On the twenty-fifth of May 1930, a young journalist visited a prizewinner of the French Academy. He came to see him on the very day he won the prize for his novel Wind, Sand and Stars. The young man knew very little about his interlocutor, except that he was an exceptional pilot. He knew that Antoine de Saint-Exupéry had flown great distances over unknown landscapes and had escaped death several times. He had been front-page news in the evening newspapers three years before; a Bedouin had found him almost dead of thirst in the Libyan desert, and then everyone had celebrated his return. The journalist remembered this event above all because Saint-Exupéry was also a writer, and thus different from other famous pilots.
The writer received him in his study. It was not the usual clutter that we imagine to be part of any writer’s life. He was the kind of man you see in all good photographs. His face was neither puffy nor haggard, resting on tiny but lively eyes, an upturned nose with wide nostrils and a mouth stretched into a smile.
The discussion was held without any major surprises. The journalist asked him the usual questions and Saint-Exupéry calmly answered them. He talked about his bohemian life, his time as an architecture student and the times when he sometimes had to tighten his belt a little more. At that time, he was dissatisfied in every way, a failure in the airline group, with a broken engagement, a bored accountant who wanted the sky. His friends called him Tonio, his colleagues called him Saint Ex for short. In 1926, he committed himself to aviation, which was then still in its infancy, and accepted a job as a pilot with the Latécoère airline.
The journalist described their meeting in an article, which was published but did not attract much attention. Who was this Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the French writer between the two world wars, who crossed his nation’s cultural circle and achieved worldwide fame with his tiny book The Little Prince?
The world knows him as a spokesman for all that is purest and most precious in the French spirit. He became and remained contemporary because of the perfect unity of his life and his writing. He wrote about his life and lived his writing. In the years before the Second World War, he introduced a new type of hero into literature; it was no longer the meditative hero, but the true hero, active, combative and emotionally noble, mentally rich and spiritually balanced.
His life was even more complicated; he was a true Hemingway hero of Roman literature. He was born in Lyon in 1900 into an impoverished noble family that soon lost his father, an insurance inspector. He spent his childhood with his three sisters and two brothers in Lyon and in the old country manor houses. He had a large park and avenues with trees, and was told fairy tales by Paula, a children’s educator from Tyrol. His classmates at the Saint-Croix boarding school nicknamed him “The Moonman” because of his tendency to daydream and his changing moods. Even as a well-known writer, he would get angry when anyone reminded him of it, even though it was part of his life.
He finished high school in Mans, studied at the Naval College and was an undisciplined student, went on to study architecture, then took up air sports and attained the rank of flight officer in the army. He spent some time in various technical services, passed his civil pilot’s test, taught flying techniques, and then, in 1926, joined the Latécoère airline and became a pilot on the Toulouse-Casablanca-Dakar mail route. It is no mere coincidence that in the same year he published his first story, entitled The Aviator.
There is no doubt at all that he dreamt of flying as a child. He may not have been the world’s first aviator, but he was the first to give us the sky. What an honour for a failed naval school candidate. Those who did not know him well could see in him whatever they wanted; a writer, an adventurer, a moralist or a scholar. But at his core he was just an aviator, a man of the skies. Not for cheap fame or social status, but for passion.
The solitude and tranquillity of the desert
Much later, he took over the dangerous Cape Juby air station in the middle of Moroccan rebel territory in West Africa. As always, he took as many books with him as he could. Even then, he was fascinated by Nietzsche. “I always carry Nietzsche with me. I love him immensely. And that loneliness. In Cape Juby, I will lie down in the sand and read. There are things in Nietzsche that fascinate me.” But Cape Juby was not a place where one could enjoy oneself and laze about.
This auxiliary airport on the Cablanca-Dakar route was located in Rio de Oro, then an unconquered part of Spanish Morocco. A few officers and penal battalions under the command of Colonel La Pena occupied the small fortress and occasionally made short reconnaissance flights over the Sahara. But this did not prevent the rebellious tribes from retaliating. Thus, when Saint-Exupéry took up his post, he was greeted by the news that, six months before his arrival, four French pilots and four Uruguayan pilots had been captured by the Moors while flying on the line to Dakar. They were released only after a ransom had been paid, and those for whom no ransom was paid were murdered.
