Season 11 Episode 2 | 54m 41s | Video has closed captioning.
In 1944, bandleader Glenn Miller boarded a plane for Paris and was never seen or heard from again. Can the History Detectives find out what happened?
Aired: 07/08/14
TUKUFU ZUBERI: His music was the soundtrack for a generation.
But on Christmas Eve 1944, the world heard stunning news.
NEWS ANNOUNCER: Major Glenn Miller,
the well-known American bandleader,
is reported missing.
They never found a body.
They don't really know what happened.
Whht!
He was gone.
ZUBERI: Was he accidentally shot down
by the British Royal Air Force?
MAN: Just happened to be Glenn Miller
in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Did his aircraft crash in bad weather?
KAIAMA GLOVER: Would ice accumulation actually be enough
to bring the Norseman down?
Or was his disappearance tied to a secret plan
to overthrow Hitler?
[ man speaking in German on recording ]
It starts with Duke Ellington, and it ends with a plot
to assassinate the Fuhrer.
On this edition
of History Detectives Special Investigations,
we dig beneath the official story...
This area is a center for a lot of covert activity.
track the final moments of Miller's missing flight...
There's about a 15-mile discrepancy.
and unearth long-buried military files...
Wow!
as we answer the question:
What really happened to Glenn Miller?
[♫]
History Detectives Special Investigations
We have us an investigation!
Glenn Miller disappears during World War II.
A major mystery.
Yeah, I mean, think of the Beatles, Bob Dylan,
the Rolling Stones.
This guy, Glenn Miller, was every bit as big
as those guys were in the 1940s.
It's hard to imagine he could've just disappeared
- without a trace.
- Yeah, poof, he's gone.
Yeah, I mean, he takes off from an air base in England
on the way to Paris, and his plane just vanishes.
Presumably, it crashes into the English Channel,
but, you know what, nobody ever found the plane.
WES COWAN: Strangely, there has never been an official published report
on what the military believe happened to Miller that day.
Instead, there are unanswered questions, speculation,
and fragments of information.
I found something a little odd.
You guys might want to take a look at this.
It's a PR document
from the Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Force.
Notice anything about that date?
24th December, 1944.
He disappeared on the 15th of December.
Why would they wait -- what is that, like nine days
before they make an official announcement
that he's disappeared?
Exactly.
I'm thinking that there's something
at least a little bit unusual if not to say downright fishy
about that delay, don't you think?
And we know that Miller was kind of afraid of flying.
The weather was really bad that day.
Why would he have gotten into that plane
to fly over the English Channel?
It's stuff like this that has led to all sorts
of conspiracy theories over the years.
These include wild tales that Miller was found dead
in a Paris brothel or secretly returned alive
to the United States.
Here's another one.
This guy Hunton Downs, The Glenn Miller Conspiracy.
In this one, Glenn Miller is part of a secret plot
to overthrow the Nazi government.
Well, listen to this.
"He'd be flown to Berlin, where the undercover insurgents
would have taken over the radio facilities."
One theory is that Miller had been planning
to meet dissident German army officers
and broadcast subversive messages to the German people.
Then all of a sudden the German populace
would overthrow the Hitler government, right?
You know, the idea that Glenn Miller was some sort of spy
for the government, it sounds far-fetched,
but there's precedent for that.
Think about Josephine Baker.
Same time, same war,
and we know she was in North Africa --
traveling, entertaining --
with secret messages written on her sheet music.
- I never heard that.
Really?
- Absolutely.
And here's another theory:
the British government did their own investigation
because they were concerned that he possibly was killed
by friendly fire.
- Oh, I haven't heard that one.
- Yeah.
I say we break this down
and divide the task up and conquer, right?
Absolutely.
Now, one of us is going to have to go to England.
And I'm going to volunteer to do that.
You get to go?
Yeah, somebody's got to do the hard work here.
Well, I'm going to take this spy business seriously.
I'm really intrigued by this friendly-fire theory.
Well, let's stay in contact,
and let's take this investigation international!
- We've got a plan.
- All right.
[♫]
[ horns honking ]
ZUBERI: I'm in England, where Miller was stationed
when he vanished.
In 1942, at the height of his popularity,
the 38-year-old bandleader
volunteered for military service.
His 50-piece dance orchestra
played to hundreds of thousands of GIs
in the United States and wartime England.
Some of the theories for what happened to him
seem unlikely or far-fetched.
Is it possible to set the record straight
and solve this mystery after more than half a century?
My first stop is Twinwood Farm airfield
just outside of Bedford.
- Hey, John, how you doing?
- Tukufu, nice to meet you.
My pleasure.
I've been able to track down a surviving relative
who lives in England, Glenn's nephew, John Miller.
He's agreed to meet at a place that holds
both sadness and mystery for his family.
This is the place where my uncle Glenn took off from
on his last flight.
John was only a child when his uncle vanished.
As was the case for tens of thousands of wartime families,
there was a knock on the door in the middle of the day.
I remember actually when we were notified.
A guy came out -- I was about that tall --
and I was under orders not to open the front door.
