First I should say what I did in the war, so you know where I was standing.

I enlisted in the spring of 1942. Because I had grown up keeping farm machinery running, the Army decided I should keep airplanes running, which was the one time I can remember the Army and me agreeing on something. They sent me to the mechanics school at Amarillo, Texas, where they were training men on the B-17, and in 1943 I went over to England on a troopship with a few thousand other fellows, most of them seasick, me included.

I spent the rest of the war on a bomber field in the English countryside, not too far from Bedford. I was a ground crew man. I never flew a mission. My job was to see that the airplane did. Our crew chief was Sergeant Bob Conroy, a quiet fellow from Pennsylvania who could listen to an engine idle and tell you what was wrong with it, and I was his assistant, and with us was Lester Gervais from Louisiana, who could fix anything and talk the whole time he was doing it. The three of us had one B-17 at a time. We lived with her. When she was out on a mission we stood out at the hardstand and waited and counted the planes coming home, and when ours came over the trees it was the best feeling in the world, and when one of the others didn't come back, that was the worst. I will not say more about that here. The men who flew in those airplanes are the ones who should be remembered, and I knew a lot of them, and too many of them were nineteen.

Most of the work was done outdoors, in the rain, in the dark, in the cold, with a flashlight in your teeth. England in the wintertime is a damp place. They had a couple of big hangars on the field for the heavy jobs, and that is where the band played.

Word comes

We had heard Glenn Miller was in England. Everybody had. The rumor that he was coming to our field went around two or three times before it was true, so when the real word came nobody believed it until the trucks pulled in. I want to say it was August. Lester says July. Lester is wrong about most things, but I have tried to find the date and can't, so I will just say summer.

They came in the afternoon in Army trucks and unloaded their instruments in the big hangar, and the whole base found a reason to walk past. They built the bandstand at one end, up off the floor. There was a B-17 in the hangar that day getting a wing worked on, and they left her right where she sat, and that turned out to be the best seats in the house.

The music

By evening the hangar was as full as I have ever seen a building. Men were standing on the workbenches and sitting up on the scaffolding, and fellows climbed up on that B-17 and sat along the wing with their legs hanging down. Lester and I got a spot on the tail section stand, which was not allowed, and nobody said a word. There were nurses from the hospital and Red Cross girls, and some of the English people from the village had been let in, and they were as excited as we were.

I was surprised how big the band was. I had expected a dance band like on our records, sixteen or eighteen men. This was more like fifty, and a whole row of them had violins. I remember thinking, Eva will not believe this.

And then there he was. He was a tall man in his uniform, with his rimless glasses, standing very straight, and he looked like what he was, which was a man who had worked hard all his life and was still working. He did not make a big show of himself. He would turn and say a few words to announce a number, and I could not tell you one of those words now, I wish I could. I was not listening to the words. I was watching him.

They started with Moonlight Serenade, and I don't mind telling you that was the end of me. Three thousand miles from home and there was our song, our kitchen song, played by the very band, and I stood up on that tail stand and thought about Eva and our linoleum floor in Iowa, and I was not the only man in that hangar wiping his eyes. I could see others doing it.

Then they played In the Mood, and the place came apart. When they got to the part at the end where it goes quiet, you never heard three thousand men be so still, and when the band came back in loud, the roar went up into the rafters and I believe they heard it in Bedford. A young sergeant sang some of the slow ones, a good-looking fellow with a fine voice. Years later I read that the band's singer in England was Johnny Desmond, so I suppose that was him.

I don't remember everything they played. I remember a lot of the marches done up the new way, with a swing to them, so you couldn't help but move your feet. I remember a couple of nurses dancing together in the aisle between the benches, and some of the fellows cheering them on, and then a couple of brave ones cut in. I remember Lester singing along, loud, to a song he did not know the words to. And I remember the band playing the theme again at the end, and how nobody wanted to leave.

I was back out at the hardstand at two in the morning, preflighting our ship for a mission, with the music still going around in my head. She went out that morning and she came back that afternoon, every man aboard. It was a good day.

December

The week before Christmas of 1944 the weather was terrible. Fog like you have never seen, and the Germans had started their big push in the Ardennes, and our planes sat on the ground day after day when the men on the ground over there needed them most. It was miserable for all of us.

On Christmas Eve the weather broke, and we put up every airplane on the field that could fly. The Eighth Air Force put up more bombers that day than on any other day of the war. I worked from midnight to midnight. And that night, Sunday, December 24, 1944, the word went around the base that Glenn Miller was missing. His plane had gone down over the Channel nine days before, in that same fog that kept us on the ground, and they were only now telling it.

Some of the men said it couldn't be, he'd turn up. He never did. I thought about him standing up there in our hangar, so straight, and I thought about how he didn't have to be there at all. He could have stayed home and made a fortune. He came over and played for us in a hangar instead.

Eva wrote me in January that she had put on Moonlight Serenade the night she heard the news, and played it through, and then put it away for a while.

That is my story. It isn't much, and I have told it so many times at the VFW that the fellows can tell it back to me. But I wanted to put it down where it will stay after I'm gone. My great-grandchildren can find it here some day, Emily says, if they want to know what their great-grandpa did in the war. He kept the airplanes flying, and one night in England he heard Glenn Miller play.

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