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Overview
On December 15, 1944, Maj. Alton Glenn Miller, commanding officer of the Army Air Force Band (Special), boarded a plane in England bound for France with Lt. Col. Norman Francis Baessell. Somewhere over the English Channel the plane vanished. No trace of the aircraft or its occupants has ever been found. To this day Miller, Baessell, and the pilot, John Robert Stuart Morgan, are classified as missing in action. Weaving together cultural and military history, Glenn Miller Declassified tells the story of the musical legend Miller and his military career as commanding officer of the Army Air Force Band during World War II. Miller’s disappearance resulted in numerous conspiracy theories, especially since much of the information surrounding his military service had been classified, restricted, or, in some cases, lost. Dennis M. Spragg has gained unprecedented access to the Miller family archives as well as military and government documents to lay such theories to rest and to demonstrate the lasting legacy and importance of Miller’s life, career, and service to his country.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781640123083 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Potomac Books |
| Publication date: | 03/01/2020 |
| Pages: | 408 |
| Sales rank: | 1,160,103 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d) |
About the Author
Dennis M. Spragg is the senior consultant of the Glenn Miller Archives and the American Music Research Center at the University of Colorado–Boulder. A veteran broadcasting and media research professional, he is an internationally known expert on Glenn Miller who has been featured in the PBS television series History Detectives, the series Mysteries at the Museum, two BBC Radio productions, numerous media interviews, and many presentations. For more information about Glenn Miller Declassified, visit dennismspragg.com.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
A Sense of Duty
State of Emergency
On Monday morning, December 8, 1941, thirty-seven-year-old Alton Glenn Miller hurried through breakfast at his home at the Cotswold Apartments, Byrne Lane, Tenafly, New Jersey. Like everyone else, America's most popular and successful bandleader was trying to understand the staggering news of the surprise Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Listeners in the New York area turned on their radios to find CBS morning host Arthur Godfrey from Washington on WABC sorting out the stunning news with news commentators. Tuning from 880kHz to 660kHz for WEAF and the NBC Red Network, they found the same sort of commentary from professionals who knew little to nothing about what had really happened. Glenn and Helen Miller were not unlike millions of their countrymen who were surprised, confused, and anxious.
The closest Glenn or Helen had ever been to Hawaii was his band's arrangements of "Aloha Oe," "Blue Hawaii," "Honolulu Blues," "Song of the Islands," and "Sweet Leilani." Many of their friends and neighbors did not even know where Pearl Harbor, Honolulu, or the island of Oahu were. During the previous eighteen hours, Elmer Davis of CBS and H. V. Kaltenborn of NBC had tried to explain to listeners what was happening. Between the commentaries and discussions, sobering live reports crackled in from CBS and NBC affiliates KGMB and KGU in Honolulu. From distant Manila, the urgent voices of Bert Silen and Don Bell of KZRH came into homes from Philadelphia to Sacramento over NBC, describing in real time the initial Japanese air attack on the Commonwealth of the Philippines.
This was not an abstract radio geography lesson or a political roundtable debating the support of the Roosevelt administration for Great Britain against Nazi Germany. The conversation among U.S. leaders and citizens about what to do regarding the war in Europe and developments in Asia abruptly ended on the morning of December 7 when Cdr. Mitsuo Fuchida, leader of the air attack, called out, "Tora! Tora! Tora!" (Tiger! Tiger! Tiger!), a coded message telling the entire Imperial Japanese Navy they had caught the armed forces of the United States completely by surprise. As newsman Elmer Davis observed, "The decision to end the façade of American neutrality had been made in Tokyo."
Down Beat editor, critic, and recording executive Dave Dexter Jr. encountered Glenn Miller the evening of December 8 at the Café Rouge of New York's Hotel Pennsylvania.
