller would have been the music listened to, depending on your age, by either your parents, grandparents, or possibly even great-grandparents, assuming that they were listening to popular music at all. Glenn Miller was born Alton Glenn. Glenn,

Starting point is 00:01:43 Miller on March 1st, 1904 in Clarinda, Iowa. At his birth, the name Glenn only had one N, and he added a second N when he was in high school. Like everyone else in his family, he always went by his middle name, Glenn, and only used Alton for official documents. His family moved around. They lived in Nebraska, and then they moved to Granite City, Missouri. It was there that Glenn made money from odd jobs, milking cows, to earn enough money to buy a trombone so that he could play in the town orchestra. His father played the mandolin and his mother was a school teacher who encouraged his musical pursuits. In 1918, his family moved once again to Fort Morgan, Colorado, where he attended high school. He was an accomplished football player, earning all state honors, and was the editor of the school yearbook.

Starting point is 00:02:25 However, his real love was music, in particular, dance band music. He started his own band and decided to pursue a career as a professional musician. He actually skipped his high school graduation because his band had a gig. He enrolled at the University of Colorado. but eventually dropped out. He had skipped most of his classes because he would be a way performing. He then went to New York to study under the music theorist and composition teacher Joseph Schillinger. While he was there, he composed a song titled Miller's Tune. The music was later rearranged and renamed to Moonlight Serenade, and it became his signature song. He began playing

Starting point is 00:03:00 trombone for other successful band leaders during the later half of the 1920s, but soon realized that his future lay in composition. In 1928, he released his first composition, room 1411 with Benny Goodman, another major musical figure of the era. Throughout the 1930s, Miller worked composing for bands, creating arrangements, and working as a trombonist in bands and orchestras where needed. This led him to cross paths with most of the major American musical figures of that period, including Bing Crosby, Gene Krupa, Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey, Eddie Kandon, and many others. In 1937, he finally started his own band, but they never really found success.

Starting point is 00:03:37 There was nothing about his band that set them apart from the other. bands of the era. So he went back to the drawing table and developed a unique sound for his band. The sound that he created in which defined his band was that of a clarinet as the lead instrument with several saxophones providing harmony. And this became known as the Glenn Miller sound. The new sound proved to be a massive hit. In 1938, the band began recording for RCA records. And in 1939, they began setting attendance records at concert venues. By November of that year, Time Magazine did a story on Miller and his band, and noted, quote, of the 12 to 24 discs in each of today's 300,000 U.S. jukeboxes,

Starting point is 00:04:17 two to six are usually Glenn Miller's. In December 1939, the band began making regular national radio appearances on CBS. In 1940, the band's version of Tuxedo Junction became one of the fastest selling records in history up to that point, selling 115,000 copies in just the first week. He also began appearing in movies, including Sun Valley San Francisco. Serenade in 1941 and Orchestra Wives in 1942. In February 1942, he became the first recording artist in history to be awarded a gold record for Chattanooga Choochoochoo, which sold over a million copies.

Starting point is 00:04:53 The point of all of this is that in early 1942, just weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor and the entry of the United States into World War II, Glenn Miller was on top of the world. He was making about $20,000 a week, which adjusted for, inflation would today be about $300,000 a week. He was 38 years old, married with children, and had poor eyesight. He was unlikely to be drafted and would have been rejected if he had enlisted. However, Glenn Miller wanted to serve and do his part, whatever that might be. So he applied for an officer commission to the Navy and was, in fact, rejected. He then set up a meeting with the Army Bureau of Public Relations and sent a lengthy letter to the head of the Army Service Forces.

Starting point is 00:05:36 They relented and granted his commission on September 8, 1942. He had 30 days to finalize his business before joining the Army. He ended his radio program and disbanded the Glenn Miller Orchestra, one of the most popular music acts in the world. On October 7th, he arrived in Omaha, Nebraska and began duty as Captain Glenn Miller in the Army Specialist Corps. The Specialist Corps was a unit of skilled civilians who otherwise were not eligible to enlist during the war. He was eventually assigned to the U.S. Army Air Force, where he created the Glenn Miller Army band.

Starting point is 00:06:08 The creation of the band to play modern music in the Army wasn't without its detractors. Many people thought that the Army should stick to marching music from the likes of John Philip Sousa. However, Miller and his Army band were a hit. They traveled around the United States in Europe, entertaining troops and putting on performances. They also made radio appearances to keep up civilian support for the war.

Starting point is 00:06:29 Much of what he did was exactly the same as what he did in civilian life, only now he was doing it on a soldier's salary. In addition to his duties, he also organized marching bands. The marching bands organized by Glenn Miller often featured jeeps with full drum sets and large string basses. On May 24th, 1944, as the Allies were preparing for the invasion of Normandy, General Dwight Eisenhower personally requested the transfer of Miller to help create an Allied radio service. Eisenhower said that Miller and his group were the, quote, only organization capable of performing the mission required. In July, Miller and his group began performing over the new Allied Expeditionary Forces program, which was managed by the BBC

Starting point is 00:07:10 out of England. They also began broadcasting radio signals into German-occupied Europe. One of their shows was Music for the Vermacht, and Miller would read scripts phonetically written in German, even though he didn't know the language. For months, they performed in England and toured various air bases. By November, Miller had requested that the radio operations be moved from England to France, which was approved. The band had to record 80 hours of music that could be played while the operation was being moved, in addition to all the live broadcasts that they were doing. But on December 12th, they had completed everything, and Miller was to fly to Paris before the rest of his band. He was scheduled to fly standby in December 13th, but it was canceled due to weather.

