On Dec. 15, 1944, Major Glenn Miller was on a plane traveling from England to France that disappeared over the English Channel. Piloted by John Morgan and also including Lt. Colonel Norman Baessell as a passenger, the plane has never been found. There have been many theories advanced as to what actually happened to Miller, who hastily took the flight to set up details about the transfer of his finest orchestra (the Army Air Force Band) to the recently liberated France.
In Glenn Miller Declassified, Dennis M. Spragg unravels the mystery as much as possible, disproves all of the conspiracy theories, and gives readers a remarkable amount of details.
The book in its ten-page prelude, has an excellent summation of Glenn Miller’s life and career up to time of Pearl Harbor. The rest of this work covers Miller’s remaining three years. He did not have to join the military since he was 37 years old and married, but his patriotism and his desire to do something significant to help the US in the war were major priorities for him. He was originally rejected by the Navy before he joined the Army Air Force and had to fight red tape, bureaucracy, and conservative authorities in order to form his military swing orchestra.
The first part of his group’s evolution found his massive orchestra touring the US, raising money at bond rallies, and broadcasting exclusively for the troops overseas. In June 1944, Miller and his musicians arrived in London where they were kept very busy with broadcasts and live appearances. Glenn Miller’s health was sometimes shaky that year resulting in brief hospitalizations. Due to the endless amount of work that he had in making sure everything ran smoothly, he largely gave up playing trombone.
All of this is covered in Dennis Spragg’s extremely well-researched book along with an endless amount of information about nonmusical matters. In fact, there is so much here about turf wars between the Americans and the British with regards to the radio broadcasts, information about a large number of individuals involved behind the scenes, technical details, and military matters that the Glenn Miller story often disappears for long stretches. I found myself skimming some pages, waiting for Miller to re-emerge. Interesting characters such as Bing Crosby, Dinah Shore, Dwight Eisenhower (a supporter of Miller’s band even though he and the bandleader only met once), General George Marshall, and the actor David Niven (who had a major military career) pop up and add life to the work, but a large part of the narrative in the middle third of the book is pretty dry. I wish that the author had included much more about the actual music and musicians.
The last 140 pages deal with Glenn Miller’s ill-fated flight and its aftermath. One learns about Miller’s insistence in going to France despite the shaky weather, informed guesses as to what most likely happened, and descriptions of the more widely-held theories. Speculation about Miller’s death has been a bit of a parlor game for many decades. Some scandal sheets in the 1950s claimed that Glenn Miller arrived in Paris and was killed in a bordello. It turns out that that story originated as propaganda by the Nazis in early 1945. Others have said that Miller might have been a spy who died in mainland Europe during an unsuccessful mission. The theories with the most credibility were that his plane was the victim of friendly fire or that another flight that was returning to England emptied its ammunition and one of the bombs accidentally hit Miller’s plane. While the latter seemed possible, Spragg’s research shows that no plane was within 90 minutes of the doomed aircraft.
The disaster actually occurred due to much more mundane factors. The weather was bad, the plane malfunctioned due to ice, and the pilot made some fatal errors. Much of the last part of the book is touching, giving a day-by-day account of the week after December 15 when the realization of the loss of Glenn Miller gradually became apparent, and ending with a summation of Miller’s legacy.
Dennis M. Spragg deserves a great deal of credit for all of the research (much of the information has never been published before) and for coherently summarizing the final chapter in Glenn Miller’s life. Declassified is available from www.amazon.com and www.potomacbooksinc.com.
Glenn Miller Declassified
by Dennis M. Spragg
408 pages
Paperback: $26.95; ISBN: 9781640123083
Hardcover: $39.95; ISBN: 9781612348957
Potomac Books/University of Nebraska Press
www.potomacbooksinc.com
Since 1975 Scott Yanow has been a regular reviewer of albums in many jazz styles. He has written for many jazz and arts magazines, including JazzTimes, Jazziz, Down Beat, Cadence, CODA, and the Los Angeles Jazz Scene, and was the jazz editor for Record Review. He has written an in-depth biography on Dizzy Gillespie for AllMusic.com. He has authored 11 books on jazz, over 900 liner notes for CDs and over 20,000 reviews of jazz recordings.
Yanow was a contributor to and co-editor of the third edition of the All Music Guide to Jazz. He continues to write for Downbeat, Jazziz, the Los Angeles Jazz Scene, the Jazz Rag, the New York City Jazz Record and other publications.
