Loch Ness Monsters and Raining Frogs The Worlds Most Puzzling Mysteries Solved (15 page)

At the end of the 1930s, just as the Second World War was breaking out in Europe, Glenn Miller's band introduced America to the new, unique style of brass-band music they had been working on for a number of years. It was a smooth, upbeat sound that struck an instant chord both with the middle-aged and with optimistic youth learning how to jive and swing.

Radio stations across America played Glenn Miller records all the time, and Hollywood was quick to sign up the new star and his band. Two films were released:
Sun Valley Serenade
in 1941 and
Orchestra Wives
in 1942. The Glenn Miller Orchestra were the Beatles of their generation (or, for the younger reader, Oasis; and if you're thinking of the Arctic Monkeys, then you should be in bed by now). By early 1942, America had entered the fray, joining the Allied forces in their efforts to repulse the Nazis. Miller enlisted later that year, on October 7. On completion of his basic training, he transferred to the Army Air Corps; his first military assignment was to gather another orchestra, the Glenn Miller Army Air Force Band, with a brief to entertain Allied troops in Britain. He was delighted to be back in touch with his old Hollywood friend David Niven, whose job it was to arrange entertainment for the troops across Europe.

Eighteen months later, the D-Day landings signaled the start of the liberation of Europe, and by November 1944, Paris was finally free of German soldiers. Even though Allied bombers were still pouring across the English Channel on their way to tackle targets farther into Europe, the Parisian party was now in full swing. David Niven organized a six-week tour for the Glenn Miller Orchestra that was to begin in the French capital on December 16, 1944. The band was due to arrive on the sixteenth, but Miller wanted to travel earlier to attend what he called a “social engagement.” Arrangements were duly made for him to fly from the airfield at Twin wood Farm near Bedford in a small American-built, propeller-driven craft called a Noorduyn Norseman that would be piloted by John R. Morgan. Lieutenant Don Haynes, a show-business agent drafted into the U.S. Army Air Force to manage the Glenn Miller Orchestra while on tour, drove his famous charge from London to RAF Milton Ernest Hall to prepare for his cross-Channel flight the following day. According to Haynes, John Morgan arrived in the Norseman at Twinwood Farm at 1:
40 P.M.
, collected Miller, and, in spite of poor weather conditions, took off again at approximately 1:45
P.M.
This was the last anyone saw of Glenn Miller: he had vanished from the world and into the history books.

The alarm was raised when he failed to meet up with Don Haynes and the band in Paris a day later. After a frantic search of the entire city's likely haunts, the Glenn Miller Orchestra had to play the show without their famous bandleader, announcing that “Major Miller cannot be with us tonight.” Nobody ever saw him again, or at least could prove that they had. The puzzle began in earnest when, just three days later, the United States military announced his death, which was extraordinary in itself, given that in the confusion of a recently liberated France many people went missing for much longer periods, often “absent without leave” (AWOL).

The question was, Why would officials make such a final announcement so soon after the musician, albeit a world-famous one, simply failed to show up at a few concert performances? Pete Doherty does that all the time these days and nobody declares him dead as a result. It was a question Helen, Miller's wife, also asked, but not until over a year later, in February 1946, when Colonel Donnell wrote to inform her that her husband had been flying that day in a combat aircraft, not the Norseman, and that the plane had taken off from Abbots Ripton airfield near Huntingdon in Cambridgeshire, many miles from where Haynes had left Miller.

The mystery deepened when it was claimed that the flight had been bound for Bordeaux, far from Miller's intended destination. There was no explanation of how he would be traveling the remaining distance within France. In fact, no further information was given at all, and so speculation raged about whether Miller had lied about his movements to his friends and the rest of the band, changing his stated plans at the last minute, or had gone AWOL, or even that he had been shot down by enemy fire. A military cover-up seemed increasingly likely. Imagine that: the military might not be telling the truth about something!

After the war, John Edwards, a former RAF officer, set out to prove Miller
had
been on board the Norseman, for which all he needed was a copy of the official accident report from the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis. But he drew a blank: that office maintained the records had been “lost in a fire,” while the Department of Records in Washington, D.C., denied such a file had ever existed. Edwards's efforts to prove the absence of a military cover-up began to convince him that the reverse must be true.

What he now wanted to know was why. And when some documents were finally discovered, they were found to be written illegibly, the signatures blurred and indecipherable. This, strengthened by the fact that the military had initiated no search of any kind for the missing bandsman, began to fuel speculation that the U.S. government knew exactly what had happened to Glenn Miller and had known it immediately, hence the early announcement of his death. After all, imagine Oasis singer Liam Gallagher going missing on a morale-raising visit to troops in Iraq, there being no search for him, and the British government firmly announcing he was dead only three days later, but without producing a body. Furthermore, no records of what had happened to him would ever be released, while every government agency claimed to know nothing about it.

What
is
known is that the Norseman had crashed into the sea, as it was discovered by divers in 1985 six miles west of Le Tou-quet on the northern coast of France, but there was no evidence that Miller, or indeed anyone else, was on board at the time, and the reasons for the accident remain unknown. It was revealed that the propeller was missing, but not when or how it fell off.

In 1986, the novelist and former RAF pilot Wilbur Wright took up the challenge and asked the U.S. Air Force Information Center in California for the accident report on the missing Norseman. He was informed that no accident had been reported on that day and, in fact, no Norseman aircraft had been reported as missing throughout December 1944. Another mystery and another lie, as Wright subsequently discovered that eight Norsemen had been reported missing that month.

