Not quite true - there were plenty of RAAF units. Not just individual airmen serving within the RAF; there were entire RAAF squadrons.
Also, the North African campaigns count as part of the “European Theatre” in that the enemy forces were German and Italian.
I guess I was subconsciously excluding the RAAF as they were not part of the invasion and battle of France per se, although granted they did support the ground forces at some points. I was specifically thinking of the ground forces of course, as an air force never liberated anyone.
North Africa not being in, you know, *Europe, *I think I’ll stand by that claim 
he played the tannerin which is different from a theremin
A bit irrelavent, but I used to live either in the house or in the house next door to where Glenn Miller lived in the forties. A lady across the road who had moved into her house as a young girl when it was built in Edwardian times remembered him living there, but couldn’t recall which house it was.
After the the start of the war, a good part of the BBC was ‘evacuated’ from London to avoid the anticipated bombings. The ‘Light Entertainment’ section was relocated to Bushmead House, fifty odd yards from my former home. A lot of Glenn Miller concerts were broadcast from the Bedford Corn Exchange.
Although Bedford is only fifty miles north of London, it was never targeted in the war. Hitler gave the town some trees as a gift in the mid thirties and some say that was the reason. I find that hard believe as, although the town had a couple of prominent engineering firms, it was essentially a rather unremarkable english market town.
Another resident told me of the times when the German bombing raids passed over the town, presumably on their way to attack the heavy industry of the West Midlands or the North West. She told of how the hum used to fill the air and how the ground would seem to shake.
Glenn Miller took off from the airfield at Twinwoods, a couple of miles north of the town. An annual Jazz/Swing festival now takes place there each year.
Although not Bedford Born and Bred, most Bedfordians consider Glenn Miller as an ‘adopted son’
China, Burma, and India aren’t anywhere near the Pacific Ocean, either, but they’re part of the “Pacific Theatre” because those campaigns were part of the war against the Japanese Empire.
North Africa wasn’t a separate conflict from the war in Europe, it was part of the same war. “European Theatre” and “Pacific Theatre” are not geographic terms, they’re shorthand terms for “the War against Nazi Germany and its allies” and “the War against Imperial Japan”.
Thanks for your answer. I don’t think I’ve ever waited a year to have a question addressed before.
I understand that under normal circumstances, the briefing would be cut short or not held, but in this situation, the pilots witnessed a plane going into the channel. Wouldn’t this have been reported, so that squadrons could have taken procedures to find out who had gone down in the plane? If they had, a longstanding mystery might have been solved before it even arose. I just can’t get my head around the fact that inadvertently knocking an airplane out of the sky would go unreported by everyone, no matter how afraid they might have been of the consequences.
Oh, and by the way, that part of the question claiming that David Niven’s sole job in the military involved setting up appearances is way off. Niven was a commando who saw action in Normandy and other places. A REMF he was not.
It wasn’t reported in a formal debriefing. It no doubt was reported, but since there was no formal office during the war to collect all reports of planes going down, and all reports of planes missing, there was nowhere to send the report where it would have been matched up with that particular missing plane. The report no doubt went up the chain of command until it reached someone who said “I don’t know who to send this to. I’ll just sit on it until someone asks if anyone knows about a missing plane.”
There is a case of a US sub that was sunk by a US or Allied ship (I don’t remember the details), that wasn’t discovered until long after the war. Missing sub… report of attack on a Japanese sub… Happened all the time during the war. It wasn’t until the Navy started looking at all the records to try to figure out what all happened during the war for the official histories, that the connection between the two was made. Same thing would have happened here…
This is just a case of the two reports never winding up in the same person’s hands, because there was no formal procedure that would have done so.
I thought Glenn Miller choked on Jimi Hendrix’s drug induced vomit??
Yes, exactly what I was going to say.
You may be thinking of the second USS Seawolf although the loss of the Seawolf was confirmed during the war:
That’s absolutely ridiculous, and you should be ashamed of promulgating such nonsense.
. . . It was ham-sandwich-induced.
Loss confirmed, yes, but not necessarily “loss to friendly fire confirmed”. That may or may not be the one I was thinking of, but the one I was thinking of, IIRC, was not listed as probable friendly fire, until several years after the war by the JANAC (Joint Army Navy somethingorother Commission). I may not be recalling correctly. 
Sorry to disappoint you, but the ham sandwich incident happened to Mama Cass.
I hear that when Glenn Miller’s plane went down it made a great whooooosh noise.
And just think, if she had given that ham sandwich to Karen Carpenter, they’d probably both still be alive.
Truly one of the great lines of the last 20 years.
Of course, Mama Cass could have done that, but it would not have stopped her heart attack.
How can you tell? You can’t dust for vomit, after all.
Yes, is incomplete. Sorta.
That is, if ‘sitting in’ counts 
I have a photo, one my wife’s keepsakes, of her father sitting in with Glenn Miller and his band. Mind you, he was hardly a renowned musician, accomplished though he was, but there’s no mistaking him - The only Navy uniform amongst a bunch of AAF types. Glenn went to ETO with the Army, whilst my father-in-law went chasing about the Pacific as a Navy musician.
I stole that and used it on Face Book.