Glenn walked over to my table and said, "I wonder if any of us are aware of the enormity of the changes in our lives soon to come now that we're at war?" I had never seen him in such a contemplative mood. "Dave, you and I, our mothers and dads, the children we may someday have, and even their children will be directly affected by what happened in the Pacific yesterday. America will never again be the way it was at midnight last Saturday. Even the world will never be the same." He tapped on the tablecloth with a fork. "I don't know exactly what I can contribute to the war effort but I am damn well going to find out. There must be something a broken down old trombone player can do to help." His sincerity that night is still vivid in my mind today. Of the more than fifty persons I contacted that post–Pearl Harbor Monday, Miller showed, by far, the most profound perception of the horror of a world at war.
NBC Presents Glenn Miller in Special Hour Program
The inimitable swing and jive of Glenn Miller, his acrobatic trombone and his famous orchestra will run riot for a full hour each Saturday evening over the NBC Blue Network from 5:00 to 6:00 p.m. EDST in a new series dedicated to the nation's selective service men and their army camps, beginning August 30th. With the cooperation of the United Service Organization (USO), the new Glenn Miller program will each week present an album of 50 of the day's most popular records to five different army camps and award one of them an RCA Victor combination Radio-Victrola in a song popularity contest. The new Glenn Miller series, a sustaining feature on the NBC Blue Network, will be dedicated to and fashioned for the men in the army camps. But another army of the nation's collegiate jitterbugs, the swing and jive addicts and the millions who are captivated by the swaying harmony of Glenn Miller and his players will be no less agitated by the new series. Fifteen minutes of Glenn Miller is a treat in any jitterbug's language and a full hour of Glenn Miller's melodies is something close to heaven. The program is officially titled "Glenn Miller's Sunset Serenade ... a new series saluting the service men." Each week five different army camps in widely separated sections of the United States will be saluted on the Glenn Miller program. The men in the camps will be asked to write for their favorite songs. And these five favorites will be featured on the week's Glenn Miller program. As soon as the camp morale officer has forwarded the song consensus to Glenn, the camp will receive with all transportation expenses paid a box of 50 of the day's most popular records.
These are to be placed in the USO recreation buildings or other army retreats where there are as yet no USO facilities, for the use of the soldiers. The radio audience will then be asked to name its favorite from among the featured songs of the camps. And the camp which has chosen the song selected by the radio audience vote will receive the RCA Victor combination radio and Victrola, for its own, to be placed in the USO or other approved camp center. Glenn says he's willing to award five of those sets should the unusual circumstances of having all five camps nominate the same song occur. NBC Blue Network facilities will be made available to Miller for this weekly series wherever his travels may take him as the band traverses the swing circuit.
Social welfare associations established canteens, reading rooms, and meeting places to serve America's growing military population during 1941. President Roosevelt wished to create a unified military welfare effort and encouraged the formation of the USO. The War and Navy Departments designated USO Camp Shows, Inc., the "official entertainer" of the armed forces. Gen. George C. Marshall gave USO Camp Shows exclusivity for overseas entertainment tours under control of theater commanders, and he banned commercially sponsored theatrical productions for the duration of the war. Eventually overseas tours led by Bob Hope, Jack Benny, Al Jolson, Joe E. Brown, and many others journeyed to every corner of the earth.
NBC broadcast the first Sunset Serenade program from the Steel Pier in Atlantic City, New Jersey, on August 30, 1941. The band opened at the Café Rouge on October 6 and broadcast all of the Sunset Serenade programs through January 3, 1942, from the popular Hotel Pennsylvania ballroom. Glenn Miller's broadcasts from the Café Rouge on NBC's Red and Blue Networks normally aired during late evening hours. To provide an audience for the Sunset Serenade matinee broadcasts, Miller and the hotel inaugurated a series of "tea dances" with an admission price of one purchased 25 cent Defense Stamp. The matinees with the NBC Blue were broadcast from 5:00 to 6:00 p.m.