I did.
I opened the door, and here's this line of brass buttons
disappearing over a khaki cliff.
It was the worst possible news.
His uncle Glenn was missing in action.
Now, how did that affect your family?
My father took it very hard,
and of course the rest of the family took it hard.
And not knowing was... was really --
I think that was really the toughest part of it all.
Forty-two years old, Helen Miller
was Glenn's college sweetheart.
The couple had two young adopted children,
Steven and a daughter, Jonnie.
Yeah, it was tough.
It was tough on a lot of families.
For a year, Helen wrote to the Army Air Force
for more information.
She'd heard rumors Glenn had been in a prisoner of war camp, but the military said he'd simply failed to arrive
at his destination and now was presumed dead.
Herb Miller couldn't accept
that his brother had simply vanished
and that there appeared to have been no official inquiry.
He even thought that Glenn may have been
returned to the United States.
My father actually looked for Glenn for years.
Herb believed his brother had gotten cancer
and had quietly been spirited home for treatment.
Glenn was a very dapper guy.
But Glenn had lost so much weight,
his tailor-made uniforms hung on him.
It could've been because he was ill from all the smoking.
My father, he even went up to Oakland
to see a fellow who was in the veterans hospital,
and because there was an Alton G. Miller there.
And what did he find?
He found somebody that wasn't Glenn.
But he never really accepted the fact that he was gone.
John suggests his family's skepticism
was the result of grief and a lack of hard information.
Do you feel that the questions,
the issues surrounding his death have been answered?
Not even close.
Not even close.
With no full official accounting
of what had happened,
the Miller family had been left clutching at straws.
They never found a body.
They don't really know what happened.
He was gone.
Just -- whht!
-- gone.
[♫]
COWAN: I'm going to start
with some old-fashioned detective work
and retrace Miller's steps.
What are the known details and chronology
from the day he vanished?
You know, there's a lot of confusion and misinformation
about exactly what happened to Glenn Miller.
I need to find out the basic facts.
The night of December 14, 1944, the day before he vanished,
Miller had gotten a phone call.
For several days, he'd been attempting to fly to Paris.
He was preparing a big Christmas Day concert
for the soldiers who'd fought their way from Normandy
through Nazi-occupied Europe.
But the bad weather had kept him grounded.
On the phone that night, according to this account
by Miller expert Geoffrey Butcher,
was his band manager, Don Haynes.
He told Miller that an acquaintance,
Lt.
Colonel Norman Baesell,
was heading to Paris the following day.
Baesell had offered Miller a ride.
The next morning, December 15th,
Miller, Don Haynes, and Norman Baesell
arrive at Twinwood.
The weather's still frigid, but shortly after lunch,
Baesell's plane and pilot arrive from nearby Alconbury.
As the three men approach the waiting C-64 Norseman,
its engine is running and Miller is clearly nervous.
The book says, "It was so cold that Haynes walked over
to look at the thermometer on the wall of the control tower.
It was 34 degrees."
At this point, Miller is starting to maybe express
some doubts about whether this is a good idea,
and he says, "Haynesy, even the birds are grounded today."
Despite his concerns, Miller gets on the Norseman
along with Baesell.
Already onboard is pilot John Morgan.
It's just amazing, considering these facts,
that Miller, who was afraid to fly in the first place,
would get on a plane in this weather.
The Norseman taxis towards the runway.
And at 1:55 in the afternoon...
Miller, Baesell, and Morgan take off,
heading for the English Channel.
It's a gripping account,
but there's nothing in these details
that explain what happened to Miller.
As I read on, I make a discovery.
Yeah.
It's a story about the so-called friendly-fire theory.
In the mid-1980s, a former Royal Air Force navigator,
Fred Shaw, made the extraordinary claim
that he may have seen Glenn Miller die.
Shaw said a British Lancaster had dropped its bombs
over the English Channel, and that one had destroyed
a C-64 Norseman, the same kind of plane
that Glenn Miller had been flying.
It seems a leading British researcher named Roy Nesbit
had investigated.
This may be our first solid lead.
I do think that it's worth looking at
this theory of friendly fire,
that the RAF accidentally dropped bombs on Miller's plane.
ZUBERI: Working with the information Wes uncovered,
I've tracked down Roy Nesbit in the town of Swindon,
about 80 miles east of London.
When war broke out, I was just 18 years old.
Roy is a former RAF navigator who flew some 50 missions.
He says that 40 years after Miller vanished,
the British Ministry of Defence had been alerted
that they might have accidentally killed him.
They had received a report emanating from South Africa
that the navigator in an Avro Lancaster
returning from an aborted raid
had seen a Norseman dive into the sea
in what was called the Southern Jettison area.
Wait, he actually saw it go down?
Yes, he saw -- so he said -- this Norseman dive into the sea.
According to Nesbit, the historical branch
of the Royal Air Force quietly suggested he investigate.
They thought I might be able to answer it,
and because I'd been a navigator during the war,
I was familiar with the research in the Public Record Office.
