Tragic tales of three Hollywood legends killed in World War II revealed in honor of Memorial Day

Daily Mail​

26-05-2025

As the Second World War ravaged the globe, every sort of person was swept inexorably into its grisly vortex - royals and villagers, dockworkers and debutantes, plucky daredevils and cowardly psychopaths.
Even Hollywood, then at its pinnacle of glamour and sophistication, found itself hemorrhaging lives to the titanic struggle engulfing the planet.
A debonair movie star who brought his cut-glass English élan to America and acted in the highest-grossing movie of all time then had his career cut hideously short when he was shot down by the Luftwaffe.
A ravishing blonde who established herself as one of the queens of the screwball comedy lost her life when her tempestuous marriage to an A-list screen idol collided disastrously with her pioneering war work.
And one musical icon went missing in action the night before the Battle of the Bulge began and was never found, leaving a generation of his shattered fans clinging to wild theories about how he might somehow have survived.
This Memorial Day, as America honors its war dead, DailyMail.com remembers three showbiz legends killed in the bloodiest conflict in human history....
Leslie Howard
In December 1939, three months after Hitler invaded Poland, the faraway city of Atlanta, Georgia played host to the star-studded premiere of the most feverishly hyped movie Hollywood had ever seen.
Gone with the Wind, with its intoxicating blend of Civil War history and doomed romance, plus the electrifying central performances by Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable, exploded onto the scene as an instant classic.
But one of the main stars was absent from the Atlanta gala, having already rushed back to his native Britain when it entered the war against Nazi Germany.
Leslie Howard, born to a Hungarian Jewish father with the surname Steiner, had fashioned himself a screen persona so frostily elegant that any outsider might have imagined he came from the crème de la crème of the English upper classes.
He established himself as a towering figure of interwar British cinema, playing Sir Percy Blakeney in The Scarlet Pimpernel and Henry Higgins in a movie of George Bernard Shaw's comic masterpiece Pygmalion.
But his most enduring role was in Hollywood's Gone with the Wind as the wanly indecisive Southern gentleman Ashley Wilkes, the husband of Olivia de Havilland's Melanie and the unshakable romantic obsession of Vivien Leigh's Scarlett O'Hara.
The year 1939 saw Howard poised for a sensational career as a Hollywood A-lister, riding high as one of the main characters in a box office juggernaut.
But after Neville Chamberlain declared war that September, Howard bought himself out of his Hollywood contract, relinquished his royalties and raced home.
He quickly became a deft propagandist for the Ministry of Information, starring in movies about the inventor of the Spitfire and the escape of Jewish refugees, to the mounting fury of Joseph Goebbels.
By May 1943, he had proven his mettle enough to be sent on a mission to neutral Spain and Portugal, both of which were under rightist dictators but also potentially susceptible to Howard's charms, particularly Madrid, where the iron-fisted generalissimo Francisco Franco apparently quite liked Gone with the Wind.
But Howard, having spiraled into a depression after the recent meningitis death of his mistress Violette Cunnington, was recklessness itself.
While on his madcap Iberian trip, he had a fling with a baroness even though he was told she might be a Nazi spy and also crossed paths with his ex, the local actress Conchita Montenegro - who claimed more than half a century later that Howard attempted to use her fascist husband's connections as a means of bending Franco's ear.
In the end, when he was leaving Lisbon to go home, Howard held a ticket on a commercial KLM plane that often went from Portugal to England under an arrangement whereby civilian flights would be left alone by both sides.
But he rescheduled his trip to be a day earlier than planned, such that two passengers had to be kicked off to accommodate the movie star and his pudgy cigar-chomping agent, who bore a distinct resemblance to Winston Churchill, according to the book Flight 777: The Mystery of Leslie Howard by Ian Colvin.
The Luftwaffe shot his flight down over the Bay of Biscay, killing everyone onboard.
Why did the Germans obliterate the civilian plane - an airline from a country, the Netherlands, that they had already occupied?
The topic is a wellspring of conjecture to this day: Did they mistake Howard's agent for the real Churchill? Was Howard himself so effective an Allied propagandist that he became a target in his own right? Or was the whole episode an error?
But amid all the speculation, the fact is that Howard's incandescent talent was snuffed out when he was just 50, and his remains were never discovered.
