I am naturally a very sunny person. Having gone through severe childhood setbacks, I have taught myself to look for the silver lining in the dark clouds that commonly pervade everyone's lives and stubbornly seek victories in my defeats.
But nothing had prepared me for this. It has enveloped me with a blanket of sadness for the past few days.
As some of you may know I originate from the south of France, and was brought up in a little coastal village, Agay (pop 342 circa 1950), whose distinction (apart from possessing one of the loveliest bay in the world) is that of having had the pleasure to host Antoine de Saint Exupery (of the Little Prince fame) as a frequent summer visitor. His sister, Gabrielle, married Pierre d’Agay, and produced four children. Alas, I never met the brilliant writer as he died before I was born. His seminal novel, Flight to Arras (Pilote de Guerre) though less known than The Little Prince is, in my opinion, one of the most anti-war book ever published as he recounts a terrifying mission above the French town of Arras as the pilot of a reconnaissance plane during the Battle of France in 1940.
Two weeks ago, a story broke in the European press about an 88-year-old German Luftwaffe veteran pilot who had been unmasked as the man who shot down Saint-Exupéry, a reminder of the continuing horrors of war and the continuing pain it offers. The 63-year-old mystery surrounding the death of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the celebrated French aviator and author has finally been solved. He died in mysterious circumstances when his plane came down near Marseilles while on a reconnaissance mission.
As a young adult, I remember thinking about my own theory on his disappearance, a little more romantic I guess, somewhat misaligned with the undisciplined sixties: Saint-Exupéry loathed the modern gods of technology and at that time he was suffering from depression. I thought he had enough and pointed his plane upwards, towards the sun, and flew on.
Saint-Exupéry was last seen alive when he took off in his Lockheed Lightning P-38 from Borgo air base in Corsica at around 14:30. He was 44 when he died and his body has never been found. Now, thanks to some sleuthing by a French diver and marine archaeologist, the final pieces of the puzzle seem to have been filled in. On July 31, 1944, Saint-Exupéry took off from the island of Corsica, one of numerous French pilots who assisted the U.S. war effort. He never returned, and over the years numerous theories arose: that he had been shot down, lost control of his plane, even that he committed suicide.
No trace of Saint-Exupéry was found until 1998 when Jean-Luc Bianco, a French fisherman, discovered an identity bracelet engraved with the name of Saint-Exupéry's wife, Consuelo, and that of his publishers, Reynal & Hitchcock, in his nets off the coast at Marseilles. Mr Vanrell, a local deep sea diver, then began searching the Marseilles coastline for the remains of the writer's aircraft. In 2000 he discovered pieces of Saint-Exupéry's plane lying on the sea bed 80 metres deep near the Ile de Riou, near my neck of the woods. The plane wreck was formally identified in 2004 as being Saint-Exupéry's by its serial number.
Near to the plane he had also found wreckage from a German Messerschmitt. Had the writer fallen victim to a collision in mid-air with an enemy aircraft? He contacted Lino von Gartzen, a German historian specialising in the Luftwaffe, who led him to the final piece of the puzzle: Horst Rippert, one of the last German pilots based in the south-east of France in the summer of 1944.
After investigating 130 Luftwaffe veterans, Mr von Gartzen narrowed the search to five. So when Mr von Gartzen called Mr Rippert he was astounded by his immediate confession. "He replied straight away: 'You can stop searching, it was I who shot down Exupéry."
Mr Rippert recounted how he had been surprised to see the French pilot's Lightning flying alone and too low in his sector near Toulouse.
"Like me, he was over the sea and flying toward the mainland. I said to myself: 'My boy, if you don't get lost, I'm going to shoot you," said Mr Rippert, who was 25 at the time. "I dived in his direction and I fired, not at the fuselage, but at the wings. I hit him. The plane crashed into the sea. No-one jumped. I did not see the pilot and even so, it would have been impossible for me to tell that it was Saint-Exupéry. In our youth at school we had all read him, we loved his books. I loved his personality. If I had known I wouldn't have fired. Not at him."
If indeed he was the pilot who killed Saint-Exupéry, I can imagine the immense suffering that man must have been going through. What a terrible twist of fate. As for me, I cling to my own theory, stubbornly.
The Little Prince was the third most read book last century, after the Holy Bible and the Ku’ran, according to Google.