The British authorities were concerned.
The idea that they might've accidentally killed
America's leading musical celebrity
was still potentially embarrassing.
I think they wanted to get it off their backs, quite frankly.
This was south of Beachy Head.
The alleged eyewitness, Fred Shaw,
was then living in South Africa.
The investigator, Roy Nesbit, arranged for him
to be interviewed on camera.
Shaw described how, that December 15th,
his four-engine Avro Lancaster had set out
to bomb the German city of Siegen.
But the weather had been terrible,
and the operation was aborted midflight.
The Lancaster needed to get rid of its bombs
before he could land, and Shaw was curious.
Roy's plane had been carrying giant bombs
known as blockbusters or cookies
designed to firebomb German cities.
4,000-pound high explosive bombs.
That's a pretty big bomb.
It's a very big bomb indeed.
It was designed to blast all the buildings.
This was a daylight raid, and Shaw wanted to watch
as the big bombs were jettisoned.
Shaw said he was stunned at what happened next.
He recognized the Norseman
because he had trained in Canada,
where the Norseman was a familiar sight,
so he could recognize it immediately.
He said the blast wave from one of the exploding bombs caused the small plane to crash.
Shaw claimed it was years later,
after watching the 1954 movie The Glenn Miller Story,
that he put two and two together.
- Good morning, Glenn.
- Morning, colonel.
Sure appreciate your giving me the lift.
He suddenly realized he may have seen Glenn Miller die.
Shaw went public with his astonishing story.
Roy Nesbit's job was to see if the story lined up
with the known facts.
So what you needed to do is know
when those planes had turned around, what time, and then
what time Glenn Miller's plane left the air strip.
I had to work out the speed
in which it would reach the Jettison Zone.
I had to work out the time the Lancaster involved landed
and work it backwards to the Jettison Zone.
I needed to plot it all out.
What is it that gave you the qualifications
to make these kinds of calculations?
Well, I had been a navigator,
a navigation instructor.
I still had all my old instruments.
I knew exactly how to do it.
The log book had the plane returning at 14:20.
Nesbit believed this was in Greenwich Mean Time.
Local time was an hour later, 15:20, or 20 past 3:00.
This is a crucial bit of information.
The bombers had been flying at 225 miles an hour.
Working backwards, Nesbit calculated
they would have been over the Southern Jettison Zone
38 minutes earlier, at 18 minutes to 3:00.
Miller's Norseman had left Twinwood
at 5 minutes to 2:00.
Its estimated airspeed was 158 miles an hour.
It was close, but Roy's calculations
showed Miller's plane would've arrived at the Jettison Zone
at exactly 18 minutes to 3:00.
That was just as the bombers were leaving the same location.
So once they coincided,
it seemed to me very significant indeed.
So why didn't Shaw and the gunner report this
at the time it happened?
Because it was an aborted raid, and in an aborted raid,
there was no debriefing.
But even if they had reported it,
I don't suppose anything would've been done.
I saw things in the war that I tried to report
and nobody took any notice.
So they would've had no reason to report this.
No.
If they had seen people in a dinghy
they thought were Allied, then certainly air-sea rescue
would've gone out, and they would've insisted
when they got back they were our men in a dinghy.
They had to do something about it.
But there was no possibility of any survivor
from that aircraft; it had gone in the water.
A once skeptical Roy Nesbit now believed
the Glenn Miller mystery had been solved.
Either a direct hit or shock wave
from a jettisoned bomb had brought down Miller's plane.
It was also discovered that this was the only Norseman
in the air at that time.
So what else could it be?
It had to be Glenn Miller.
So this is just a tragic case of friendly fire.
It is indeed.
It just happened to be Glenn Miller
in the wrong place at the wrong time, poor chap.
I mean, it's sheer damn bad luck.
It's one of the tragedies of war.
[♫]
- Hey, Tukufu.
- Hey, Wes, how you doing?
Yeah, good.
So, uh, how did your interview with Nesbit go?
I'm going to tell you, he has this theory
about friendly fire, and it's pretty tight.
So any doubts about the theory?
It's a little odd Shaw didn't report the crash.
And he waited years to talk about it?
But Roy Nesbit's calculations seem thorough.
Look, I'm open to an alternative explanation,
but it is going to have to be very compelling.
Well, look, I may want to do some due diligence on my own.
Well, let me know what you find.
Right.
Okay, later.
COWAN: I've been digging into this friendly-fire theory
and made a discovery online.
It's a news story from 2012.
The headline is "Glenn Miller clue found
in Reading plane-spotter's log."
Huh.
The news relates how, in January 2012,
77-year-old Sylvan Anderton arrived
at the Antiques Roadshow in England
with a journal that had been kept by his brother.
During the war, Richard Anderton had worked
at a military base in Woodley, near Maidenhead.
He was an avid plane-spotter.
A plane-spotter is a guy
who's just spotting and logging in planes
that were flying over just for a hobby.
So it says that on December 15, 1944,
he logged in a Norseman that was passing on the horizon
and flying east to southeast.
