If you think of great band music in the 1930s and 1940s you will probably think of Glen Miller with hits like Moonlight Serenade, Chattanooga Choo Choo and In the Mood.
This is the 80th anniversary of his disappearance.
It is strange that someone so well-known at the time and so
well remembered has a large mystery attached to his last journey.
It was very cloudy, there was heavy rain, and it was foggy,
Glen Miller is reputed to have said we will never get off the ground today. His
manager Don Haynes said the fog and rain could be cut with a knife. Most
airports across Britain were shut that day the 15th December 1944,
however a single engine Noorduyn Norseman takes off and disappears into the
clouds. The plane and Glen Miller the great band leader is never seen again.
The Norseman plane was a Canadian designed aircraft and
entered service in 1936. They would be used by the Canadian Air Force and
United States Army Air Force.
As he was the greatest music star of his day the conspiracy
theories quickly started. Even now 80 years on we don’t know why he took off on
that day or what happened.
One idea was that he was shot down captured and tortured by
the Nazis, another that he was shot down by friendly fire or even that his
plane was hit by a jettisoned bomb. A fleet of 139 Lancaster bombers was
returning from an aborted mission due to the weather and were dropping their
bombs into the English Channel. Could one of these had struck his plane? We
don’t know.
The pilot maybe not that experienced, didn’t have the
confidence to say that it was too dangerous to fly that day. The mystery will
probably never be solved or will it?
Maybe someday in the future we might learn the true story of
the last flight of the great band leader Glen Miller.
www.theramblingastronomer.co.uk
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