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*[ 2 ] It wasn’t long before the Germans unleashed their V-2 bombs, which rendered Bedford as much a target for their strikes as London.

*[ 3 ] Fifth unit two pianos

These units instituted a backbreaking schedule of radio broadcasts and concerts. Miller was on the air thirteen times a week, and his musicians performed seventy-one live concerts during their five-and-a-half month stay in England, leading General Jimmy Doolittle to remark that ‘Next to a letter from home, Captain Miller, your organization is the greatest morale builder in the [European Theater of Operations]. By the time they returned to the United States and were deactivated in January 1946, the band’s members had played an estimated three hundred personal appearances on the continent before more than 600,000 people in slightly less than a year.

While still in England, much of the band’s travel was in their own C-47 air bus. One band member estimated that they spent some six hundred hours in the air, often enduring close calls when pilots had difficulty finding air strips in the dark. Miller, who disliked flying and whose ears would ring in the unpressurized cabin, considered the plane second-rate.

Promoted to major in August 1944, Glenn, was becoming restless; he wanted to get his band to France so they could play for the men marching on Germany. With his health poor and his morale low, he seemed to be developing a touch of fatalism, at one point saying that he believed that he would never see his wife and child again.*[4] ‘I’ve had a feeling for a long time now,’ he said, ‘that one of those buzz bombs has my name on it.’ Then, on November 15, he got the go-ahead he wanted to take his musicians to the continent.

At first, band manager Don Haynes was scheduled to fly to Paris ahead of the musicians to make preparations, but at the last minute Miller, characteristically impatient, decided to go himself. On December 13, one day before his planned departure, the weather was so bad that no military aircraft were making the channel crossing. The following day, however, Haynes ran into a friend, Lieutenant Colonel Norman F. Baesell, who was going to Paris on December 15 in a general’s private plane. He invited Miller along.

As takeoff time approached, rain, poor visibility, and a low ceiling continued to hamper flight schedules. Word was, however, that the weather was clearing over the continent and the plane would be allowed to leave England. As Miller looked at the nine-passenger C-64 Norseman, he was dubious. First, he noted that there was only one motor; Baesell countered that one had been enough for Charles Lindbergh when he flew the Atlantic alone in 1927. Then, after he took his seat he said, ‘Hey, where the hell are the parachutes?’ To which Baesell retorted, ‘What’s the matter, Miller, do you want to live forever?’

When the band arrived in Paris three days later, Miller was not there to meet them. Obviously something had gone wrong. For days the musicians hoped that Miller would somehow turn up, but eventually the truth had to be faced. Glenn was officially reported missing on December 23.

For years afterward, speculation about Miller’s fate centered on the bad weather and the plane’s lack of de-icing equipment. In late December 1985, however, two former members of a Royal Air Force bomber crew came forward with a story that provides the likeliest explanation of the accident that will probably ever surface. They had been aboard one of some 150 Lancaster bombers returning from an aborted raid on Germany on December 15, 1944. Following standard procedure, the crew jettisoned their bombs near Beachy Head on the southern coast of England. But as the bombs exploded, the gunner reportedly saw a Norseman below them fall into the sea, apparently downed by the shock waves. A check of the records at Britain’s Ministry of Defense subsequently confirmed the aborted raid and the return of the Lancasters. Miller, in other words, may have been a victim of that grim military occurrence, ‘friendly fire.’

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