The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries (60 page)

In fact, a careful study of the facts reveals that the solution of this particular mystery is obvious.

The man most responsible for the perpetuation of the myth about the
Mary Celeste
was Conan Doyle: it was he who insisted that the ship’s boats were still intact. This small inaccuracy made an otherwise simple problem virtually insoluble.

In fact, once we know that the boat was missing, we at least know one thing for certain: that the crew abandoned ship, apparently in great haste – the wheel was not lashed, an indication that the ship was abandoned in a hurry. The question then presents itself: what could have caused everyone on board to abandon the ship in such a hurry?

Captain James Briggs, the brother of the
Mary Celeste
’s skipper, was convinced that the clue lay in the last entry in the log, for the morning of 25 November 1872: it stated that the wind had dropped after a night of heavy squalls. James Briggs believed the ship may have become becalmed in the Azores, and started to drift towards the dangerous rocks of Santa Maria Island. The gash-marks found along the side of the
Mary Celeste
– which the British investigators had claimed were deliberately made by the ship’s mutinous crew – may have been made when she actually rubbed against a submerged rock, convincing the crew that she was about to sink.

Oliver Deveau proposed that during the storms some water had found its way from between decks into the hold, giving the impression that the ship was leaking.

Another popular explanation is that a waterspout hit the
Mary Celeste
. The atmospheric pressure inside a waterspout is low; this could have caused the hatch-covers to blow open and forced bilge water into the pump well; this would have made it look as if the ship had taken on six to eight feet of water and was sinking fast.

There are basic objections to all these three answers. If the ship scraped dangerous rocks off Santa Maria Island, then the lifeboat would have been close enough to land on the Island. Since no survivors were found and no wreckage from the lifeboat, this seems unlikely.

Oliver Deveau’s theory has a great deal more in its favour. There have often been panics at sea. When Captain Cook’s
Endeavour
was in difficulties off the coast of eastern Australia the ship’s carpenter was sent to take a reading of the water in the hold. He made a mistake, and the resulting hysteria might have ended with the crew leaving the ship if
Cook had not been able to control the panic. On another occasion a ship which was carrying a hold full of timber dumped the whole lot into the sea off Newfoundland, before anyone realized that it would be next to impossible to sink a ship full of wood. But it seems unlikely that a captain of Briggs’s known efficiency would allow some simple misreading to cause a panic.

The objection to the waterspout theory is that, apart from the open hatches, the ship was completely undamaged. If a waterspout was big enough to cause such a panic, it would surely have caused far more havoc.

In any case, the real mystery is why, if the crew left the
Mary Celeste
in the lifeboat, they made no attempt to get back on board when they saw that the ship was in no danger of sinking.

Only one explanation covers all the facts. Briggs had never shipped crude alcohol before, and being a typical New England puritan, undoubtedly mistrusted it. The change in temperature between New York and the Azores would have caused casks of alcohol to sweat and leak. The night of storms, in which the barrels would have been shaken violently, would have caused vapour to form inside the casks, slowly building up pressure until the lids of two or three blew off. The explosion, though basically harmless, might have blown the hatches off the cargo hold on to the deck in the positions in which Deveau later found them. Convinced that the whole ship was about to explode, Briggs ordered everyone into the lifeboat. In his haste, he failed to take the one simple precaution that would have saved their lives – to secure the lifeboat to the
Mary Celeste
by a few hundred yards of cable. The sea was fairly calm when the boat was lowered, as we know from the last entry in the log, but the evidence of the torn sails indicates that the ship then encountered severe gales. We may conjecture that the rising wind blew the
Mary Celeste
into the distance, while the crew in the lifeboat rowed frantically in a futile effort to catch up. The remainder of the story is tragically obvious.

34

Glenn Miller

The Strange Disappearance of a Bandleader

On 24 December 1944, an official press release stated that “Major Alton Glenn Miller, Director of the famous United States Army Air Force Band, which has been playing in Paris, is reported missing while on a flight from London to Paris. The plane in which he was a passenger left England on 15 December and no trace of it has been found since its takeoff”.

