The band played without him

He was at the top of the business, and he gave the business up to put on a uniform. Glenn Miller was the biggest star on the American pop-music scene when he set aside his career at its peak in 1942 - his orchestra had run off an unprecedented string of hits, and 'Chattanooga Choo Choo' was the number-one record in the country when Pearl Harbor was attacked - and he organised a band in uniform: 'I Sustain The Wings' on radio first, then the Major Glenn Miller Army Air Force Orchestra, which crossed to England in the summer of 1944 and gave more than three hundred live performances and some five hundred broadcasts to the troops. His commander, General Jimmy Doolittle, told him on a stage in July 1944: 'Next to a letter from home, Captain Miller, your organization is the greatest morale builder in the European Theater of Operations.' On 15 December 1944 he took a small plane to Paris and vanished. The UC-64A Norseman took off from RAF Twinwood Farm near Bedford on the afternoon of the 15th and was never seen again; no trace of the aircraft has ever been found and the cause has never been established. Miller had taken a casual flight his travel orders did not authorise and had told nobody, so the army needed three days to realise he was missing. He was declared dead a year and a day later, and the case is filed, still, as non-recoverable, his name on the Wall of the Missing at Cambridge. The band went on: a Christmas Day broadcast from Paris to England and America was already scheduled. The far side of the bond was now a voice with no man behind it - records, broadcasts, an orchestra still booked under his name - and his listeners could not know. Of every idol in this corpus, he is the one with no grave and nothing to visit but the work, and the work is still playing.