Hello. Welcome to solsarin. This post is about “What happened to Glenn Miller?“.
Alton Glenn Miller (March 1, 1904 – disappeared December 15, 1944) was an American big band trombonist, arranger, composer, and bandleader in the Swing era. He was the best-selling recording artist from 1939 to 1942, leading one of the best-known big bands. Miller’s recordings include “In the Mood”, “Moonlight Serenade”, “Pennsylvania 6-5000”, “Chattanooga Choo Choo”, “A String of Pearls”, “At Last”, “(I’ve Got a Gal In) Kalamazoo”, “American Patrol”, “Tuxedo Junction”, “Elmer’s Tune”, “Little Brown Jug”, and “Anvil Chorus”. In just four years, Miller scored 16 number-one records and 69 top-10 hits—more than Elvis Presley (38 top 10s) and the Beatles (33 top 10s) did in their careers.
In 1942, Miller volunteered to join the U.S. military to entertain troops during World War II, ending up with the U.S. Army Air Forces. On December 15, 1944, while flying to Paris, Miller’s aircraft disappeared in bad weather over the English Channel. He was posthumously awarded the Bronze Star Medal.
D.B. Cooper. Amelia Earhart. Jimmy Hoffa. All prominent Americans whose unexplained disappearances have fascinated and confounded armchair historians and professionals alike—and created fertile ground for all manner of wild explanations and conspiracy theories.
Ditto for Glenn Miller, one of the University of Colorado Boulder’s most illustrious alumni, who was the nation’s most famous big-band leader when he disappeared Dec. 15, 1944, after heading out over the English Channel on a small military plane bound for Paris.
Almost from the moment the world learned Miller had gone missing, conspiracy theories began to emerge like puffs of smoke from the Chattanooga Choo Choo. And they’ve never really stopped, as each new generation discovers the mystery and publishes books and articles purporting to have solved it.
But Dennis Spragg of the College of Music’s American Music Research Center—and Miller’s family—is doing his best to end all the crazy speculation.
“In 2009, Steve Miller, Glenn’s son and a big donor to the Glenn Miller Archive”—the definitive Miller collection, housed at the AMRC—“asked me if I would consider dealing with the latest series of sensationalistic conspiracy books. He said, ‘enough is enough,’ ” says Spragg.
· Miller never boarded the plane, but was assassinated after Gen. Dwight D. “Ike” Eisenhower sent him on a secret mission one or two days earlier to negotiate a surrender from Nazi Germany.
· He made it to Paris, where he died of a heart attack in a bordello.
· The small plane he was on was destroyed by bombs jettisoned from a phalanx of Allied bombers passing overhead on their way back from an aborted mission over Germany.
More than four years—and dozens of trips to Washington, D.C., London and U.S. Air Force archives—later, Spragg is confident he knows what happened: The plane went down in mere seconds over the channel, instantly killing Miller, another officer and a young pilot, likely because fuel lines from wing tanks froze. The steel-framed, wood and fabric plane all but disintegrated, sending its heavy Pratt-Whitney engine plunging to the bottom.
Ironically, as Spragg told the producers of the PBS show “History Detectives,” which will air “The Disappearance of Glenn Miller” nationwide on July 8, that not-so-mysterious conclusion was reached by investigators just days after the plane went down. But documents from the investigation were boxed up after the war, sent to the United States and locked away.
“It was right there all this time, but all the researchers trying to follow the trail of Glenn Miller just didn’t have access to it,” says Alan Cass, founder and curator of the Glenn Miller Archive.
But Spragg, who surely knows more about Miller’s time in the U.S. Army Air Force and his mysterious disappearance than anyone else alive, was as driven as Sherlock Holmes in his quest to find the answers.
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