This is article is part of a series:
- The Day the Music Died – The Glenn Miller Story Intro
- The Day the Music Died – Part 2: The Aircraft
https://imodeler.com/groups/imoder-at-the-movies-1964926360/forum/topic/the-day-the-music-died-part-2-the-aircraft/
- The Day the Music Died – Part 3: The Diorama.
https://imodeler.com/groups/imoder-at-the-movies-1964926360/forum/topic/the-day-the-music-died-part-3-the-diorama/
I actually had been toying with the idea to build the plane Glenn Miller was last seen in for some time, before David
@dirtylittlefokker started this group. The particular kit, the Modelcraft Noorduyn Horseman UC-64A is somewhat illusive and reviews indicate it’s not much to look at. I’ll just blame it on Tom Cleaver
@tcinla, and his most recent posts of “Music to Model by”.
Alton Glenn Miller (March 1, 1904 – December 15, 1944)
Glenn Miller was the best-selling recording artist from 1939 to 1943, leading one of the best-known big bands. In just four years, he scored 17 number-one records and 59 top ten hits - more than Elvis Presley (38 top 10s) and the Beatles (33 top 10s) did in their careers.
In 1942, at the peak of his civilian career, band leader Glenn Miller decided to join the war effort, forsaking an income of $15,000 to $20,000 per week in civilian life. At 38, Miller was too old to be drafted and first volunteered for the Navy but was told that they did not need his services. Miller then wrote to Army Brigadier General Charles Young. He persuaded the United States Army to accept him so he could, in his own words, "be placed in charge of a modernized Army band". After he was accepted into the Army, Miller's civilian band played its last concert in Passaic, New Jersey, on September 27, 1942, with the last song played being "Jukebox Saturday Night" featuring Harry James on trumpet.
Miller reported on October 8, 1942, to the Seventh Service Command as a captain in the Army Specialist Corps. Miller was soon transferred to the Army Air Forces serving as assistant special services officer for the Army Air Forces Southeast Training Center at Maxwell Field, Montgomery, Alabama, in December 1942.
Miller initially formed a large marching band that was to be the core of a network of service orchestras. His attempts at modernizing military music were met with some resistance from tradition-minded career officers, but Miller's fame and support from other senior leaders allowed him to continue his efforts and led to the forming of his 50-piece Army Air Force Band. In 1944, after the Allies recaptured Paris from the Germans, General Eisenhower asked Miller to head up a joint British-American radio production team, to perform for troops and to record for broadcast back home.
Miller would take the band to England in the summer of 1944, where he gave 800 performances. While in England, now a Major, Miller recorded a series of records at EMI owned Abbey Road Studios. The recordings the AAF band made were for propaganda broadcasts by the Office of War Information. The music was used by World War II AFN radio broadcasting for entertainment and morale as well as counter-propaganda to denounce fascist oppression in Europe.
During Miller's stay in England, he and the band were headquartered in a BBC Radio office at 25 Sloane Court in London. A bomb landed three blocks away and Miller decided to relocate to Bedford, England. The day after he departed London, a V-1 flying bomb demolished his former office, killing at least 70 of his former office-mates.
As early as September 1944, a plan had been developed and approved to move Major Miller and the Band to Paris once broadcasting facilities and logistics could be arranged. The plan was to make the band available for personal appearances with the ground troops on leave in the Paris area. Until now, the Miller band had only been available for air force units and others stationed in England. The war was going so well at that point there was already talk of the orchestra being sent back home in the spring of 1945 and then being sent onward to the Pacific Theatre.
In late November, band member Lt. Don Haynes flew to Paris to make arrangements to find suitable quarters for the group. In Paris, he ran into an 8th AAF Service Command staff officer that he and Glenn had become acquainted with at their Milton Ernest Hall dining facility in Bedfordshire. This was Lt. Col. Norman F. Baessell. Baessell was a frequent traveler to and from AAF facilities in France and Belgium and he had a hotel room in Paris.
