Glenn Miller.Photo: Felix Man/Getty
The official explanation is the most obvious: Miller and the crew fell victim to bad weather. Flights from Twinwood Farm, the British airfield where Miller departed, had been grounded for several days prior due to fog, and the cloud ceiling had fallen to 1,500 feet on the day in question. Conditions in Paris were just as poor, with local French air controllers formally denying Morgan’s request to undertake the flight. But according to a2014 episode ofHistory Detectives, commanding officer Baessell ordered Morgan to make the trip anyway so that Miller could meet up with the rest of his band and perform a concert for the troops.
The haze was bad enough to prompt the notoriously plane-phobic Miller to quip, “Where the hell are the parachutes?” Baessell,according to legend, replied, “What’s a matter with you Miller, do you want to live forever?”
Morgan was reportedly not certified to fly using instruments alone, and it’s likely that he lost his bearings and succumbed to spatial disorientation — a common problem that remains one of the leading causes of pilot death. Once this occurs,simulator testing has revealedthat pilots have an average of just 178 seconds to correct their course before a crash is imminent.
In addition to low visibility, military planes of the era — including the UC-64A Norseman — were known to have defective engine carburetors. This, mixed with wings that became iced over in the sub-freezing temperatures, likely doomed the aircraft.
“The airplane got out over the water, the [cloud] 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,” researcher Dennis Spragg explains onHistory Detectives.“The engine stops, the airplane turns nose down, and in eight seconds it’s in the water. … That’s exactly what the United States Army Air Force concluded three weeks after the accident.”
“I’d never seen bombs exploding from a plane before,”Shaw recalled. “I put my head in a little observation blister where I could look vertically down. There, sure enough, 4000 lb. cookies were exploding and I could see the blast waves were radiating outward. As I was watching, the bomb aimer said, ‘There is a kite down there,’ and I looked down and saw a small tiny high wing monoplane… I saw him flip over to port. He looked like he was going into a spin, he dived in and splash. Then he disappeared under the wing.”
After viewing a Glenn Miller biopic a decade later, Shaw felt compelled to check his log book to see if the date of the bomb dump corresponded to the day Miller went missing. It did — down to the hour. Shaw’s flight captain Victor Gregory, also recalled that Shaw and two others on the flight had reported a downed plane over the intercom.
Investigator Dennis Spragg, who also wrote the bookGlenn Miller Declassified, further rejected the friendly fire theory. “The lowest altitude any Lancaster reported for a jettison was 5,000 feet,”he told theGuardianin 2017. “The recommended jettison altitude was 6,000 feet. One mile is 5,280 feet. A Norseman flying almost one mile below would have looked like an indistinct flyspeck.”
However, in the aftermath of the initial report, Ulfkotte walked back his claims, saying that he had been misquoted in theBildstory. Instead, he said that he never possessed documents proving his version of Miller’s death, but had received the information from German intelligence specialists during an off the record conversation. Though it’s interesting to note that Miller was not reported missing for nine days after the Norseman crashed, there is no credible evidence to disprove that Miller went down with his flight.
Don Haynes, Miller’s military aide during the period, strongly denied Ulfkotte’s tale when asked about it in 1997, dismissing it as “perverted” and a “16th-hand” rumor. “I guess it’s much more exciting to hear that he had a heart attack while he was [having sex] than that he died in a plane crash,”he told theNew York Daily News.
Perhaps even stranger, Miller’s own brother (and fellow musician) Herb reportedly claimed in 1985 that he died in a different kind of bed — a hospital bed. “My own theory for years was that he never even left England, but died somewhere of cancer,” Herballegedly told theWeekly World News. “I have never believed in the story that my brother died in a plane crash.” The accident, he claimed, was concocted to provide the swing star with a hero’s death, rather than one “in a lousy bed.”
In Herb’s version of events, Miller — a heavy smoker — allegedly wrote to him in the summer of 1944 complaining of poor health. “I am totally emaciated, although I am eating enough,” he allegedly said. “I have trouble breathing. I think I am very ill.” There is circumstantial evidence that Miller was indeed unwell during this period. Don Haynes later admitted that Miller had lost a great deal of weight, and his British radio director recalls him saying, “You know, George, I have an awful feeling you guys are going to go home without me …” Herb died in 1987 before he could clear up some holes in his story.
source: people.com
