Legacy Matters

'My boy, if you don't get lost, I'm going to shoot you,"

The man who shot Antoine de Saint-Expery out of the sky has come forward. 

Sainte Exupery was a celebrated French aviator and writer who, a year before his death,  wrote the book beloved by millions, Le Petit Prince, "The Little Prince".    who so famously said,
Here is my secret. It is very simple: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.

Saint-Exupery was 44 when he flew for the last time over the Mediterranean until his plane was shot down on July 31, 1944.

His plane was never recovered and considered lost until a French fisherman pulling up his nets
discovered an identity bracelet engraved with the name of Saint-Exupéry's wife, Consuelo, and that of his publishers, Reynal & Hitchcock.

Mr Vanrell, a local deep sea diver, then began searching the Marseilles coastline for the remains of the writer's aircraft. In 2000 he discovered pieces of Saint-Exupéry's plane lying on the sea bed 80 metres deep near the Ile de Riou. The plane wreck was formally identified in 2004 as being Saint-Exupéry's by its serial number.

The investigation continued and as it happens, Horst Rippert, the German pilot was still alive.

So when Mr von Gartzen called Mr Rippert he was astounded by his immediate confession. "He replied straight away: 'You can stop searching, it was I who shot down Exupéry'."

Mr Rippert recounted how he had been surprised to see the French pilot's Lightning flying alone and too low in his sector near Toulouse.

"Like me, he was over the sea and flying toward the mainland. I said to myself: 'My boy, if you don't get lost, I'm going to shoot you," said Mr Rippert, who was 25 at the time. "I dived in his direction and I fired, not at the fuselage, but at the wings. I hit him. The plane crashed into the sea. No-one jumped.

"I did not see the pilot and even so, it would have been impossible for me to tell that it was Saint-Exupéry. In our youth at school we had all read him, we loved his books. I loved his personality. If I had known I wouldn't have fired. Not at him."