The Selective Training and Service Act of 1940 was the first peacetime military conscription in the history of the United States. Men between the ages of twenty-one and thirty-five were required to register with local draft boards. As the ranks of men in the service grew and the government constructed new army and navy bases, Miller began to dedicate songs for military installations on his CBS Chesterfield Moonlight Serenade programs months before his Sunset Serenade debuted.
During 1941 Gen. Alexander Day Surles, director of the War Department Bureau of Public Relations (BPR), brought in Edward Montague Kirby, director of public relations for the National Association of Broadcasters, to run the BPR radio branch on a "dollar a year" basis while continuing to be paid by the NAB. Kirby and a small civilian staff had to field a flood of telephone calls from broadcasters around the nation seeking guidance in the wake of Pearl Harbor. The BPR Radio Branch was also tasked with developing Army radio programs. A 1926 graduate of the Virginia Military Institute, Kirby was promotion manager of WSM, Nashville, before joining the NAB. At WSM he won a national reputation for groundbreaking coverage of the devastating 1937 floods, and he promoted the career of WSM singer Dinah Shore. Kirby brought in experienced broadcasters to work with him at BPR including WSM news and promotion director Jack Harris, building up his staff to forty people. Surles commissioned Kirby and Harris as Army officers, and Lou Cowan, creator of the Quiz Kids radio series, assisted with the development of two original programs, The Army Hour and Command Performance.
The Army Hour went on the air over NBC on Sunday, April 5, Army Day, at 3:30 p.m. Eastern War Time (EWT). The imaginative program gave the American public a clear and sober look at the war without hype or propaganda. Kirby wanted to bring the reality of the war to the American people with hard-hitting radio actuality, and producer Wyllis Cooper presented the straight story, "good, bad, or indifferent." Before the April 5 Army Hour episode, Gen. Jonathan Wainwright, the commanding officer in the Philippines, radioed that his defenders on besieged Corregidor wished to participate via shortwave. When The Army Hour went on the air, no mention was made of Corregidor so as not to tip off the Japanese. A test signal from "The Rock" did come through for five minutes. As announcer George Putnam was about to say, "We take you to Corregidor," the Japanese jammed the frequency. The following week, Lt. Col. Warren Clear, recently evacuated from Bataan, was able to report for The Army Hour from Brisbane, Australia. The response to Clear's moving account flooded the NBC switchboard. Several weeks later, a dramatic connection was made with the final coded message from Corregidor as it fell to the Japanese. Putnam fought back emotion as he translated the terse code from the forsaken garrison in plain language. RCA president David Sarnoff thought he "could find no rival in any radio drama" for this gripping segment.
According to the New York Times, "More than 3,000,000 American radio-equipped homes, or 39 per cent of those having sets in operation during the Army Hour's sixty minutes, are tuned into this program, the government estimates. From the beginning, the program has represented something like a triumph of radio technique." The Hooper Radio Ratings Service reported The Army Hour was the highest-ranking national Sunday daytime program. By 1943 the program had three million average listeners, and Kirby won a coveted Peabody Award. Americans about to be stationed in all corners of the globe needed radio information and entertainment. Hollywood scriptwriter Glenn Wheaton secured commitments from the networks, advertising agencies, music licensing firms, movie studios, and the musicians' union. Vic Knight, the producer of The Fred Allen Show, agreed to produce a new armed forces variety series. On March 1 to the sound of a bugle call and the opening bars of George M. Cohan's "Over There," announcer Harry von Zell introduced the first episode of Command Performance from the Major Bowes Studio in New York and broadcast by shortwave on March 8. Eleven stations relayed the program to Australia, Iceland, Ireland, and the Philippines. Production moved to Hollywood on April 12, where the support of the Hollywood Victory Committee greatly expanded the pool of entertainers available to appear on the program. Fred Allen let Knight go to the West Coast and quipped, "Command Performance has a larger sponsor than I have." Glenn Miller and his orchestra appeared on Command Performance on May 7, the day after Corregidor surrendered.