The Spanish authorities were embarrassed, felt ashamed and saw the solution to the problem in the cancellation of all flights over their territory. This could also have been the end of the route to Dakar, because it was not possible to get there without a stopover at Cape Juby with the planes of the time. However, this ban applied to military aircraft, but not to civilian aircraft. Saint-Exupéry was therefore given only a brief instruction before he left: “Contact the Spanish Governor and come to the aid of any aircraft in danger at any hour and in any weather, no matter where it is in the desert”.
This instruction, of course, required a great deal of courage and diplomatic skill on the part of the airport operator. Saint-Exupéry managed to do all this well, securing the support of the Spanish Governor and succeeding in standing up to the Moors. In the eighteen months he spent at Cape Juby, six crews were captured by the Moors and four times he had to come to the aid of pilots who were experiencing technical difficulties.
He wrote his first novel, The Southern Courier, in Cape Juby, where a wooden shack served as both his home and his office. He simply borrowed the title from a postal item bound for Dakar. But he did not just sit in his office; whenever he could, he got into a plane and took to the skies. And risked his life doing so. He often flew at night.
On the first flights of the Casablanca-Dakar air route, when the planes were still fragile, engine failures and the search for casualties repeatedly forced rescuers to land in rebel territory. Landing on sand was dangerous, as the sand was prone to sinking. It was better to land on the 300-metre-high plateaux, which stretched from Cape Juby to Cisneros and were made up of tiny shells. It was often necessary to spend the night there. At that time, Saint-Exupéry was lost in the desert, surrounded by stars and shells, and handed over to silence, but he was immensely content.
Once, he had to make an emergency landing near the Nouat-chott fortress. This fortified point of Mauritania was then as lonely in the midst of life as a lost island in the middle of the ocean. It was the home of an elderly orderly and his fifteen Senegalese men. He welcomed Saint-Exupéry like an envoy from heaven: “If you only knew how much it means to me to be able to speak to you.” It meant so much to him that he burst into tears. “After six months, you are the first I see, because only every six months are we supplied with food.”
The Nouat-chott fortress was located on the edge of rebel territory and did not really deserve to be called a fortress. The desert around it was so boundless that it was practically impregnable. Attacking rebels had to cross a wide swathe of sand in the heat if they wanted to attack it, so they could only approach it when its defenders were at the edge of their strength and running out of water. Yet the rebel detachments had been approaching it for as long as the governor could remember.
But the greatest enemy was not the rebels, but the endless silence. That evening, the orderly showed Saint-Exupéry his garden. He had received three boxes of real black soil from France. Three green stems sprouted in the black soil and the orderly caressed them like valuables. He was saying: ‘This is my park. When the sandy wind blows and dries everything up, I take it to the cellars.”
In the Sahara, Saint-Exupéry was also in contact with free Moors who ventured to the fortresses of Cape Juby and Cisneros to buy bread, sugar and tea before plunging back into their mysterious world. Sometimes, when they were powerful chiefs, with the permission of the company, he would put them on a plane and show them a different world. This was to reduce their nakedness, because they killed prisoners more out of contempt than out of hatred.
Death in the desert
These were not the only Saharan experiences that found a place in his literature. On 30 December 1935, Saint-Exupéry and his navigator crashed in the Libyan desert near Wadi Natrun while attempting to break the speed record in the Paris-Saigon race and win a prize of 150,000 francs. He described these events, which could have cost him his life, in his second book, The Dehumanised Land, published in 1939 and awarded the Grand Prix of the French Academy.
In it, he described how, one night in 1935, he glided down a lighted runway in a Simoun-type aircraft into an opening in the night. Weather stations in Paris, Tunis and Benghazi were forecasting a stern wind of up to 40 km/h. He set his course for the centre of the segment linking Alexandria and Cairo. He decided to fly at 300 km/h and calculated that, if the wind did not change, it would take him three hours and twenty minutes to reach the stage finish.
The month was gone. Up to the stars, the night was as black as asphalt. He knew that as far as the Nile he would not see any fire, that he would not be able to use any sign on the ground and that he would not get any human message if the radio failed him. Of course, the radio soon stopped working. He and the radiotelegraphist had been flying for three and a half hours and Saint-Exupéry calculated that he must be close to the Nile. After four hours of flying, he became restless, looked at the map, believed he was over the east bank of the Nile and turned north. The lights of the great city would soon shine in his windows.
