Glenn Miller's Last Flight

What this episode covers

On the fifteenth of December, 1944, the most famous American musician of his generation boarded a small single-engine military aircraft at a Royal Air Force base in Bedfordshire, England. He was a forty-year-old Major in the US Army Air Forces — a bandleader who had outsold every other artist in America for four years running.The weather that afternoon was bad. Heavy fog. Cloud cover at four hundred feet. Freezing rain expected over the English Channel. Other officers had warned him not to fly. He went anyway.The plane took off bound for Paris. It was never seen again.This is the story of Glenn Miller's last flight. The carburetor problem that may have brought the plane down. The Lancaster bomber crew who, forty years later, said they had watched a small plane crash into the Channel directly beneath their jettison. And the eighty years of rumors that have never been proven, and never been settled.A real flight. A documented disappearance. A wreck that has never been found.Episode Six of The Quiet Files.Sources: US Army Air Forces accident report, March 1945; Royal Air Force 149 Squadron logs, December 1944; published statements of Fred Shaw, 1985 onward; UK Ministry of Defence file review.

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