Starting point is 00:07:52 On December 14th, another flight was canceled due to weather. Miller became anxious and found that a small single-engine bush plane, a Nordun UC 64A Norseman, was scheduled to fly from Paris on the 15th, carrying Lieutenant Colonel Norman Bissell. Bessel invited Miller to join him, and the two, along with the pilot, John Stuart Morgan, took off from the RAF Twinwood Field near Bedford England at approximately 155 p.m. The plane and its passengers were never seen again. The next morning, the Battle of the Bulge started, and the military became preoccupied with stopping the German counteroffensive. No one realized that Glenn Miller was missing until December 18th.

Starting point is 00:08:34 A search and rescue operation was conducted, but they found nothing. Miller's wife was notified of his disappearance on December 23rd, and the public was informed on December 24th. Miller was posthumously awarded a bronze star, and there is a memorial forum at the Cambridge American Cemetery in England and at Arlington National Cemetery in Washington, D.C. The Glenn Miller Army Band continued to play until 1946 when its members were discharged. That same year, his family authorized the creation of a new Glenn Miller Orchestra, which would operate under that name. In 1945 and 1947, albums of his music were released,

Starting point is 00:09:09 which hit the top of the charts. In 1954, a movie titled The Glenn Miller Story was released with Jimmy Stewart in the starring role. The Glenn Miller Orchestra reformed in 1956, and it's still playing today. The question of what happened to Glenn Miller and the plane he was on has always remained. Something I've noticed, and I'm sure that many of you have noticed as well, is that whenever a well-known person dies unexpectedly, there are always conspiracy theories that will appear soon after. The disappearance of Glenn Miller was one of the first cases of celebrity death conspiracies. One of the first rumors to spread was that Miller didn't in fact die in a plane crash. He died in Paris while visiting a bordello and of a heart attack. The army, not wanting the embarrassment of this fact to become public, simply said that he disappeared.

Starting point is 00:09:53 There was, of course, no evidence to support this. Another conspiracy theory that spread was that Glenn Miller was on a secret mission to Germany to negotiate the surrender of Hitler. Supposedly, Hitler had heard his radio broadcast and enjoyed them and would only negotiate with Glenn Miller. While in Germany, he was imprisoned or tortured by Nazis. And again, there's absolutely no evidence for this either. A 2001 documentary claimed that Miller's plane was the victim of friendly fire. A group of bombers returning from Germany dumped their payload over the English Channel,

Starting point is 00:10:25 and one of the bombs accidentally hit Miller's plane. This was based on the testimony of one navigator in one of the bombers who claimed to have witnessed it. Beyond this one witness, who never said anything until decades later, there is no other proof. Moreover, the Army records of the timing of the flights don't match up, and other crew members from that mission claimed that visibility was so bad that they could barely see their wingtips, which is why the mission was scrubbed in the first place. So what really happened? In 2017, a historian by the name of Dennis Sprague released the results of a multi-year study

Starting point is 00:10:58 into the disappearance of Glenn Miller on behalf of his family. One of the key pieces of evidence he found was the diary of a 17-year-old plane spotter near Redding, England, by the name of Richard Anderton. He identified Miller's UC-64A Norseman in the direction it was flying, which made the friendly fire theory impossible. The route was not a typical route to Paris, which, may have indicated that the pilot was off course. The pilot, John Stuart Morgan, was not certified to fly using just instruments, which would have been necessary given the low visibility on that day.

Starting point is 00:11:32 Spray concluded that the most likely explanation was one of or a combination of two things. The first was simply that of pilot air. The pilot was lost, couldn't see, and flew the plane into the ocean. The other is that the cold conditions that day may have caused the wings to ice over and possibly the engines to freeze up. The UC 64A had a known problem with its carburetor in icy conditions. Now, this isn't a scandalous as the other theories, but it at least fits the known facts. The remains of Glenn Miller and the aircraft he disappeared in have never been found,

Starting point is 00:12:05 and at this point they probably never will be. The disappearance of Glenn Miller was just the first of several tragedies involving airplanes and musicians, a list that includes Buddy Holly, Stevie Ray Vaughn, Patsy Klein, Otis Redding, Richie Valens, Alia, Ricky Nelson, Jim Croce, John Denver, and three members of Leonard Skinner. The music of Glenn Miller may not be listened to today

Starting point is 00:12:27 like it was in the past, but his disappearance was still a very significant event at the time. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Peter Bennett and Cameron Kiefer. Today's review comes from listener Jane Austen runs over on Apple Podcasts in the United States. They write,

Starting point is 00:12:49 Delightful. If you see someone driving down the road, mouth a gape, eyes all astonishment, and hear them muttering, No way, that's amazing. You've just seen me listening to an Everything Everywhere Daily podcast. Well, thanks, Jane. Just be careful when listening to the show. If your face shows those expressions too many times, it just might become permanent. Remember, if you leave a review or send me a boostogram, you two can have it right on the show.

Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The Disappearance of Glenn Miller

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