Carole Lombard
Carole Lombard looked like the woman who had it all: a glittering career as one of the top heroines of the Hollywood comedy and an envied marriage to America's premier rugged sex symbol, Clark Gable.
But the luminous façade concealed a private life rocked by betrayal and insecurity, one that sent Lombard careening down the path to her destruction.
She started off as a fuller-figured actress in silent movies, but when talkies arrived and standards shifted, Lombard found herself under intense pressure to rapidly lose weight or have her career cut off at the heels before it got fully off the ground.
A studio executive pleaded with the house dietitian: 'We're supposed to give her parts. But look at that figure! Think you can do anything?'
Lombard was plunged into a monastic regime of sad little green salads and gelatin desserts, presided over by a dietitian who bragged to Photoplay about how she 'pounded and squeezed and slapped that flesh away' from the actress' body.
After wrenching herself down four dress sizes in three weeks, Lombard rose to become the sleek crown jewel of the screwball comedy.
Along with her radiant beauty, she found herself in a genre where she got to be as funny as the men, matching her formidable comic chops up against those of John Barrymore in Twentieth Century and her ex-husband William Powell in My Man Godfrey, the latter of which earned her an Oscar nomination.
As the shadow of war gathered over America, she remained a platinum blonde beacon of wit and chic, starring in one of Alfred Hitchcock's rare light comedies, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, which came out at the dawn of 1941.
That December, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.
Two weeks after the attack, Lombard and Gable summoned up a claque of Hollywood luminaries to the Beverly Wilshire Hotel for an emergency summit of the Victory Committee actors' branch.
Cary Grant, Irene Dunne, Bob Hope, Claudette Colbert, Rosalind Russell, Gary Cooper, Bette Davis, Charles Boyer and more were in attendance, per Christian Blauvelt's book Hollywood Victory: The Movies, Stars, and Stories of World War II.
Hollywood was mobilized to the cause of the Allied victory, and right from the start, Lombard was at the forefront of the war bond tours that became a key prong of the industry's contribution to the struggle.
With Gable as the head of the Victory Committee and Lombard at his side, the pair emerged as the reigning power couple of Hollywood's war.
But the united front they displayed to their fans belied a tortured relationship poisoned by a fatal strain of distrust.
To the public, Gable was adored as the ultimate smoldering totem of raw male sexuality - but from inside the marriage, Lombard knew that the other edge of the sword was his ravenous appetite for other women.
She repeatedly paid jealous visits to the set of her husband's 1941 movie Honky Tonk, where he was widely thought to have carried on an affair with his co-star Lana Turner, who later denied as much in her memoirs.
By the time Lombard was about to embark on her war bond tour in January 1942, five weeks after Pearl Harbor, she and Gable were on the rocks.
They had a furious row over his adultery the night before her departure, according to Robert Matzen's book Fireball: Carole Lombard and the Mystery of Flight 3.
When she boarded her train the next day, he neglected to see her off at the station - while she, demonstrating her ability to always find the joke, left a nude mannequin with blonde hair in their bed to tide him over while she was gone.
Lombard thundered through a triumphant tour of her native Indiana, at one point selling $2 million worth of war bonds in a single day.
But she was going to pieces inside, desperate to get back to Los Angeles and confront her straying husband in a bid to salvage the marriage.
There has even been a nagging rumor that she was plotting to surprise Gable by reaching him early and catching him with Lana Turner.
She was meant to take the train home, but she was unable to resist the urge to see her husband as soon as possible and so booked passage on a commercial flight.
Dragging along her frightened mother and press agent, Lombard used her star power to hustle her way onto the full plane, undeterred by the dangerous winter weather or the fact they would have to stop multiple times in order to refuel.
At the last minute, the frantic press agent tried to dissuade Lombard by wagering the decision on a coin toss, but he lost.
The plane crashed into a mountain in Nevada on a dark night owing to pilot error, killing all 22 people onboard including Lombard, aged 33.
In spite of his inability to stay true to her, Gable loved Lombard madly and was thrown into a frenzy of grief over her death, even attempting the climb the 7,800-foot mountain her flight hit in a vain mission to find her corpse.
The month after she died saw the release of her last and perhaps best-loved movie To Be or Not to Be, a giddily vicious Ernst Lubitsch farce starring her and Jack Benny as an egomaniacal actor couple in Nazi-occupied Warsaw.