Oh, look at that.
It's a picture of the log itself
that the guy brought in to the Antiques Roadshow.
The curious teenager records the sights and sounds of war
over his corner of southern England
that cold December morning.
And Friday, December 15, 1944,
a morning force of U.S. bombers heard.
Oh, hey, look at that.
"Afternoon: one Norseman going east to southeast."
Nesbit had told Tukufu that Miller's Norseman
was the only Norseman that had taken off
over southern England that day.
Richard Anderton had clearly wondered
whether he had witnessed Glenn Miller's final flight.
Inside the journal were news clippings
about Glenn Miller's disappearance.
You know, this is all new information.
This gives me an idea.
According to Nesbit, Glenn Miller took off
from Twinwood, which is near Bedford,
flew down through Bovingdon, hit the Thames,
and then headed southeast over Beachy Head.
Nesbit had plotted the most direct route
while still avoiding London.
But the possible sighting by Anderton
has the Norseman making the turn towards the channel
in a different location.
Now, our Antiques Roadshow guy
saw what he says was Glenn Miller's plane,
or what we assume was Miller's plane, in Woodley,
which would've meant that from Twinwoods,
the plane would've had to go through Maidenhead
and then southeast to Beachy Head.
If I'm correct, there's about a 15-mile discrepancy
between Nesbit's route and our Antiques Roadshow guy's route.
And that discrepancy may be critical.
Nesbit's margins had been very tight.
The Lancasters were leaving the Jettison Zone
as Miller's aircraft arrived.
If Miller's journey is extended west,
it would've taken some six minutes longer
to get to the Jettison Zone.
The bombers would've already jettisoned their bombs
by the time Glenn Miller's plane had flown by.
I'm growing increasingly skeptical
of the friendly-fire theory.
Why had the crew never reported the crash?
One splash, and that was it.
Why had Shaw waited decades before coming forward?
And the new information in the journal
adds a question mark over the timing.
I'm not sure that the friendly-fire theory holds up.
But unlikely as it is,
Kaiama's onto something even stranger.
GLOVER: One of the seemingly far-fetched theories
about the disappearance
is that Miller had been killed on a secret mission
behind enemy lines
and the plane crash was a cover story.
The Glenn Miller Conspiracy alleges Miller
had been attempting to meet dissident German army officers.
According to the book, the plan was to broadcast
"surrender" messages to the war-weary German population.
It sounds hard to believe, but it's true
that in World War II, Josephine Baker had carried
secret messages behind the lines in North Africa.
The book doesn't have a lot of evidence to back its claims.
It's long on speculation and short on facts.
Frankly, I'm not very impressed.
But even the strangest theories may have a grain of truth.
Check out this photo I found.
It's a chronology of Miller's concerts in England in 1944.
In one of the images, I find a slightly surprising figure.
This is a picture of David Niven, the British film star.
And the caption here says that Niven and Miller
were close colleagues.
David Niven was the celebrated actor who had left Hollywood
and rejoined the British army during the war.
How long has this been going on?
GLOVER: In the photo, Niven is at Glenn Miller's
first British concert in Bedford, England.
Niven is onstage.
He's described as a senior official
in charge of broadcasting
and a, quote, "close colleague of Miller's."
But backstage, Niven had been a high-level member
of a British commando unit called Phantom.
The elite secret reconnaissance force
used shortwave radios to mark enemy positions,
sometimes parachuting deep behind enemy lines.
After D-Day, he was given a new job:
working closely with the American forces.
According to this history, Niven was "able to make use
of his invaluable liaison skills,
learnt during his time with Phantom, to the full.
Under the direct command of American General Raymond Barker,
Niven was to travel extensively in France and beyond,
communicating between the Allied commanders."
If Niven had been involved in secret war work,
is it possible that Glenn Miller had been, too?
And had this somehow been connected
to Miller's disappearance?
I found something else.
"Recordings for the Office of War Information
to be broadcast over
the American Broadcasting Station in Europe."
The Office of War Information.
[ bugle plays ]
The Office of War Information
was the U.S. military's propaganda arm.
I knew part of Miller's job
was broadcasting to GIs and civilian audiences,
but the label says these recordings
are for the German army, the Wehrmacht.
Let's have a listen to this.
[ jazz standard plays ]
MILLER: Good evening.
I mean...
[ continues speaking in German ]
Have I said that right?
[ woman on recording speaks in German ]
Oh, yes.
[ Miller continues in German ]
Ilsa, you better announce our first number in German.
It's "In the Mood."
[ woman speaks in German ]
Now, the gist of what they're saying
in this kind of scripted conversation is that --
well, Glenn Miller is saying, "I don't speak German very well,
and I think I should let the flower speak for me."
And then this woman corrects him and says,
"Well, I think you mean to say
you should let the music speak for you."
It's a very strange little dialogue.
GLOVER: The tapes are interesting.
The recordings were only released in 1995,
more than 50 years after Miller vanished.
I want to look into them and see if we can find out
more about Glenn Miller's military career
as more than just a bandleader.
