ON Thursday France paid nationwide homage through official ceremonies and media coverage to one of its most enigmatic heroes on the 70th anniversary of his … let’s call it ‘disappearance’ in order to keep intact the legend of mysteries that surrounded the man all his life and does so even today.

At nine o’clock on the morning of July 31, 1944, Antoine de Saint Exupéry took off in his twin-engine Lockheed P38 Lightning aircraft from a secret base. In clear weather he could easily see the French Alps, the Annecy Lake and the island of Corsica in the Mediterranean to his left from an altitude of 10,000 metres where the temperature, as his controls panel showed, had dropped to minus 50 degrees centigrade.

Saint Ex, as he was called by friends, had little sleep during the night. He was the guest of honour at a dinner party thrown by Colonel Paul Rockwell, an American officer who had come under cover to meet him. Saint Ex was a great entertainer and was surrounded during such evenings by admirers, and beautiful young women, who laughed heartily at his jokes and enjoyed his card tricks and thrilling accounts of flying feats.

Now, alone in his cockpit, he knew his real life was up here and what he did below was no more than a show to please the others. “I belong to the skies and if ever I am shot down by the enemy while flying…” he once wrote in his logbook “…I won’t regret it. I was not born to be slave-labour insect of an anthill.”

By this time Saint Ex was no longer a fighter pilot, a long career full of adventures that was now behind him; he had belonged to the generation of flyers whose aircraft were built with wood and canvas pieces. He had already turned 40 when Marshall Pétain signed the much disgraceful armistice with Germany on June 22, 1940; feeling humiliated, Saint Ex escaped through Portugal to end up in the United States where he would strive to persuade the Americans to join the war against Hitler.

Already author of at least five well-known oeuvres, during his nearly three years of self exile in the US and Canada, Saint Ex would write Wind, Sand & Stars, Flight Arras, Letter to a Hostage and the most famous of his books The Little Prince, started as a children’s tale that later turned into a philosophical piece which the author decided to illustrate himself with naive watercolour sketches. The work was based on his own experience during eight days of solitude and hallucinations and his miraculous survival after a plane crash in 1935 in the Great Sahara. The book has since been translated into 270 languages with 145 million copies sold — the greatest best-seller of them all!

Once assured of US backing to the anti-Pétainist forces, Saint Ex would spend the final year and a few months of his life in Algeria, Tunis and Morocco with the Free France Air Force. His mission this fateful morning was to look for German military bases in southern France, photograph them and record wireless messages.

The Lockheed carried no weapons but was equipped with a technology that allowed it to fly much higher than the German aircraft and at a much superior speed. It could also hover very low to escape radar detection and to take close-up photographs.

His final exchanges with the operator reveal him to be terribly frustrated by the fact that, as he was bringing his aircraft down over Grenoble and Lake Annecy, dark clouds started covering the sun. He was advised to call off the mission but he insisted on flying at a minimum possible altitude to get a clearer view of the German base at Chazelles. Then, at ten o’clock all communication was cut off and Saint Ex never returned to the base.

Officially he was declared ‘lost in action’ but no trace of the Lockheed nor of the mortal remains of Saint Ex were recovered despite many attempts over the years following the liberation of France … not until September 7, 1998 that is, when a boat accidentally dragged up in its fishing net a badly damaged piece of metal close to the isle of Riou near Marseilles.

Divers quickly discovered and brought up the unrecognisable carcass of the Lockheed that was eventually formally identified in April 2004 as the aircraft belonging to Saint Ex.

If there had been any doubts as to why the plane fell into the sea, they were finally resolved in a declaration by a former Luftwaffe pilot shortly before his death at age 91 in April 2013.

Horst Rippert was flying a Jgr. 200 fighter plane on July 31, 1944 when he discovered a Lockheed at a very low altitude heading toward Marseilles.

“I could immediately see this was an unarmed surveillance plane and there was no point in trying to kill the pilot. I fired just one shot aimed at the left wing of the aircraft. It went down into the Mediterranean instantly. Only a few months earlier I had read a most wonderful book and had loved it. I would never have fired that shot if I had known that I was going to kill the man who wrote The Little Prince.”

—The writer is a journalist based in Paris.

(ZafMasud@gmail.com)

Published in Dawn, August 3rd, 2014