Glenn Miller’s rise to fame and wealth had not been an easy one. Born in Clarinda, Iowa, in March 1904, he learned to play the trombone at thirteen and helped to pay his way at the University of Colorado by playing with local dance bands. He joined Ben Pollack’s band at the age of twenty and over the next ten years became known in New York as an arranger as well as a trombonist, playing with Red Nichols, Smith Ballew, and the Dorsey brothers. A dance orchestra he organized for Ray Noble in 1934 became popular through its broadcasts, but Miller’s own orchestra, organized in 1937, was a failure. A second orchestra, organized in the following year, did little better.

The breakthrough came in March 1939, when the band played at the Glen Island Casino in a suburb of New York and the audience was overwhelmed with enthusiasm at this new, distinctive, Glenn Miller sound, with its smooth, almost syrupy, brass. Radio broadcasts spread the fever across the country, and Miller was soon a rich man. Although he lacked the sheer inventive genius of other jazzmen of the period – Benny Goodman, Duke Ellington, and Count Basie, for example – the “seamless and rich” perfection of numbers like “Moonlight Serenade” made him the favourite of the American middle classes, while “hot” numbers like “In the Mood” and “Tuxedo Junction” made him popular with a younger generation that was learning to jive. He went
to Hollywood and made two classic films,
Orchestra Wives
(1941) and
Sun Valley Serenade
(1942). During this period he became a friend of actor David Niven – a friendship that, as we shall see, plays an odd part in the mystery of Glenn Miller’s disappearance.

In 1942, as a patriotic gesture, Miller joined the air force. He soon assembled another band and was assigned to entertaining the troops abroad. He was sent to London. David Niven had also joined up – but in the British Army. Since he was a famous show-business personality, he was also given an important post in armed-forces entertainment, and one of his jobs was to organize Glenn Miller’s tours. He was, in effect, Miller’s boss. The man actually in charge of organizing the details of Miller’s tours – hotel and travel arrangements – was Lieutenant Don Haynes, Miller’s former booking agent, now also in the U.S. Air Force.

In November 1944 Niven organized a six-week tour for Miller’s band, starting on Saturday, 16 December. The band was due to fly to Paris on that day. But on 12 December, as Don Haynes and Miller were walking back to their London hotel, Miller told Haynes – according to Haynes’s later story – that he wanted to go a day early because he had a social engagement. Haynes said he would book Miller on a flight from RAF Bovingdon, northwest of London, the usual takeoff point for Continental flights.

The following day, Wednesday, 13 December, Haynes claims he left Miller in London and drove back to Bedford, where the band was housed in billets, to arrange their flight. The following morning, he claims, he ran into Lieutenant-Colonel Norman Baessell, who was special assistant to the station commander at RAF Milton Ernest, near Bedford. Baessell mentioned that he would be flying to Paris the next day – Thursday – and offered Haynes a lift. Haynes declined, saying he would be flying with the band on Saturday, but mentioned that Glenn Miller would like a lift. Haynes telephoned Miller, who accepted the offer; Haynes went to London to collect him and took him back to RAF Milton Ernest.

The next morning Haynes collected Miller and Baessell and took them to the nearby airfield, Twinwood Farm. At about 1:40, their plane arrived – a small American prop-driven plane called a Norseman, piloted by Flight Officer John R. S. Morgan. In spite of appalling weather conditions, they took off five minutes later – and vanished.

We now know what happened to the plane. It flew across the channel toward Dieppe but began to experience engine trouble; the pilot was forced to ditch in the sea only six miles west of Le Touquet, which is some distance north of Dieppe. The plane was located in 1973 and
examined by an independent diver seven years later. Its propeller was missing. This suggested a leak in the hydraulic system, which failed to adjust the blades to the required speed; the propeller “oversped” and probably fell off.

Now as strange as it sounds, no one at the time seems to have realized what had happened. On Monday (the flight was delayed by bad weather) the band arrived at Orly Airport, near Paris, and Haynes was puzzled when Miller failed to turn up to meet them. Haynes spent the rest of Monday, and the whole of the following day, searching Paris – which had recently been liberated – for the bandleader. He finally contacted General Ray Barker, who was in charge of all U.S. military personnel in Paris. Two days later, when the band played its first Paris engagement, the audience was simply told that “Major Miller could not be with the band”. Miller’s death was announced three days later.