Her effervescent sparkle in the film had the same champagne fizz she always exhibited onscreen, but it was now overlaid with the haunting knowledge of her death during the very war she had just helped satirize.
Glenn Miller
As a bandleader, Glenn Miller had more Top 10 hits than either Elvis Presley or the Beatles got years later; pictured circa 1937 not long before he reached his peak of stardom
Now that the Big Band Era has passed into the woozy haze of gentle nostalgia, it may be a surprise to remember what a superstar Glenn Miller was.
A trombonist from Iowa who dropped out of college to pursue music, Miller worked his way up into the stratosphere of interwar American pop music.
As a bandleader, he had more Top 10 hits than either Elvis Presley or the Beatles got years later, and he created some of the most lasting smash records of his genre, most famously Moonlight Serenade and Chattanooga Choo Choo.
He cut the original recording of At Last nearly two decades before Etta James, amid a string of successes like Little Brown Jug, In The Mood and Tuxedo Junction.
Miller commanded a devoted fanbase with his earworm ballads, breezy charisma and quirky smile, which sent more than a few of his female admirers swooning.
By the time America entered the war, he was 38 years old with weak eyesight, and his attempts to enter the Navy were rebuffed - but he was still determined to forego his $20,000 weekly earnings and serve his country.
His art, as usual, was his way through the door, and the Army Service Forces accepted his pitch to join up and try 'streamlining modern military music.'
Miller gave his final civilian performance in New Jersey on September 27, 1942, three years to the day after Warsaw surrendered to the Nazis.
He was taken under the wing of the commander of U.S. Army Air Forces, General Henry 'Hap' Arnold, who declared that Miller's work was 'my kind of music' and gave him license to recruit 38 of the best musicians from more than 400 continental bases to form his Major Glenn Miller Army Air Forces Orchestra.
Miller brought his signature style to the front, adding strings to the big band and creating a sound that became the gold standard copied by his successors.
'The band helped the war effort. It made people want to join,' said Bill Chivalette, curator of the Air Force Enlisted Heritage Hall, to Air Force University Public Affairs.
'It helped with recruiting. They created the greatest orchestra of its time in the military. Their performances were wonderful. He truly had rock star status.'
Miller took the show to Britain and then toured Europe, performing for over a million troops in 11 countries and playing on even when the bombs were falling nearby.
His musicians were somewhat less delighted than his audiences, owing to his merciless perfectionism - one recalled a day known as 'Black Monday,' when Miller told every single performer precisely 'what he thought' of him.
In December 1944, while France was in the process of being liberated, Miller, 40, was supposed to fly there from England to play, but to his increasing exasperation, the planes kept getting canceled because of bad weather.
Ultimately, the irascible musician was so fed up he caught hold of an officer he knew who was flying across the English Channel on December 15 and hopped aboard, without getting authorized or even sending the information up the chain of command.
The plane disappeared over the water and was never found.
It took three days for Allied forces to even realize Miller was missing, as they were preoccupied with the Battle of the Bulge, which broke out hours after he vanished.
The eventual investigation failed, and he was pronounced dead in absentia a year and a day after his disappearance, in accordance with U.S. military etiquette.
His legions of fans went wild with heartache and seized on the mystery surrounding Miller's flight to formulate theories about how he might actually have arranged to go missing in order to be a spy, or for a woman, or to flee to South America, etc.
Among those who accepted that he was dead, one line of thinking held that he was taken down by friendly fire, another that he made it to Paris but succumbed to a heart attack in the arms of a local prostitute, still another that he was at Allied headquarters in France and was killed in a Nazi assault.
As late as 1989, there was a joke on The Golden Girls where Blanche (Rue McClanahan) mentions that 'Glenn Miller's dead' and Dorothy (Bea Arthur) emotionally bursts out: 'He's not dead! He's missing!'
But most of his admirers resigned themselves to the likelihood that Miller's plane crashed into the English Channel, adding him and his two fellow passengers to the ranks of the millions killed in the conflict.
He left behind his widow Helen, who had been his college sweetheart before he dropped out to launch his big band career, and their young son Steven.
And he left behind his music, which was cherished for decades by countless listeners who had borne the same bereavement Helen did and held onto his records as a memory of their last dance with the loves they lost to the war.