[♫]
ZUBERI: The photo Kaiama found of Glenn Miller and David Niven showed them in Bedford, some 45 miles northwest of London.
So based on her lead, that's where I've come next.
I'm meeting historian David Fowler
just outside of town at Milton Ernest Hall.
He says Miller and his band had arrived here
in June of 1944.
Over there on the grass is where the full band played
in July 1944 to an audience of something like 1,600.
Fowler says their new home had an obvious appeal
for a bandleader making radio broadcasts.
Bedford was the largest center for the BBC out of London.
There were seven studios, and Glenn Miller used one of those.
But Bedford was more than the wartime home
for the BBC orchestras.
This area, Bedford, is a center
for a lot of covert activity.
There were a lot of military, and not just American,
but British, Polish, French.
There was a British group that trained recruits
from German-occupied countries in spying and sabotage.
There were code breakers and units producing propaganda.
The building behind us, it was taken over
by the American military.
There was a grass landing strip
just the other side of the river.
Why would there be a need for a grass landing strip
when a couple of miles away,
there were a couple of military airfields
where it was easy to land?
And Glenn Miller was right in the middle of it.
The security was exceptional here,
as opposed to other American bases around the area.
Something was going on.
So it was more than normal.
It was more than normal.
Fowler says Niven's job was to be liaison
between the Miller band, the BBC, and the military.
So he and Niven were working together.
Yes, well, he was, to some extent,
Miller's boss.
Not that he would order him around,
but he was effectively the boss.
It was David Niven who had brought the Glenn Miller band
to Bedford
after a harrowing experience in the British capital.
This, at the time, was when, from the middle of June,
V-1s had been landing in London.
The V-1 terror weapon was a drone
aimed at civilian populations.
Following D-Day, Hitler had launched hundreds
of these so-called vengeance weapons at England,
killing thousands.
If you could hear the noise, you're all right.
When the noise cuts out, it was going to dive for the ground.
You got under the nearest table, bomb shelter,
anywhere safe.
The band was not very happy.
They were billeted down in Chelsea.
Because of the V-1s coming in at night,
they were spending their time in the bomb shelters.
So Glenn Miller wanted out of London.
Niven pulled strings and got the band out of London
on a Sunday.
The next day, a V-1 hit the building
where they had been staying.
Some 25 American military had been killed by that bomb,
and about 50 other civilians had been killed.
So had they stayed a couple of days longer,
there would've been no Glenn Miller band.
Fowler's not sure if Niven had brought Miller to Bedford
because of its role as an intelligence center
and whether this had any part in Miller's disappearance.
The curious thing is that David Niven, in his biography,
makes no mention of Bedford, makes no mention of Miller.
So there's a lot of unanswered questions.
Had Niven overseen Glenn Miller's
German-language broadcasts?
Was he involved in the production
of Glenn Miller's German LPs?
I think we're uncertain about that.
I think you need to speak to the guy called Les Back,
who's got a lot more information on propaganda of that era.
Okay, well, thank you very much.
[♫]
It's clear that Bedford had been a center
for covert operations, but it's not clear
if Glenn Miller had been drawn into this secret world.
I'm here to meet Professor Les Back
at the Bedford Corn Exchange.
This historic site
is where Glenn Miller held his first concert in England.
- How you doing?
- I'm good.
Right down there was where the orchestra
of the Allied Expeditionary Force would've been set up.
They'd have had a full swing orchestra down there.
Les says the concert here made history.
It was the Miller band's first concert
in wartime England.
David Niven in front in uniform.
It's the soundtrack of the war.
America's leading music star had been introduced
by Britain's top actor.
It's a key moment where celebrities
started to get conscripted into the military endeavor.
They become conscripted to the cause, and I think
this is really pivotal; this didn't happen in World War I.
Les explains how Glenn Miller had become
an important weapon in this propaganda blitz.
In the 1930s, jazz and swing
had seized the imagination of audiences
in England, America, and Germany.
Although Germany had gone to war,
love of Miller's music remained.
There's some fantastic accounts
of pilots in the Luftwaffe manically retuning their radios
to catch a few bars of Glenn Miller
before they dropped their bombs on London.
The strategists
in General Eisenhower's Psychological Warfare Division
now had a special target: young Germans
still in love with Glenn Miller's music.
They were called Swing Kids.
And here's a picture of a group of young men
dressed in Anthony Eden hats with silk scarves.
This isn't the SS or the Hitler Youth.
These are Anglophone kids who are tuning into the BBC
to get some Glenn Miller and other music.
They're also completely sort of taken in by the style.
So these are Germans during the war.
These are German jazz-loving kids during the war.
Look at the styles here!
This could be Harlem.
It's not.
It's in Hamburg.
The Nazis recognized the danger
from Miller and his fans.
They were branded as subversive and degenerate
because of the music's roots in black America.
Scores of Swing Kids were sent to concentration camps.
One young jazz lover described his experience.
When the SS officer comes to interrogate him,
he says, "The beginning of your treason is Duke Ellington.