But he could see nothing, just clouds everywhere. He didn’t dare go any lower, as he was supposed to be only 400 metres up. He shouted to the radio operator: “I’m going down to the sea, I’d rather land on the sea than crash…”. He did not finish his sentence, because at that moment he felt a terrible crash as they hit the ground at 170 km/h. The crash shattered the cockpit, propelled the sheet metal hundreds of metres away and broke the right wing. It was a miracle that they survived. There was a big hole where they had hit the sand. The plane did not tip over, but lay on its belly. He quickly removed the batteries to prevent a short circuit from causing a fire. The petrol and oil tanks were smashed and the water supply had also gone bad.
They didn’t know where they hit the ground, but they knew that if they were somewhere on the flight line, they would be discovered in a week, and if they had turned around, only in six months. They curled up in the wrecked cabin and tried to fall asleep. In the morning, they tried to find out where they were. They walked on the floor, which was covered with a uniform layer of shiny black stones. No sooner had they crossed the first ridge than a second ridge, equally shiny and black, appeared in the distance, followed by a third, and then a fourth. As they walked, they dragged their feet behind them to leave footprints that would lead them back to the plane. Without any logic, they walked eastwards, convinced that they were on the other side of the Nile.
After five hours of walking, the landscape has changed. A sandy river wound through the valley and they walked along it. The tide was getting heavier and heavier and the apparitions were beginning to appear. Large lakes appeared and disappeared as soon as they approached them. They tried to wake the sleeping Bedouin, but he had turned into the trunk of a withered black tree. Walking on made no sense, they had to return to the plane. They lay down in its shade and realised that they had drunk all their water.
Early in the morning, they wiped some dew off the wings and put it in the bottom of a jar. The liquid tasted disgustingly of paint and oil. Nevertheless, they drank it, thinking that they must be wanted and would soon get fresh water. They knew that a man could survive in this desert for a maximum of nineteen hours without water and, with no help coming from anywhere, they decided to get water by cutting the parachute into triangles, spreading them on the ground and weighing them down with stones, setting them on fire at dawn and putting the dew into the jars. Indeed, they collected almost two litres of water. It was a greenish-yellow colour, but they drank it anyway and waited for the rescuers. At night they dug a hole in the sand, lay down in it and covered themselves with sand. At least that way they didn’t get too cold.
On the fourth day, they decided to leave the plane and head east. A westerly breeze blew in from the desert, drying a man out in nineteen hours. The esophagus closes, making it impossible to breathe. They walked quickly, wanting to take advantage of the morning chill. But they soon realised that, despite the cold, it was difficult to walk. They walked five hundred metres and collapsed from exhaustion. They felt nothing more inside them, only a great emptiness. They thought they were finished.
They soon realised that there was still hope for a solution. They saw human footprints and camel tracks in the sand. They knew that somewhere in the desert, a caravan was rocking, but they had yet to discover where. They had to catch up with it. They trudged on. They were at the end of their strength when they were spotted and rescued. Later, they learned that they had landed in the middle of the desert, 200 kilometres from Cairo.
Night flight
Before he crashed in the Libyan desert in 1935, his path took him to the other side of the world, to Argentina. On 12 October 1929, he was in Buenos Aires, having been appointed director of Aéropostale Argentina, which had previously been called Latécoère. He had to organise and expand a network of airlines along much of the east coast of South America, linking them to a transatlantic route from Dakar. He knew that, with a bit of luck, he could open up some exploratory lines to the very interior of the continent.
And indeed he did, with a flight from Buenos Aires to Punta Arenas in Patagonia. He worked until January 1931, to the satisfaction of the French and the Argentines, and then went to Paris on leave. He was sorry to see the company go bankrupt in the meantime.
In Buenos Aires, he wrote his famous novel Night Flight. It was inspired by a famous event in the history of flight. At the beginning of 1928, Didier Daraut decided to fly at night to ensure the speed of mail delivery, a very audacious act for those times. Aircraft were still at a very early stage of development and were more or less unreliable, and the chances of an accident were high. It was already dangerous to fly in the daytime, and night flights were not really thought of at that time.
On 16 April 1928, the famous pilot Mermoz flew from Rio de Janeiro to Buenos Aires at night. No one thought that this daring flight would one day become commonplace. “It is a question of survival for us, because the advantage over the train and the boat that we get with daily flights is lost again every night”, mused the owner of this airline.
