In 1942, Glenn Miller joined the United States Army Air Forces ["Stars Wore Stripes"] and was commissioned as a captain as well as being appointed as the branch's band director. Miller jettisoned most of his civilian band's musical library. "[E]ven the famous Miller sound exemplified in 'Moonlight Serenade' was only heard occasionally from the AEF [Allied Expeditionary Forces] Band." [Butcher 97]

He initially formed a large marching band that was to be the core of a network of service orchestras, but his attempts at modernizing military music were met with some resistance from tradition-minded career officers. An example is the arrangement of "St. Louis Blues March", combining blues and jazz with the traditional military march. This was recorded October 29, 1943 at the Victor studios in New York City. [The Best of Glenn Miller and the Army Air Force Band] "Miller's striking innovations and his adaptions [sic] of Sousa marches for the AAF band prompted Time magazine to claim that he had rankled traditionalists in the field of Army music and had desecrated the march king. The magazine also criticized Miller's injection of casual enjoyment into the disciplined cadences of military music, stating that the Army was 'swinging its hips instead of its feet.'" ["Stripes"] In the end though, the soldiers had a positive reaction to the new music and the Army gave tacit approval to the changes. ["Stripes"]

The orchestra was first based at Yale University.[10] From mid-1943 to mid-1944 they made hundreds of live appearances, transcriptions, and "I Sustain the Wings" radio broadcasts for CBS and NBC. Miller felt it was important that the band be as close as possible to the fighting troops. In mid-1944 he had the group transferred to London, where they were renamed the American Band of the Allied Expeditionary Force. While in the United Kingdom the band gave more than 800 performances to an estimated one million Allied servicemen. After one of the band's performances, General "Jimmy" Doolittle told then Captain Miller, "Next to a letter from home, Captain Miller, your organization is the greatest morale builder in the ETO (European Theater of Operations)." By February of 1944, the band consisted of thirty musicians. [Butcher 41] The dance band boasted several members of his civilian orchestra, including chief arranger Jerry Gray [Butcher 18] as well as stars from other bands such as Ray McKinley, Peanuts Hucko and Mel Powell [Butcher 80]. Johnny Desmond and the Crew Chiefs were the singers [Butcher 41-42], although recordings were also made with guest stars such as Bing Crosby [Butcher 131-132], Irene Manning [Butcher 189] and Dinah Shore [Butcher 152]. The Dinah Shore recording sessions were September 16, 1944 in the HMV studios on Abbey Road and[11] include her version of Stardust. They are of special musical interest as they were intended as the band's first commercial releases. [Butcher 152-153] The British magazine Melody Maker in their September 23, 1944 issue said: "[The Dinah Shore recording session] which lasted for over four hours-gave us an opportunity to witness the painstaking thoroughness and terrific attention to detail of American musicians and artistes, and very impressive it was too." [Butcher 152-153] As of 1986 the songs from this session were yet to be issued on any label. [Butcher 156]

On November 17, 1944, Miller, now a major, was scheduled to fly from the United Kingdom to Paris to play for the soldiers who had recently liberated Paris. His plane departed from RAF Twinwood Farm, [Butcher 203-205] Clapham, Bedfordshire, but disappeared over the English Channel and was never found. Miller's disappearance remains a mystery; neither his remains nor the wreckage of his plane (a single-engined Noorduyn Norseman UC-64, USAAF Tail Number 44-70285) were ever recovered from the water. (Clive Ward's discovery of a Noorduyn Norseman off the coast of Northern France in 1985 was unverifiable and contained no human remains.)[12]

There have been sixty years of theories about what happened to Glenn Miller. Buddy DeFranco, one of the leaders of the post war Glenn Miller orchestra explained to George Simon, that at many of the concerts where he was leading the Glenn Miller band in the nineteen-seventies, more than a few people confided to him what "really" happened to Glenn Miller. "If I were to believe all those stories, there would have been about twelve thousand four hundred and fifty eight people there at the field in England seeing him off on that last flight!" [Simon 446]. It is now thought more than likely that Glenn Miller's plane was accidentally bombed by RAF bombers over The English Channel, after an abortive air raid on Germany and short on fuel dumping four thousand pounds of bombs in a safe drop zone to lighten the load. The logbooks of Royal Air Force pilot Fred Shaw record that a small mono engined plane was seen to spiral out of control and crash into the water.[13][14] Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.