Glenn Miller wearing an American military uniform.
D. Hess/Getty Images/Hulton Archive
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D. Hess/Getty Images/Hulton Archive
It was Christmas Day, 1944, when people heard the news: Glenn Miller, one of music’s biggest stars, had vanished.
He had boarded a military plane from Britain, bound for Paris, where he was scheduled to perform for American troops during World War II. But neither crew nor passengers made it across the English Channel.
There is no wreckage of Glenn Miller’s plane, and no definitive answers. Eighty years ago this week, he disappeared without a trace.
Miller wasn’t even supposed to be on board the small prop plane. But, anxious to get going after multiple weather delays, he’d hitched a ride without authorization. It took days for anyone to realize he’d gone missing.
The rest of his band eventually arrived in France. And on Christmas Day, as news of Miller’s disappearance hit the papers, they played their show — without the man who had brought them together in the first place.
The king of swing
Glenn Miller was the human embodiment of the big band era.
By 1939, his orchestra had become America’s most popular musical act. Hits like “In the Mood” and “Chattanooga Choo Choo” sold millions of copies, earning Miller the first-ever gold record and acclaim from his peers.
But behind Miller’s success, a world war was raging. So in 1942, at the height of his civilian stardom, he traded his suit and baton for a uniform, enlisting as a captain in the U.S. Army Air Forces.
“There’s a lot of swell guys in the outfit I’m going in,” he said to the audience during a performance, “and maybe all of us can get together again after this thing’s over.”
That outfit was the American Band of the Allied Expeditionary Forces — more commonly known as the Army Air Forces Band — an ensemble of 50 musicians founded at Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower request.
As bandleader, Miller’s mission was to boost the morale of American soldiers stationed across Europe with music. The band spent up to 18 hours a day recording and performing at dozens of military bases.
“This was a lot of hard work, a lot of hard times, a lot of bad, dangerous traveling, and it wasn’t clear that he was going to make it as a band leader,” NPR’s Noah Adams said in 2002.
But Miller’s efforts paid off. For soldiers, the band became a symbol of American resilience, and of home.
The Army promoted Miller to the rank of major. And just a few months later, on Dec. 15, 1944, he vanished.
What happened to Glenn Miller?
Peanuts Hucko played clarinet in the Army Air Forces Band. He recalled the state of confusion at Orly Airfield in France when they arrived three days behind, and with Miller nowhere to be found.
“It was a mess, really a mess,” he told Noah Adams. “[There were] all these soldiers all around and the weather was terrible. It was raining and [there was] mud all over the place.”
A missing plane might have raised more alarms, but the day after Miller took off, the Battle of the Bulge started in nearby Belgium.
“The planes [were] going out, and you see these soldiers, they’re sending them back to the States [in] their stretcher cases,” Hucko said.
Several hours after the band touched down, Army lieutenant Don Haynes, their manager, tried to find information on Miller’s whereabouts. Eventually, he gathered the men.
“‘Guys, I don’t know how to tell you this, but Glenn is unofficially missing. He never arrived in Paris,” Haynes said.
Hucko remembers the room falling completely silent.
“It’s still unofficial,” Haynes said, “but it doesn’t look good.'”
The plane, it’s now speculated, encountered freezing temperatures and heavy cloud cover. A navigational or mechanical failure likely downed it in the Channel. But next to Amelia Earhart, the fate of that aircraft remains the 20th century’s most notorious aviation mystery.
A musical legacy
Glenn Miller was 40 years old when he disappeared. But his star didn’t fade.
The Glenn Miller Story, a dramatization of his life starring Jimmy Stewart, was a box office smash in 1954. And while the Army Air Forces Band played its last concert in 1945, its successor, The Airmen of Note, continues to perform Miller’s songs for fans around the world.
Joe Jackson is a former member of the Airmen of Note.
“And today we have kids in the audience standing up and cheering when they hear ‘In the Mood,’ ” Jackson told NPR in 1994. “And I think as long as the music’s being played, I don’t see it declining. I think it’s always going to be around, and future generations will be coming up and standing up in the audiences, cheering just as loud.”