It starts with Duke Ellington, and it ends with a plot
to assassinate the Fuhrer."
Les says while Niven had been a commando
earlier in the war, by late 1944,
his celebrity was more valuable to the war effort.
And Glenn Miller's war work was pure propaganda.
The music spoke for itself.
He's not a spy.
He's not pretending.
He's being Glenn Miller, but in a uniform,
playing that incredible music to raise spirits
amongst those people who love that music on the Allied side
in Britain and in America,
but also he's using that music that's loved on the other side.
COWAN: It's a fascinating look
at Miller's life in the military,
but it seems clear his propaganda work
wasn't responsible for his death.
It's a little frustrating.
In some respects we're back at square one
and no closer to figuring out what happened.
I want to go over the details of the final hours
and see if we missed anything.
One thing I still don't understand:
why had the plane taken off
when the weather was so atrocious?
The University of Colorado Boulder
is home to the Glenn Miller Archives.
That's where I'm meeting Ed Polic,
who's written about Miller's last days in England.
I've got a couple questions that I'm hoping you can help me with.
He says the key to understanding events
at Twinwood that day is the senior officer
who is also heading to Paris, Lt.
Colonel Norman Baesell.
Now, tell me about him.
He was on the plane, too, right?
Yes, he was the one who invited Glenn Miller
to join him on this flight.
Ed explains that as Miller and Baesell waited
for their flight that December morning,
both men were desperate to get to France.
Glenn was anxious to get over to Paris.
He's flying over to make sure all the billeting is correct,
but also to make sure that all the broadcasting
and recording facilities were set up for the band.
And Norman Baesell was responsible at that time
for setting up advance bases for airplane repair depots
on continental Europe.
Baesell was a top official,
responsible for keeping the war machine running.
As the conflict in Europe reached its bloody climax,
he had deadlines to meet and an air force to supply.
He was used to commanding people,
telling them what to do, getting things done.
He was the go-to guy to get a project done.
So he was doing lots of flights between Europe and England.
And he was spending most of his time in Europe at that time.
The scheduled pilot was a young flight officer,
John Morgan.
He was not yet qualified
for night flying or instrument flying,
but he was very confident for visual flying.
And he'd made the channel crossing more than once?
He'd made it several times with Norman Baesell.
Ed says that earlier that morning,
Morgan had actually been denied permission to fly to France.
Morgan submitted a flight plan to Paris
that was rejected because Paris was fogged in.
But over the phone, the hard-driving Baesell
gave the junior pilot a direct order.
Baesell told him to fly to Twinwood Farm,
that he was cleared to go to Paris.
Now, wait a minute, Baesell said he was cleared,
but Baesell, did he have official clearance?
No, he did not.
But he was used to having his way,
so he sort of forced Morgan to go on the flight.
And because he was Morgan's superior officer,
Morgan couldn't say no.
He couldn't reject it, right.
At about 1:40, Morgan arrived at Twinwood
from his base at nearby Alconbury.
The Norseman flew in below the clouds, over the field,
came down and landed.
Miller and Baesell boarded the waiting Norseman,
but Ed says the bandleader likely had no idea
that he was playing Russian roulette.
He was getting into a single-engine plane
that had not been cleared for a flight over the channel.
I'm going to ask you to put yourself in Glenn Miller's shoes
and he's waiting for that little single-engine airplane
to come out of the fog.
What was that like?
What do you think he was thinking about?
Ed says that Miller's feelings were clear.
He was terrified.
They walked up to the airplane, threw their bags in,
Miller looked around and said, "Where are the parachutes?"
Norman Baesell turned to him and said,
"What the hell, Miller, you want to live forever?"
And they closed the doors,
and the airplane taxied and took off.
And that's the last that they were seen.
The unauthorized flight helps explain the delay
in announcing Miller's disappearance.
The officials didn't know that Miller was on the plane
until three days later, on the 18th of December,
when the band came over
and there was no Miller to greet them as they expected.
The Air Force, Army Air Force, did a search,
tried to figure out what happened with the plane.
And there was another reason for the delayed announcement.
On December 16th, Hitler launched an attack
that threatened to change the course of the entire war.
The Battle of the Bulge started the next day
after Miller took off, and it gathered all the headlines.
A quarter of a million of Hitler's best soldiers
had thrown themselves at the American forces
in the Ardennes region of Belgium and Luxembourg.
Bad weather kept Allied aircraft grounded.
Finally, on December 23rd, the skies cleared,
and U.S. bombers returned to the air,
pounding the Germans.
But it had been a desperate fight.
Some 19,000 Americans lay dead.
Miller, as important as he was to the war effort
from the entertainment standpoint
and morale standpoint, was minor
compared to the Battle of the Bulge.
So there was a time delay.
They spent several more days trying to figure out
what happened to them.
Even as big as Glenn Miller was,
the Battle of the Bulge was a bigger newspaper story.
Most certainly.
And then on December 24th, Christmas Eve,
the day before this concert that the Miller band
was going to broadcast from Paris,
they announced to the public that Glenn Miller was missing.