That was the story. But Miller’s wife, Helen – the childhood sweetheart whom he had married – didn’t want to believe it. To begin with, she hoped that he had been taken prisoner. And when, after the end of the war, it became clear that this was a forlorn hope, she began instituting inquiries that involved searching war cemeteries, hoping that at least she could find a grave that she could visit. In February 1946 a certain Colonel Donnell wrote in answer to her inquiry to tell her that her husband had not been flying in one of the passenger planes but in a combat aircraft not designed for passengers. This aircraft, he said, was cleared to fly from Abbotts Ripton Field, near Huntington,
to Bordeaux
. Now Bordeaux is long way short of Paris, and Helen Miller must have found herself wondering whether her husband was supposed to walk the extra distance. Of course, the Norseman could have been intended to land at Paris and then go on to Bordeaux; but if so, the clearance would have said as much. The letter concluded by telling her firmly that no further information was available.

The rumor that there had been some sort of cover-up in the case led various researchers to try to track down the official documents. One of these, an ex-RAF officer named John Edwards, dismissed the cover-up theory and set out to prove that Glenn Miller
had
been on board the Norseman when it crashed. It was simply, he thought, a matter of getting the official form – called a 201 – about Miller’s death from the Washington file where it must be kept. But he found it to be a less simple task than he expected. The Records Office in Washington denied all knowledge of the file. The National Personnel Records Center in St Louis said they thought the records had been lost in a fire. It began to dawn on Edwards that
somebody
had a reason for sitting on the evidence.

Another RAF man, Squadron Leader Jack Taylor, decided to have a try. He succeeded in obtaining the MACR (Missing Air Crew Report) but found that the signature was illegible and the typed details so blurred as to be almost unreadable. Two other documents he succeeded in obtaining showed only that no kind of search for Glenn Miller had been instituted at the time. This in itself seemed odd, for the Allies were by then in control of most of France, and there would have been nothing to prevent a thorough search for the famous bandleader.

It was Taylor who approached another ex-RAF pilot named Wilbur Wright, who had become a highly successful novelist and therefore had time to spare. It was true that, by 1986, most of the witnesses were dead; but Wright reasoned that it ought to be straightforward enough to obtain whatever records existed. If there was any difficulty, he could invoke the Freedom of Information Act. And so Wilbur Wright took a deep breath and wrote to the United States Air Force Inspection and Safety Center in Norton, California, for the accident report on the missing plane. The reply stated that they had no record of an accident involving a Norseman on that date. A second letter drew from them the reply that no Norseman airplanes had been reported missing in December 1944. But Wright had a way of checking this – a document called the Cumulative Loss Listing. And this told him that there had been no fewer than
eight
Norseman airplanes lost in December 1944.

Wright began to smell a rat. And when letters to the Washington Records Office, the Army Casualty Division, and the Air Force History department met with similar blanks, one thing at least became obvious. This was not vagueness or incompetence; he was being deliberately stonewalled. Another letter to the Casualty Division in Alexandria, Virginia, brought a fascinating revelation. They admitted plaintively that they had been trying for years to obtain the Glenn Miller file from Washington and had been totally ignored.

Over the next month or so Wright kept up a furious barrage of letters to various agencies. He even wrote directly to President Reagan, asking him to intervene. He secured one grudging admission from Military Reference, admitting that there were several documents in the Miller file and listing them. But the Washington Records Office continued to insist that all documents had been lost or mislaid. In January 1987 Wright telephoned the records office and demanded to talk to the “top man”. He was put through to a Mr George Chalou, and he explained that he was a professional author and wanted to see the Glenn Miller burial file. He added that he had written repeatedly and got nowhere and that the Casualty Division people in Alexandria complained that
Washington would not give them the file. “Right”!, said Mr Chalou, “and there’s no way they’ll get them back either. Those files have been under lock and key for years, and that’s how they’ll stay”. Wilbur Wright, who was recording the conversation, stared at the phone in dumbstruck astonishment. At last he had an admission that the file was being kept under wraps.