Night flying had to continue despite the dangers if it was to survive. The intermediate landing sites stretched 2500 kilometres from Buenos Aires to the Magellan Strait, each opening up the limits of the deep night for the pilot. Thus, one night, three mail planes from the south, west and north returned to Buenos Aires, coming from Patagonia, Chile and Paraguay. They were waiting for their cargo to be taken to Europe by another plane around midnight. The pilots were contemplating their flight and slowly descending from the stormy skies towards the giant city. Saint-Exupéry, as the airline’s manager, paced nervously around the landing field. Until the planes arrived, the day was full of dangers for him. From one minute to the next, he was aware that the day would not end well.
A staff member told him that a mail plane from Chile was already seeing the lights of Buenos Aires, and soon enough the rumble of an engine could be heard. Then the other two arrived. The planes were slowly landing. The pilot of the Chilean mail plane just nodded to him and did not answer the question as to what the flight was. He did not want to talk, because he had had a bad flight. He flew calmly over the mountain range of the Andes, where the winter snow was resting. For two hundred kilometres there was not a living creature in sight, not a breath, nothing. Just vertical cliffs, piles of stones and a single awful silence.
It all started around the Tupungat peak. He thought he was being watched and his heart squeezed. He stared at the peaks, the snow ridges and the vertical walls and had the feeling that they had come alive. Then, suddenly, the air was filled with a thick dusting of snow and his vision was blocked. Instinctively, he turned the aircraft to secure his exit in case of a necessary retreat. Suddenly, snow, a volcano of snow in fact, gushed from a peak below him. Then other peaks began to gush snow.
The mail plane was bouncing left and right. It was the first time the pilot had experienced this and now he knew that the cyclone was nothing, that the dangerous thing was the one in front of him. And now he had experienced it – the prelude to a cyclone. “Some of us are going to have damn bad weather tomorrow,” he muttered to himself. He was saved by air currents that lifted the plane to 7000 metres. Then other currents pushed it down to 3 000 metres, and he still didn’t know how he had managed not to crash anywhere.
The tired teams went to bed, replaced by fresh ones. But for Saint-Exupéry, it was not the end of the day. He was anxiously awaiting a plane from Europe. If the pilot of the mail plane had fallen victim to a cyclone, there was no way that the company’s survival could have been called into question. The pilot’s life and his chances of survival were to be treated as if they were of no importance at all. He must not kneel in sympathy or grief at the death of a colleague. He knew that if a single flight was cancelled at the outset, the whole idea of night flights would be lost.
The next day everything went well, although the weather reports were poor. This worried the radiotelegraph operator of a mail plane that had flown in from Patagonia during the night. He looked out of the window and saw that heavy clouds were extinguishing the stars. He looked towards the ground, searching for the lights of the village, but nothing lit up out of the dark greenery. He sensed that he and the pilot were in for a difficult night.
Then, directly in front of them, at horizon height, he saw a faint glimmer, like the glow of a blacksmith’s hearth. The first gusts of a distant gale were already crashing into the plane, causing it to lose its weight momentarily. In the darkness, nothing could be seen but a red light in the cockpit. They were flying into the middle of the storm because it was so wide that it was impossible to avoid it. The altimeter read 1500 metres, so the pilot lowered the plane to 700 metres. This was risky, but the only sensible thing to do at that moment.
Trelew informed them that the sky at Trelew was only three-quarters covered with clouds, so the plane only had to stay in the air for another twenty minutes before it would reach them. Other possible landing sites reported that they were closed because of the storm, and then Trelew also reported “Hurricane at 30 metres per second from the west and a rain squall.”
The pilot of the mail plane instructed the radiotelegraph operator to report to Buenos Aires: “We are surrounded on all sides, the storm is developing on a 1,000-kilometre line, we can’t see anything. What should we do?” The night seemed to him to be endless, for it led neither to port nor to dawn. He had only enough fuel for an hour and forty minutes of flying.
Saint-Exupéry read the message: ‘We are expecting a considerable delay of the mail plane from Patagonia. It seems to be in trouble.” The plane to Europe, which will be flying in clear weather full of moonlight, will not be waiting for the parcels from Patagonia. He asked all the intermediate stations to let him know if they knew where the Patagonian mail plane was. They told him back that they had heard nothing because of the storm, and some did not reply at all. Thus, the number of mute regions on the map grew, where towns were already trembling in the face of the cyclone, and inhabitants were closing their doors and windows. Only the dawn could save them.