Ed, it seems like that Miller's disappearance
has spawned all these weird conspiracy theories,
that he was actually killed in Paris
and his body was misidentified
and he was shipped back to the U.S. and got lost.
There's absolutely no truth in that story.
And there are many other stories that there's no truth in.
I think the key thing as to why these conspiracies crop up
is because there was never any recovery
of part of the airplane or the bodies.
All these wacky theories,
they must drive Glenn Miller's family crazy.
They most certainly do.
It's a real disservice to this patriot.
Glenn Miller, in 1942, before he enlisted,
was making $15-20,000 a week.
And he gave all that up, he left his family,
to go raise the morale of the troops.
The country did well to him,
and he wanted to give something back.
All these crazy theories are not doing a service
to this patriot.
He loved his family, loved the United States,
he loved his music.
Before I leave, Ed suggests I speak with another researcher
who's preparing a book on Miller.
Dennis Spragg has done a lot of research and information
in both the British and U.S. records.
Thanks for the lead.
GLOVER: While Wes looks up Dennis Spragg,
I want to take a closer look at the aircraft Miller flew in.
The weather had been bad,
but there were other aircraft in the sky that day.
What exactly had gone wrong?
Had there been some sort of mechanical failure?
Going over everything we know so far,
I can't stop thinking about Glenn Miller's plane
flying in bad weather.
Was the pilot up to it?
Was the plane?
The C-64 Norseman was a Canadian aircraft
designed for the rough conditions
of the Canadian bush.
When war came, its reputation earned orders
from the U.S. military as a trainer and a transport.
I found this website that lists a lot of the Norseman planes
and what happened to them.
[♫]
The plane saw service around the world
before and after the war.
We don't have a lot of precise details,
but there are some reports of engine failure.
A common denominator seems to be winter weather.
Here are just a few.
November 15, 1945: crashed and destroyed,
Schweinfurt, Germany; weather blamed.
A month later, December 10:
crash landing due to fuel starvation and weather
at Donnemarie-en-Montois, France.
1949: a forced landing due to engine failure,
possible carburetor ice.
Another in 1955: crashed into trees and burned,
possible carburetor ice.
Perhaps such accidents are just the result
of hard flying in winter weather.
But maybe not.
Is it possible that something about the Norseman
contributed to Glenn Miller's disappearance?
I've come to the British Columbia Aviation Museum
to meet pilot Steve Wall.
In the 1980s, Steve flew a WWII-era Norseman
in the Canadian bush for five years.
- WALL: Clear!
- MAN: Check!
[ engine turns over slowly ]
I want to see if he can help me figure out
what might have gone wrong that December day in 1944.
Welcome aboard, Kaiama.
Come on in.
So, Steve, we know that Flight Officer Morgan,
the pilot who was flying the plane
Glenn Miller disappeared in,
he wasn't particularly experienced
with flying on instrument.
Now, when would it be called for flying on instrument?
Well, the Norseman is normally flown
under visual flight conditions.
He'll find himself on instrument
whenever he loses reference to the ground.
So an inability to really negotiate
and deal with the instruments, could that, too, be a factor
in bringing the Norseman down?
There's a lot of pressure involved
in sustained instrument flying.
This is a very basic panel with very limited aids to help you.
So it would, again, then be a question of experience
and figuring out what to do in a crisis situation.
It could be difficult.
The C-64 Norseman was powered
by a nine-cylinder piston engine.
Steve says it was a workhorse.
But winter weather kept pilots on their toes.
The engine, being a carbureted engine,
is susceptible to carburetor icing.
The carburetor feeds the fuel into the cylinders,
but if it ices up, the engine is starved
and can shut down.
Steve says ice could target the entire plane.
Ice can accumulate on any forward-facing surface,
including the struts, lifts, the outriggers,
the landing gear.
The propeller can accumulate ice.
And would ice accumulation actually be enough
to bring the Norseman down?
Oh, a Norseman caught in a severe icing condition
with airframe icing and carburetor icing,
it could certainly bring it down.
Given your experience flying in bad weather conditions
and knowing what we know about what Glenn Miller's pilot
would've been facing, what conclusions can you draw?
Steve says it's impossible for him to know
exactly what happened.
But the three men who had left Twinwood that day
had headed into a witch's brew of potential problems.
Well, I can only imagine that a low-time instrument pilot
finding himself in poor visibility,
extremes of icing conditions,
perhaps mechanical difficulties with the aircraft
could find himself with compounding problems
that would add up to a very challenging flight.
[♫]
COWAN: Had mechanical problems brought the Norseman down?
We've been able to run down the researcher
Ed Polic mentioned.
Dennis Spragg is preparing a book on Miller
based on records boxed up at the end of the war.
He says that as the weather worsened,
Baesell's decision to ignore air traffic control
now became critical.
The thick fog and low clouds that would allow Hitler
to launch the Battle of the Bulge the next morning
was advancing over the continent.
Miller was heading directly into it.
