Today marks the 80th anniversary of the death of the great American jazzman Glenn Miller.
He was born in the small town of Clarendon, Iowa. The first musical instrument he learned to play was the mandolin. At the age of 13, he turned to the trombone, a love that remained with him for the rest of his life.
In the mid-1930s, Miller formed his first big band. The group had several breakups and reunions, until in 1939, after a concert at a casino in the New York suburb of New Rochelle, they signed a contract for a series of radio broadcasts and filming a musical.
This film – “Serenade in the Valley of the Sun” – brought Glenn Miller worldwide fame. More than a million copies of the music recorded for the film were sold.
By 1942, Glenn Miller's orchestra was already a force in jazz, giving three concerts a day and releasing 50 records.
The Second World War was in full swing when he joined the US Air Force, where he created one huge orchestra from two military orchestras.
After the opening of the second front in Normandy in June 1944. the orchestra toured in front of the Allied troops.
On December 15, 1944, Glenn Miller took off in a small plane from a military airfield near London to Paris, where he was planning to conduct a long tour.
The small single-engine plane never reached the French capital, disappearing over the English Channel.
The search operation for him ended in failure. The most likely cause of the crash was the version of the plane's engine icing.
The possibility that the light plane "Norsman" was shot down by German fighters is not ruled out.
In 2000, however, a completely new possibility emerged about the fate of the musician.
The Englishman Derek Thurman, who served as a flight engineer on a "Lancaster" bomber tells how on December 15, 1944, their plane dumped its unused bombs in the eastern part of the English Channel, at a time when a small plane passed under them.
One of the pilots even noted in his logbook the probability that the small plane had been hit by the bombs.
Source: news.bg