Every new message spoke of the danger to the mail plane and every town reported, if it could, on the progress of the storm. “It is coming from the Cordillera, from the interior, and it is destroying everything in front of it as it rages out to sea.” The pilot’s wife also came up and asked if her husband had landed yet. She was comforted that they knew nothing because of the storm, but she insisted on the phone and demanded to speak to the director.
Meanwhile, the Patagonia mail plane was struggling to survive. The telegraph operator told the pilot that he could no longer use the machine because sparks were jumping into his fingers. The plane was already bouncing violently. With each dive, the engine rocked so much that the aircraft shook violently and probably creaked, but the creaking could not be heard because of the storm. It was losing altitude and slowly sinking into the darkness. The pilot read the altitude: five hundred metres. That was already the height of a hill. He now knew that he would have to land, even if he crashed the plane in the process.
He lit the only flare to at least avoid the hills. It lit up the plain and went out on it: it was the sea. “I’ve moved away from the shore, it’s the cyclone, but where is the land?” he shouted to the radiotelegraph operator, but he didn’t hear him. His hands were numb as he gripped the rudder with all his might. “This means death. It had to come to this one day.”
One of the telegraph operators at Patagonia’s Commodoro Rivadavia airport made a sudden gesture and everyone gathered around him. He wrote a few indistinct letters, then a few words. “Blocked at 3000 metres above the storm, we are flying west inland because we have gone over the sea. Below us everything is closed. We don’t know if we are still flying over the sea. We still have half an hour of fuel.” Then, twenty minutes later, Bahía Blanca airport, a thousand kilometres away, picked up the message: “We are descending. We’re going into the clouds.” Nothing more was heard after that.
The wife of a Patagonian pilot was waiting for Saint-Exupéry in the secretary’s office. They had only been married for six weeks. The clerks raised their faces and looked at her furtively. She felt ashamed and looked around in fear. The people around her were mindlessly going about their work, as if they were stepping over corpses. Then Saint-Exupéry welcomed her. She would have liked to run away, but all she said was, “Am I disturbing you?” He replied, “I am sorry that we have nothing to do but wait.”
He was soon informed that a plane from Paraguay had started its descent. The flight to Europe, scheduled for 2am, had been postponed and would not take off until the morning. In his office, Saint-Exupéry felt the relief that comes from the great disasters that have already happened. He informed all the provincial police of the disappearance of the Patagonian mail plane. There was nothing more he could do, now he could only wait.
A plane flying from Paraguay, going from station to station, reported that it had been flying along the edge of the cyclone the whole time. Ten passengers, wrapped in travel blankets, had their foreheads against the windows. After landing, the pilot waited until they had disembarked, approached Saint-Exupéry and asked: “Is the Patagonian here yet?”. “We don’t expect him anymore, he’s gone,” he replied.
In 1931, the Aéropostale airline went bankrupt, but by then Saint-Exupéry was already on holiday in Paris. That same year, his book Night Flight was published, in which he described what happened on the stormy night when the Patagonian mail plane disappeared. This book, which won him the prestigious Femina literary prize, made him a rising star in the literary world.
She married Consuelo Suncin, a twice-widowed Salvadoran writer with a “snake tongue”. He later left her and returned to her several times. She was his muse and the cause of his worries. It was a tempestuous relationship, as Saint-Exupéry travelled frequently and had many affairs. The most famous was that with Helene de Vogue, who, after his death, managed his literary legacy.
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Combat pilot
In 1937, Saint-Exupéry was reporting on the Spanish Civil War and was working on the idea of flying a Simoun from New York to Tierra del Fuego in Argentina. He arrived in New York in 1938, went to Guatemala, which was to be a stopover on the route, and had his worst plane crash. He took to the air prematurely in a school plane and crashed. He suffered a severe concussion, several other injuries to his head and several fractures to his limbs. In fact, he never fully recovered from these injuries.
In New York, he recuperated as much as possible and prepared his work Wind, Sand and Stars for the press. Soon after its publication, it became one of the best-selling books in America. He then returned to Paris. The clouds were gathering over Europe, heralding the Second World War. On 4 September 1939, Saint-Exupéry was mobilised in Toulouse and assigned as a pilot to the technical department of the air force.
But it did not last long in the technical workshops. He persevered and managed to get accepted into the 2/33 reconnaissance aviation group through influential acquaintances, despite a medical certificate clearly stating that he was unfit to fly. Since almost nothing happened there at the beginning, he had enough time to write some drafts for his most famous work, The Little Prince, which he completed in America.