Wright then repeatedly wrote to every U.S. State Department and records office he could find, requesting information relating to the disappearance of Glenn Miller. But he was ignored until his letter of complaint to President Ronald Reagan encouraged a response out of the Military Reference Office. They confirmed there were several documents relating to the accident, but then failed to produce them. However, other departments continued to insist all records had been lost, destroyed, mislaid, or had never existed in the first place. When Wright telephoned George Chalou, the man in charge of the records office, to complain, he was alarmed by the latter's reaction during the conversation. According to Chalou (in a taped conversation with Wright): “They will never get them [the files] back either. Those files have been under lock and key for years and that is where they will be staying.” There had been a cover-up after all.

After extensive research, Wilbur Wright's eventual conclusion was worthy of one of his own novels: that Glenn Miller probably had arrived in Paris the day before his band, where he was met by David Niven. Niven then set off to dramatically rescue Marlene Dietrich from the clutches of the Nazis, while Miller holed up in a brothel in the Parisian red-light district awaiting their return. Unfortunately, with time on his hands (and plenty of alcohol), he ended up becoming involved, and badly injured, in an unseemly bar brawl. The American authorities were horrified to discover the world's best-loved musician in a seedy brothel with a fractured skull. Miller was immediately airlifted back to Ohio, but he later died of his injuries.

Wright proposes three main strands of evidence. The first is based on the fact that David Niven makes no mention of Miller in his auto biography
The Moon's a Balloon
, published in 1971, despite the pair knowing each other well. Wright sees this as indicating Niven's awareness of the incident and his decision, for the sake of good grace and the Miller family honor, never to mention it again. (Indeed, he never even mentioned the name Glenn Miller to either his biographer, Sheridan Morley, or to his second wife.)

The second line of “proof given by Wright is that Helen Miller soon moved to Pasadena, California, where she bought a burial plot with room for six graves. As her immediate family consisted of five people—herself and her son, daughter, and parents—it is therefore assumed that Miller himself occupies the last grave. When asked, the cemetery administrators denied Miller's presence but took a full fifteen months to reply to Wright's letter of inquiry, suggesting to Wright that both the family and local gravediggers were in on the cover-up. For him the clinching piece of evidence is that in 1954, a Parisian prostitute—still plying her trade opposite Fred's Bar, the brothel bar where Miller was alleged to have been drinking the night he went missing—revealed that her then boyfriend had told her what had happened to Glenn Miller, confirming the whole Parisian brothel story.

If that all seems a bit thin—and let's face it, it does—that's because the authorities only needed to remove one word and the whole cover-up would have been completely unnecessary. Think about the difference between reading “Glenn Miller died after being involved in a fight in a brothel bar” and “Glenn Miller died after being involved in a fight in a bar.” That's it, no inter national outcry, just a respectable period of public mourning. No shame would have been heaped upon the Miller family and no extensive and complicated cover-up story would have been necessary. But if Wright's hypothesis is true, how could all those people who would need to have been involved for this story to have any basis in fact—including any witnesses, the French police, military personnel, flight crew, medics, doctors, nurses, administrators, gravediggers, family, friends, and probably Inspector Clouseau himself—have not failed to give the game away hundreds of times over the ensuing fifty years? Instead we have the silence of a film star, a six-berth burial plot, and the testimony of a Parisian tart well past her sell-by date.

My vote goes with the recent evidence that has emerged that Miller was on board the Norse man after all. The new story has a much more convincing explanation of the Americans’ fear of the truth coming out. According to this theory, Miller boarded the Norseman at Twinwood Farm on December 14, 1944, just as Don Haynes said. The aircraft took off at 1:45
P.M.
By 2:40
P.M.
it was traveling through what was known as a jettison zone in the English Channel, an area set aside for returning bombers to drop their undischarged loads safely into the sea before they crossed the south coast. A fully laden bomber exploding on landing could wipe out an entire air base, so the jettison zone was stringently enforced. The only bomber to use the jettison zone that afternoon is known to have crossed it at around 3:40, at the time Miller should have been landing in Paris, and so it has never been thought relevant to the Miller mystery before. However, it has only recently been noticed that while the Miller flight would have been charted on Greenwich mean time (GMT), all military flight operations were logged using Central European time, which is one hour later. Therefore the bomber would have released its load directly over the area where Miller's Norseman would have been flying through, at a much lower altitude and in the opposite direction. Did the Americans hit their favorite musician with some not-so-friendly fire? There is certainly strong witness evidence to suggest they did, including some of the military aircrew themselves.

Fred Shaw, a navigator in one of the bombers, claimed, in an interview for an amateur film, that he saw the bombs his aircraft jettisoned strike a small plane beneath him. According to Shaw: “I had never seen a bombing before so I crawled from my navigator seat and put my head up into the observation blister. I saw a small high-wing monoplane, a Noorduyn Norseman, underneath us.” Mr. Shaw claimed he didn't make any connection to the disappearance of Glenn Miller until he saw
The Glenn Miller Story
in 1956. “There is a kite down there, I told the rear gunner, there's a kite gone in,” Shaw con tinued. “He then replied, yeah, I saw it too.” At the time authorities had dismissed his claims as a publicity-seeking exercise, but Shaw remained adamant he had seen the small plane spiral out of control as a result of being hit.