In a night without "Moonlight Serenade" the king of swing Glenn Miller disappeared

There was no moonlight or even the echo of a serenade when on 15 December 1944 the plane carrying Glenn Miller was lost in the darkness of the night over the English Channel and the sea swallowed up the musician who had invented swing and composed «Moonlight Serenade». From history he passed to legend, from the lights of success to the darkness surrounding his end which immediately took on shades of yellow. The Canadian-built Noorduyn Norseman UC-46 monoplane had taken off from London for Paris, but never arrived there. The single-engine aircraft simply disappeared.

The news was released on Christmas Eve when the American military authorities made it official that Air Force Major Alton Glenn Miller had been missing since December 15th. The next day he was supposed to hold a concert in the City of Light for the Allied troops who had landed in Normandy and liberated the French capital six months earlier, and the news could no longer be kept hidden. He was just 40 years old and world famous.

Volunteered as a captain in the U.S. Air Force

Rich and famous, at the outbreak of the war he was earning the hyperbolic sum of 15-20,000 dollars a week with his music, every concert was broadcast live on the radio and his records were selling like hotcakes: the recording of “Chattanooga Choo Choo” in just a few weeks in 1942 it had exceeded the hyperbolic figure of one million copies sold, earning its author the first gold record in history. Yet Miller had given up all this in order to enlist. The Navy had rejected him because he was too old (38 years old, in 1942), and so he had circumvented the obstacle by proposing to a general the creation of an army band in a contemporary key: they gave him the degrees of captain of the Army Specialist Corps and therefore of the Army Air Force, to give the soldiers who danced to the wave of his songs a few hours of carefreeness, far from the thoughts of fighting against the Germans.

He had taken his assignment with his usual seriousness, so much so that in the summer of 1944 he had given hundreds of concerts in England and for this reason they had been promoted to major there. In his repertoire he had songs, now very classic, such as «In the Mood», «American Patrol», «Tuxedo Junction». In the three-year period 1939-1942 with his innovative wind orchestra had dominated every possible record sales chart. He played live conducting the Army Air Forces Training Command Orchestra and recorded vinyl V-Discs, now highly sought after by collectors, produced by the War Department, in which the music was often preceded by a patriotic speech: the same underlying philosophy of the seven documentaries «Why We Fight», supervised by Frank Capra, to motivate public opinion on the necessity of war against the Axis.

The mystery of the death and the hypotheses beyond the accident: intrigue, capture by the SS, brawl gone badly

The disappearance of Glenn Miller in mysterious circumstances, the failure to find the wreckage of the plane and its remains, have triggered a multitude of hypotheses, some of which are truly imaginative, to go beyond that of a simple accident. According to some theories Miller would have been the bearer of a separate peace proposal to be sent to Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, which would have been opposed by the powerful Nazi counter-espionage SD (Sicherheitsdienst), who would have captured and tortured the musician until he died. Major SS Otto Skorzeny was tasked with countering Operation Eclipse (this is the code name of this alleged secret mission), pursuing the possibility of killing General Dwight Eisenhower through him. Before Miller died, crushed by torture, his body was left in front of a brothel in Pigalle. Precisely where, according to others, he would have instead lost his life as a result of a banal brawl that broke out between the patrons of the meeting house. In both cases, the embarrassment of the authorities would have been evident, so much so that the announcement of the death was delayed for days and the romantic crash of a plane that would never have taken off from London was simulated.

The testimony of an RAF airman: killed by friendly fire

In 2000, the auction of the old RAF Lancaster NF973 on the internet, among the first at Sotheby’s in this way, led to the discovery of the logbook in which flight engineer Deryck Thurman had noted that a small plane, which should not being under the four-engine plane at all and perhaps he had changed his route, he had been hit by bombs in an area closed to traffic because that’s where the planes got rid of their cargo when the missions weren’t successful. The Norseman would have been shot down either by a bomb or by the blast caused by the massive bombardment at sea. Glenn Miller, therefore, would have died due to friendly fire. This story, however, dates back to 1953, when the biographical film in which the musician was played by James Stewart had recently been filmed, but it was not taken seriously, since it was believed that the revelation was either a ploy to arouse curiosity around the film or the initiative of some veteran who wanted to gain easy publicity. This version, in 2001, will be consecrated in a documentary in which the former navigator Fred Shaw reconstructs and reiterates what happened with a statement previously delivered to an amateur recording.

However, the rumor that Miller had indulged in a mercenary adventure in sinful and tempting Paris, even dying in the arms of a prostitute. The tour in Paris had been agreed on December 12th with a very dear friend of the musician, the English actor David Niven, also involved in a uniform in the effort to defeat Hitler through the world of entertainment, who had planned the band’s concerts . The first was for the 16th, but Miller had anticipated the departure despite the adverse weather conditions, in order to attend a reception with Niven. A mystery is why he boarded a small single-engine plane flown by Lieutenant Norman Francis Baessell, despite his notorious distrust of small planes, rather than a more reliable and safe twin-engine transport. On December 16, his absence was simply announced to the public waiting to applaud him: without any other reason, until Christmas Eve. The reticence and delays with which the military authorities handled the case immediately triggered the mystery surrounding the death of Glenn Miller, on the stormy night without “Moonlight Serenade”.