On 10 May 1940, however, the fighting began. In the general confusion that followed the retreat of the French army from the enemy, Saint-Exupéry was able to describe these events. His war novel, The Fighter Pilot, was published in 1942 in the safety of New York, where he had taken refuge after the French capitulation. By then, he had already flown several combat missions over enemy German positions, but the mission he and Officer Dutertre received from Major Alias on 22 May 1940 was “abominable”. They were to fly over the town of Aras at an altitude of 700 metres and gather information on German tank forces. It was a suicidal mission, but they carried it out, even at the cost of a damaged air wing.
“One hundred and seventy-two.” Right, let it be that many, thought Saint-Exupéry. At least that way his grave will be easy to write on: He flew unchallenged in the direction of 172. How long will this mad provocation last? He was flying under heavy clouds at an altitude of 750 metres. If he had risen thirty metres, Dutertre would have seen nothing, so he had to stay at that height. Seven hundred metres is a forbidden height, so the plane drew the firearms of the entire army. It was within range of all calibres. They stayed within weapons range for eternity.
He carefully considered his position and realised that a parachute jump was not an option. Once the plane started to fall, it would take more seconds just to open the chute than the time it would take to fall. He knew that opening it required seven turns of a crank that was difficult to twist and that, on top of that, at full speed the opening would bend quickly and tend to lock.
He was in a landscape that went to his heart. The day was coming to an end. To the left, during the storms, the light planes were building up and turning into church windows. Two steps below him, he could feel only good things with his hand. The cherry trees with their fruits, the earth with its smell of soil. Then something crackled over the landscape, like a splintering log that seems to have gone out.
He was thrown 20 centimetres from his seat. The plane was jolted as if someone had hit it with a stick. It cracked, shattered, but Saint-Exupéry felt that the gears were still responding to him. That was just the first blow, and many more followed.
No explosion was detected. Smoke billowed from the cracks made by the missiles and merged with the blur of the dark floor. He raised his head and watched. It was a scene unlike anything he had ever seen before! The curves of the bullets glittered in the sky. He knew well that each one of these flakes decided life and death, but he also knew that they were shooting too high.
He sensed that defeat was in the offing and his Combat Pilot, published in early 1942, was the first book to draw lessons from a lost battle. But not in a way that hid the events, but in a way that preserved the pride of a defeated nation. Did Saint-Exupéry have to learn anything from this war? For him, it was not a test of courage, nor was he afraid of it.
Saint-Exupéry, in particular, has much to teach us about war. On 17 June 1940, the French army was defeated and all the officers of 2/33 Squadron were sent to Algiers to await demobilisation. In August he returned to Marseille, stayed with his sister and wrote his novel Citadel. But what was he to do in a defeated and occupied country run by collaborationists? He wanted to go to America, so he went to Morocco and from there to Portugal, and in December he was on his way to New York, where he started writing The Fighter Pilot. Later, his wife Consuelo joined him in America.
American months
The novel The Fighter Pilot was published in America in early 1942 and became an instant bestseller. It was published in France the same year and survived the censorship, which removed only three words from the text: “Hitler is an idiot.” The book was banned in 1943 at the request of the German authorities. During his stay in America, Saint-Exupéry is said to have been close friends with Anna Morrow Lindberg, wife of the famous pilot Lindberg. Ironically, in America he was actively involved in the fight against fascism, while the Lindbergs were pro-fascist and advocated peace between America and Germany. Anna Lindberg even wrote a 40-page pamphlet which the US administration described as “a bible for every American fascist”.
Saint-Exupéry was often ill in America, as a result of injuries sustained in numerous plane crashes. However, his French publisher’s wife managed to persuade him to write a children’s book. This was to calm his nerves and at the same time compete with the new series of Mary Poppins stories that were so popular in America. So he wrote and illustrated The Little Prince, which was published in English and French in America at the beginning of 1943, but only posthumously in France, since the Vichy regime had banned all his works.
A pilot who shouldn’t be
In April 1943, after 27 months in America, he travelled to Algiers with an American military convoy to join the Free French Air Force, whose squadrons were based in the Mediterranean. He was promoted to the rank of Major and, at 43, was considerably older than any of his colleagues. In fact, at that age – he was eight years over the age limit – he should not have been allowed to fly at all, but he was persistent, wrote to various generals and generally bothered everywhere. He even approached the Supreme Allied Commander, General Dwight Eisenhower, and asked him to make an exception in his case.