The schedule for the orchestra to travel from Bedford to France was set for Saturday, December 16. Lt. Don Haynes was scheduled to fly ahead of the orchestra to firm up their living accommodations. Glenn was trying to arrange for the orchestra’s French stay to be extended, and wanted also to confirm further details of radio and concert logistics. He was not pleased that the accommodation plans had not been completed, and apparently Lt. Col. David Niven (the actor) was also not pleased and he ordered Miller to come ahead of the band instead of Haynes to work things out. Miller switched Haynes’ travel so he could fly ahead and then Haynes would accompany the band several days later after Miller firmed up their arrangements. Glenn’s travel orders called for him to depart aboard a scheduled Air Transport Command flight on or about Thursday, December 14. The weather on Wednesday, December 13 was problematic and all flights were canceled. The same thing happened on Thursday. At lunch that day, Baessell told Haynes that he planned to fly to Paris the following morning and that he could take Miller along with him. Hayes called Glenn in London, putting Baessell on the line and as Baessell explained it, even if the ATC service resumed on Friday, Glenn would be bumped by officers with higher priority. Baessell told Miller that there would be a break in the weather and he was confident they would reach Paris Friday afternoon. Glenn accepted the invitation and asked Haynes to come and pick him up in London. That evening, the three men had dinner together and played poker with several other officers.
Miller spent the last night before his disappearance at Milton Ernest Hall, near Bedford. On December 15, 1944, he boarded, with Lt. Col. Baessell a C64 Norseman (44–70285) piloted by F/O Stuart Morgan. The plane departed from RAF Twinwood Farm in Clapham, on the outskirts of Bedford on Runway 23 at 1:55 p.m. British Summer Time, and disappeared while flying over the English Channel.
Almost from the moment the world learned Miller had gone missing, conspiracy theories began to emerge.
The three most prominent theories over the years:
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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. (More than a dozen witnesses saw Miller board the plane on the 15th with Baessell.)
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He made it to Paris, where he died of a heart attack in a bordello. (This was concocted by Nazi propaganda chief Hermann Goering and broadcast only after the Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Force announced Miller’s death on Dec. 24.)
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The small plane he was on was destroyed by bombs jettisoned from Allied bombers passing overhead on their way back from an aborted mission over Germany. (In order for Miller’s plane to have been taken down by a flight of Lancaster bombers, time would have had to shift by an hour and the small plane would have had to be 20 degrees off course. This theory grew out of a tall tale told by one of the Lancaster pilots in a bar in South Africa in 1984. Flight logs and discovery shows that another plane actually was accidentally bombed.)
According to Dennis Spragg, a senior consultant to the Glenn Miller Archive at the University of Colorado Boulder, the plane was flying low because of poor visibility. Contrary to popular myth, the flight conditions were not foggy, as depicted in the film “The Glenn Miller Story.” It was a “casual” flight in a plane model that had been recalled due to defective carburetor heaters, but it was at the end of the line behind combat planes and bombers on the repair list. Heavy clouds aloft forced the pilot to fly VFR and relatively close to the water where the temperature was below freezing. When the fuel lines froze, the engine stopped, giving the plane's pilot about eight seconds to react before it plunged into the water.
Spragg cites military documents to back his claims, some of which have been in the public realm for decades, but were previously not inspected by Glenn Miller researchers. Spragg has written a book on the subject, titled “Glenn Miller Declassified”. https://www.amazon.com/Glenn-Miller-Declassified-Dennis-Spragg/dp/1612348955/ref=as_sl_pc_qf_sp_asin_til?tag=dm0184-20&linkCode=w00&linkId=1cafe0d325985e4366561d7ffaf0fe85&creativeASIN=1612348955dm0184-20
Of interest is an article from 11 January 2012. BBC News - https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-berkshire-16517128
The article tells of a 17 year old plane spotter in 1944, working at an airfield in Woodley, Reading who logged a UC-64-A type aircraft passing to the east in a south easterly direction. Spragg states "I went back and consulted the records for what would've been the route of the flight. I worked out flight times and the speed of the aircraft and worked out that he probably saw the airplane to his east at eight or nine minutes past two in the afternoon." All speculations of the flight going to the east of London, traveling across the channel en route to Paris are voided. Below is an image depicting a close approximation of the route taken my Miller. Bombers returning from Germany would have more likely been on the north east side of London.
The plan is to build a diorama featuring the control tower from Twinwood, the plane and maybe a vehicle or two.
Still have a few builds on the bench and need to do a little more research so this one probably won’t start until late November or later.
MTC
James B
