TIMEPIECE This month in history
‘In The Mood’, ‘Moonlight Serenade’, ‘Chattanooga Choo Choo’. The titles are familiar, the tunes indelible, and as the early rumblings of World War II emerged in Europe they catapulted Glenn Miller and his Orchestra to heady levels of celebrity in his native US. The Orchestra’s euphonious brand of big-band swing dominated the airwaves, and for its founder decades more of media celebrity seemed to beckon.
Then Pearl Harbor happened. The Japanese bombing of an American naval base in Hawaii in December 1941 drew the US into the war, prompting Miller to offer his services to the military effort. Initially rejected by the Navy, by September 1942 he had persuaded the Army to offer him a commission. He would, he promised, ‘put a little more spring into the feet of our marching men and a little more joy in their hearts’.
And that he did, with the same irrepressible energy that had made the original Glenn Miller Orchestra so successful. Within months of enlisting with the Army Air Forces (AAF), Miller had formed a band which broadcast weekly concerts from New York. The ensemble was subsequently sent to Europe to play for the troops. ‘Next to a letter from home, Captain Miller,’ commented General James Doolittle, his commander, ‘your organisation is the greatest morale builder in the European Theater of Operations.’
But a fateful turn to Miller’s life was looming. In June 1944 he was sent to London, tasked with providing broadcast entertainment to the D-Day forces in their onward push to reclaim territory in Europe. Miller, as ever, approached his new assignment with gusto, and five months later received approval to billet his AAF musicians closer to the action in liberated Paris.
Anxious to smooth arrangements for the band’s arrival in the French capital, Miller was booked to fly by scheduled military transport to Paris on Thursday, 14 December. Bad weather intervened, however, and the flight was cancelled. Then Miller learned that a US Army colleague, Lieutenant Colonel Norman Baessell, was crossing the Channel on a much smaller aircraft a day later and arranged to join him.
On 15 December, Mille
