On the trail of a missing aviator, Saint-Exupéry

Amateur archeologists dig up keys to WWII mystery
Pair track down pilot who likely shot down 'Little Prince' author

By John Tagliabue | New York Times News Service
April 11, 2008

MARSEILLE, France — The demise of author Antoine de Saint-Exupery on a reconnaissance mission in World War II has long ranked as one of aviation's great mysteries. Now, the final pieces of the puzzle seem to have been filled in.

The story that emerged about the disappearance of Saint-Exupery, the French aviator, author and emigre from Vichy France, proved to contain several narratives, a complexity that would probably have pleased the author of several adventure books on flying and the charming tale "The Little Prince."

On July 31, 1944, Saint-Exupery took off from the island of Corsica in a Lockheed P-38 Lightning on a reconnaissance flight.

The first clue about his fate surfaced in September 1998, when fishermen off Marseilles found a silver bracelet with their nets. It bore the names of Saint-Exupery and his New York publisher. Further searches by divers turned up the badly damaged remains of his plane.

News of the bracelet prompted Luc Vanrell, 48, a diving coach and marine archeologist, to inspect more closely some marine wreckage he had noticed years before near the remains of Saint-Exupery's plane. A serial number and a Skoda symbol, for the Czech supplier, proved it to be a Daimler-Benz V-12 aircraft engine.

In 2005, after enduring numerous bureaucratic delays, Vanrell and another diver, Lino von Gartzen, lifted the motor and shipped it to Munich for study. It turned out to have powered a Messerschmitt fighter plane based in southern France from 1942 to 1944.

Yet von Gartzen was not content. Consulting archives and with the help of the staff of a magazine for Luftwaffe veterans, he tracked down veterans who had flown in the unit.

Then in July 2006, he telephoned a former pilot in Wiesbaden, Horst Rippert, seeking information. Without hesitating, Rippert replied, "You can stop searching. I shot down Saint-Exupery."

Rippert, 85, said it was days after he had shot down a P-38 with French colors near Marseille that he learned of Saint-Exupery's disappearance.

Over the years, the thought that he might have killed Saint-Exupery had troubled Rippert. As a youth in the 1930s, he had idolized the aviator-turned-author and had devoured his books, beginning with the adventure tale "Southern Mail" in 1929.