p rologue
NATIONAL TREASUREback home. It served as the orchestra’s theme and
would be remembered as an anthem of the Greatest
Generation. Miller composed the music in 1935 as
simply “Miller’s Tune.” It went from one publisher to
another and eventually to the lyricist Mitchell Par-
ish, who renamed it “Wind in the Trees.” By the time
the Glenn Miller Orchestra recorded the song in 1939
as the B side of a 78 rpm on the RCA Bluebird label, a
producer had changed the name again, this time to
echo the record’s A side, the Frankie Carle compo-
sition “Sunrise Serenade.” But while “Sunrise” got a
lot of play for several weeks , “Moonlight Serenade”
outshone it by far, spending months near the top of
the charts and helping Miller’s band (which enjoyed
seven No. 1 hits that year) achieve pre-eminence.
Not bad for a trombone player from the Iowa farm
community of Clarinda who dropped out of college
to play jazz. After working with a few outfi ts, in-A
T 1:45 P.M. on December 15,
1944, an overcast Friday after-
noon at the Royal Air Force air-
port near Bedford, England, U.S.
Army Maj. Glenn Miller strug-
gled against the stinging air-
stream blowing in his face from
a running propeller as he threw
his briefcase and military gar-
ment bag into the cabin of an idling airplane. The sin-
gle-engine C-64 Norseman, piloted by Flight Offi cer
John R. S. Morgan, was aloft in minutes, and Miller,
the bandleader whose mellifl uous swing provided the
soundtrack for Americans during World War II, was
on his way to an airfi eld near Versailles, France.
Miller and his American Band of the Allied Expe-
ditionary Forces had been making appearances in
England since early July. Now military authorities
wanted the orchestra to entertain troops on the Con-
tinent. Determined to fl y ahead and fi nalize tour ar-
rangements, Miller told his brother in a December 12
letter that “barring a nosedive into the Channel, I’ll
be in Paris in a few days.”
The G.I.s looked forward to no tune more than
“Moonlight Serenade,” the ever-so-slightly melan-
choly number evocative of a sultry summer nightThe song that jazzed the
Greatest Generation, from the
bandleader Glenn Miller, who
was lost at sea 75 years agoHow to
Boost
Morale
24 SMITHSONIAN.COM | November 2019FROM THE
SMITHSONIAN
NATIONAL
MUSEUM OF
AMERICAN
HISTORY