On May 26 Thomas H. A. Lewis resigned as vice president for radio of Young & Rubicam and Audience Research, Inc., and accepted a commission to develop a military broadcasting service. Lewis immediately went to Washington armed with creative ideas that the Army approved. He selected Los Angeles for the base of operations and moved his new staff to 20th Century–Fox where his friend, Col. Frank Capra, was making Army training and education films. Lewis preferred transcription discs as a distribution channel for programs rather than relying on ineffective shortwave radio transmissions. He decided to distribute programs through an innovative global system of new full-power medium wave (AM) stations, low-power stations, and mobile field units.
Lewis pursued an ambitious agenda for his Special Service Division Radio Section (SSD). He approved development of original programs including Mail Call, Jubilee, and G.I. Journal and entered into agreements with the networks and advertisers to rebroadcast popular programs with commercials removed. To maximize limited resources, he rented network studios in Hollywood. A fight ensued within the War Department for control of military radio broadcasting, and Lewis successfully lobbied for consolidation of production in Los Angeles under his command. The SSD Radio Section took over production of Command Performance on January 6, 1943, although BPR retained control of The Army Hour, which was targeted to the American public rather than the personnel of the armed forces.
The SSD Radio Section was renamed the Armed Forces Radio Service on November 12, 1943, and AFRS quickly became the largest radio network in the world. Every week cartons of AFRS program releases were shipped in two boxes, A and B, including 110 discs each, 55 per box. Lewis negotiated an agreement with the Air Transport Command of the Army Air Forces to ship the cartons by priority air from Long Beach. The most popular program among servicemen was the fifteen-minute disc jockey production G.I. Jive, featuring Martha Wilkerson as "G.I. Jill." The media nicknamed the astonishingly popular Wilkerson "America's answer to Tokyo Rose." Her signoff, "This is Jill saying good morning to some of you, good afternoon to some more of you, and to the rest of you, good night," summed up the global reach of AFRS.
For the Duration
To Glenn Miller's irritation, NBC was interrupting his Sunset Serenade broadcasts with bulletins and canceling broadcasts on the fly due to war news or overruns of the Metropolitan Opera broadcast leading into his 5:00 p.m. time slot. To stage Sunset Serenade, Miller arranged for the Café Rouge to open before normal business hours, accommodate a large audience at a minimal attendance charge, and clear the audience out before evening dinner guests arrived. The broadcast portion of the matinee was only part of the entire "tea dance," which lasted two hours. Whether NBC aired the broadcast portion or not, Miller was responsible for the matinee. Miller required flexibility after January 7, 1942, when he was scheduled to go on the road. An agreement was reached with NBC to drop the Sunset Serenade program after the January 3 broadcast from the Café Rouge. Beginning on January 10 from Cleveland, Ohio, Sunset Serenade moved to the Mutual Broadcasting System.
Bandleaders were faced with new challenges. Fuel was rationed, and transportation became encumbered by priorities. Bus and rail travel was costlier and less available. It was difficult for bands to maintain one-night appearances and longer engagements crisscrossing the country. The draft depleted bands of talented musicians. In spite of the wartime emergency, the American Federation of Musicians (AFM) led by outspoken president James Caesar Petrillo played hardball in negotiations with the recording and transcription industry regarding the musicians' fees. Travel, the draft, and a looming AFM recording strike all weighed on Miller as he considered his options "for the duration" of the war.
"Chattanooga Choo Choo" topped the Billboard charts for sixteen weeks from November 1941 through January 1942. It was displaced as #1 the week of February 7 by another Miller record, "A String of Pearls." On February 10 RCA Victor executive W. Wallace Early appeared on the Chesterfield Moonlight Serenade and presented Glenn Miller with the first "gold record" in honor of the one millionth pressing of "Chattanooga Choo Choo." Mack Gordon and Harry Warren wrote the popular song for Miller's 1941 20th Century–Fox film Sun Valley Serenade.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Glenn Miller Declassified"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Dennis M. Spragg.
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