The Echo of the Little Prince in the Mediterranean

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By: Dr. Marco V. Benavides Sánchez.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry published The Little Prince in 1943, arguably the most widely read book in the world after the Bible, and a year later he was dead at the bottom of the Mediterranean. He was 43 years old when he was allowed to fly combat missions again in World War II, an age that commanders considered too old for a fighter pilot. He had to insist, plead, and negotiate to be allowed to board a plane. On his first missions, he wrecked an aircraft upon landing and was grounded for eight months. On July 31, 1944, at 8:45 a.m., he took off from the Borgo airbase in Corsica aboard a Lockheed P-38 Lightning, an unarmed photo-reconnaissance aircraft, with the mission of flying over German positions in the Rhône Valley to prepare for the Allied landings in Provence. He had enough fuel for six hours. He never returned. At 1:00 p.m., his squadron captain reported his disappearance. At 2:30 p.m., he was declared missing. There was no radio signal, no flashes in the water, no body. For almost fifty-four years, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was officially "missing in action." Theories multiplied: a technical failure, suicide, that the Nazis had captured him, that he had survived and disappeared voluntarily. None had any proof. Everything changed on September 7, 1998, when a fisherman from Marseille named Jean-Claude Bianco hauled his nets in off the island of Riou and found something faintly gleaming among the fish. It was a metal bracelet. He cleaned off the rust and read the inscription: "Antoine de Saint-Exupéry." Below it was the name of his Salvadoran wife, Consuelo Suncín, whom he had met in Buenos Aires. And the address of his publisher in New York, the one that published The Little Prince. The fisherman had no idea what he held in his hands. That bracelet mobilized researchers and divers, and in 2000, diver Luc Vanrell located the plane on the seabed at a depth of 87 meters. In 2004, the French Ministry of Culture confirmed that the fuselage serial number corresponded to Saint-Exupéry's P-38 Lightning. In 2008, an 85-year-old former German Luftwaffe pilot named Horst Rippert confessed to having kept the secret for 64 years: he shot down that plane that July morning. He said he had shot it down with professional pride and that it pained him for the rest of his life because Saint-Exupéry was his favorite writer. However, a second report from another German pilot who died days later calls his account into question. Saint-Exupéry's body was never recovered. For the diver who found the plane, that has its poetic side: like the Little Prince, who also disappears at the end of the book.

 

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