WWII mystery dredged up

PARIS — One of France’s most enduring mysteries has been solved with the discovery of the wreckage of the aircraft piloted by Antoine de Saint-Exupery, author of the children’s classic “The Little Prince.”

Two pieces of his Lockheed Lightning P-38, which vanished on July 31, 1944, during an Allied reconnaissance mission, have been pulled from the Mediterranean Sea near Marseilles, a French air force spokesman said Wednesday.

Archives confirmed that the manufacturer’s serial number, 2734L, stamped on a piece of salvaged fuselage, matched that of Mr. Saint-Exupery’s plane.

“I had tears in my eyes when I saw the number,” said Pierre Becker, the head of Geocean, one of the engineering companies involved.

The discovery ends more than half a century of speculation over the final resting place of the aristocratic adventurer and author, whose blend of pioneering aviation, philosophy and literary genius made him one of France’s most beloved sons.

“The Little Prince,” a disarmingly simple tale about a little boy who recounts his space-traveling experiences to a pilot he meets in the Sahara, is believed to be the third-best-selling book on the planet, beaten only by the Bible and Karl Marx’s “Das Kapital.”

Much of his writing recounts the perilous and poetic experience of flying, in submission to what he calls “those elemental divinities — night, day, mountain, sea and storm.”

Mr. Saint-Exupery first flew a plane at age 12. Much later he crashed in the Sahara and walked for days without water before being rescued.

For what turned out to be his final flight, he took off from Corsica in good weather on a mission to photograph German troop movements in the Rhone Valley.

He never returned, and it was not clear where or why he crashed.

The hunt moved to the Marseilles area in 1998 when a fisherman recovered a silver bracelet with the inscription “Saint-Ex,” “Consuelo” (his Salvadoran wife) and the address of his American publishers.

Skeptics branded the find a fake, but in May 2000, Luc Vanrell, a professional French diver, located parts of a P-38 about 230 feet down near the island of Riou off Marseilles. A state ban on further dives meant he could not retrieve the pieces until last October.

“The parts were given an acid bath and once they resumed their former appearance the serial number appeared,” said Philippe Castello, a diver and aviation expert who compiled the Culture Ministry report on the plane. “When it tallied with Lockheed’s number for Saint-Exupery’s plane, we were all speechless. We had to go over it four times to be sure we weren’t dreaming.”

The mystery of why the plane crashed remains.

“There was no bent propeller, no bullet holes,” Mr. Castello said.

Story Continues →