Saint-Exupéry was an extremely stubborn and also sick man. Due to the many accidents he had during plane crashes, he was in constant pain and had limited mobility. He could not even put on his flight suit without help, nor could he turn his head to the left side to watch for enemy aircraft coming from that side.
He and some other pilots were assigned to his former unit 2/33, which flew decommissioned F-5 Lightnings. These aircraft were an improvement on the earlier Lightnings, and Saint-Exupéry had to be re-trained to fly them. The seven-week refresher course was gruelling and left him completely exhausted. This had an impact on his flying abilities. On his second mission, he crashed his plane and was not allowed to fly for eight months. He was again bothered and complained and was only able to sit at the controls of the plane again after a special intervention by General Eaker, the Commander of the US Air Force.
When he was allowed to fly, he also returned to his old passion, reading and writing. His passion for books took him over completely, and he often read while the mechanics were working around his plane, closing the book only when he was about to board. On one flight, he circled the airport for an hour after his return flight, so that he could read a novel to the end without disturbing anyone.
Before he returned to North Africa with the Americans and joined the Free French Air Force, he was hailed as one of their own by the collaborationist regime in Vichy, to his horror and disappointment. Even General de Gaulle, whom Saint-Exupéry had no respect for, publicly implied that the famous pilot and writer supported Germany. Already burdened by personal and other problems, he began to drink heavily, with the result that his health, both physical and mental, deteriorated greatly. He also suffered from depression and his superiors were already considering forbidding him to fly.
On his last reconnaissance mission, he was to gather information on German troop movements near Grenoble in the Rhone Valley as the Allies prepared to invade southern France. Although it had been previously agreed that he would only be allowed to fly five reconnaissance missions with his air unit, he was about to embark on his ninth.
On July 31, 1944, he flew in an unarmed P-38 reconnaissance aircraft from an airbase in Corsica, where 2/33 Squadron had been transferred. He took off at half past nine in the morning and had not returned to base by 11.30. At that time he had fuel for another hour’s flying time. When he still had not reported by 14.30, everyone knew that the plane had crashed. His colleagues adored him, so when he did not return from a mission, they were killed. They knew what that usually meant. They assumed that it had been shot down by German fighters on the high seas, about 100 kilometres away from Bastia. Word of his disappearance soon spread throughout the literary world, and extensive obituaries appeared in the newspapers.
No one knows exactly what happened. After the war, a French woman said she saw an Allied plane crash into the sea near the Bay of Carqueiranne, near Toulon. A few days later, an unidentified body in French uniform washed up in the sea south of Marseille. For several years it was assumed that the location of the downed aircraft would never be identified. It was not until September 1998 that a French fisherman found a silver identification bracelet engraved with Saint-Exupéry’s name and that of his wife, east of the island of Riou.
The French people were very emotional about the find, as Antoine de Saint-Exupéry has since become a national icon. In May 2000, a diver found the scattered partial remains of a P-38 Lightnings aircraft in the sea near where the bracelet was found. There were no bullet holes. Today, these remains are housed in the Aviation Museum in Le Bourget, near Paris.
The Little Prince
But there is someone more famous than Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. Which prince do people like best? Prince Charles, Prince Jackson or one of the others? None of these. It is the golden-haired hero from one of the world’s most popular books, The Little Prince. The poetic story of an extraterrestrial traveller who appears in the desert and befriends a stranded pilot has been translated into almost every language in the world. Some say as many as 250, including Braille. In fact, this is a children’s book that is meant to be read by adults. It is very fortunate that the manuscript of the book has survived at all. Before Saint-Exupéry returned to Europe from America to join the Free French Air Force, he handed over to the journalist Sylvia Hamilton a crumpled paper bag containing the original manuscript, all covered in coffee stains and cigarette burns.
There are many biographical comparisons in The Little Prince. The very first question the Little Prince asks the pilot who is telling the story is: “What, did you fall from the sky to earth?” Saint-Exupéry, too, was constantly falling from the sky. The little prince first left a lonely flower on his small planet and then longed for it. Many understood that the flower represented his wife Consuelo, and the Little Prince was supposed to be the writer himself.
The most similarities between the fate of the Little Prince and that of the writer can be seen at the end of the story. After being stung by a snake, the Little Prince falls into the sand, “as gently as a tree falls”, and his body disappears – either to his death or because he is on his way home to his little planet. Like the Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry has disappeared from the world.