As he flew to the south, the ceiling dropped
from 3,000 feet to 2,000 feet down to about 1,500 feet.
It was getting worse and worse and worse.
Pilot John Morgan wasn't instrument-rated,
and so he couldn't fly through the cloud to get above it.
And in addition, he was entering conditions
that were in freezing.
Dennis says as temperatures fell,
the Norseman revealed its Achilles heel.
The carburetor heaters on the aircraft
had been recalled.
There were eight Norsemen prior to this accident
that were documented as having carburetor heater problems.
The danger of carburetor icing that Steve Wall mentioned
and Kaiama had tracked
had dogged the Norseman from the start.
And they weren't the only plane
that had carburetor heater problems.
Dennis says he discovered that the carburetor heater
had been problematic on a number of U.S. planes.
This part was defective in B-17s, B-24s,
and other combat aircraft.
Okay, so you're saying that the plane that Miller took off in
probably had one of these defective carburetors in it.
Not probably.
They all did.
They had all been fitted with the same part
right out of the factory.
Whoa!
I want you to now read this.
"Carburetors are no longer being supplied by the States.
Consequently, the only source of supply
is from repairable carburetors turned in to repair depots."
So they're saying there aren't any.
Correct.
The bottom line is that they didn't have
enough of these things to put in all the planes.
And they prioritized the combat aircraft
over the utility aircraft.
The big bombers which also used the carburetor
were needed to carry the war directly to Hitler.
So the B-17 and the B-24 would've gotten
the repaired carburetors or any new carburetors
that came in, so Miller's plane obviously
as a utility, everyday plane didn't get top priority.
Correct.
Did Morgan know that he had a defective carburetor
or was he warned about these defective carburetors?
- The pilots knew.
- The pilots knew.
Oh, yeah, they were told.
And the maintenance crews knew.
They all knew, because they received the recall note.
They had a memo saying,
"Your carburetor heater could act up.
Take precautions."
So, all right, what happened?
The airplane got out over the water,
the ceiling was dropping, the temperature was at freezing,
the engine ices up, and all of a sudden
as they're flying along, more than halfway across the channel,
there's a loud noise like a bang, like a backfire.
The engine stops, the airplane turns nose-down,
and in eight seconds it's in the water.
- Just as simple as that.
- Yes.
And that's exactly what the United States Army Air Force
has concluded three weeks after the accident.
Dennis discovered the military had conducted
a full inquiry.
It convened on January 20, 1945,
at the request of Major General Orvil Anderson,
the deputy commander of the Eighth Air Force.
The inquiry concluded that Miller's aircraft
had been lost due to a likely combination of factors:
pilot error, bad weather, and possible engine problems.
And how come this information never came out?
The reason is the regulations of the Army Air Forces at the time.
Miller never informed his boss
he was taking an unauthorized flight.
That had been a mistake and serious breach of protocol.
But ironically, a regulation written to protect families
meant Miller's wife never learned
exactly what the military believed had happened.
In a presumed fatal accident or where there was evidence,
they did not send messages back to relatives, next of kin,
saying Johnny or Freddy, your son,
made a mistake, got lost, or killed himself.
You have a perfect storm of human error,
mechanical failure, and weather,
not independent of one another -- all three --
and the plane goes down.
COWAN: Disappearance of Glenn Miller, what a story, right?
GLOVER: Yeah, but what a tragedy.
Imagine, his wife, his children, they never saw him again.
So what happened to Major Glenn Miller?
Do we finally have an answer?
He was making propaganda.
We know that.
But was he on a secret mission when he died
somewhere behind enemy lines?
That isn't true.
All of these conspiracy theories
that have surfaced over the years are just hogwash.
But the British theory about the accident
being caused by friendly fire,
well, that has a little more credibility.
Look, I'll give you that, but Nesbit is getting
this testimony from these crew members 20, 30 --
how many years after the actual event took place?
Why wait until now?
Well, this is the weak part of Nesbit's theory.
I think it's a cut-and-dried issue.
Glenn Miller unwittingly gets onto a ticking time bomb.
He got onto a plane with a defective carburetor.
He flew out over the English Channel
in worsening weather conditions.
The carburetor froze up.
The plane crashed into the English Channel.
End of story.
Yeah, but why would Glenn Miller have gotten on that plane?
Glenn Miller didn't know anything
about a defective carburetor.
What Glenn Miller knew was that he had an important concert,
his first concert in liberated Paris,
and he was going to play before these guys
who had fought their way from the beaches of Normandy
to liberate Paris.
I think we come away with something else
from this story, too, right?
A new appreciation for Glenn Miller
not just as an artist, not just as a musician,
but as a man who really gave his all for the war effort.
And like so many of the young men of that generation,
he paid the ultimate price.
[♫]
Find behind-the-scenes material
and information on investigative techniques
at pbs.org/historydetectives.
History Detectives Special Investigations
is available on DVD.
To order, visit shopPBS.org or call 1-800-PLAY-PBS.
Captions by LNS Captioning Portland, Oregon www.LNScaptioning.com
History Detectives Special Investigations
