The article comes from the Daily Mail, so the veracity may be suspect, Nevertheless, it’s an interesting story.
How a German wartime flying ace discovered he shot down his hero
Excerpt:
How sad that a ghost from his past had to come back so late in his life.
First off - I want you to know, you’re harshing on my view of the world, dammit.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery was not killed in the war. He simply left this world because he was going to see his friend The Little Prince.
(Puts hands over ears.) His plane has never been found. And even if it had been found, there were no remains nor personal effects ever found to prove his body must have been in the plane’s wreckage. Lalalalalala
More seriously, what a terrible thing to find out.
<back to obligatory denial mode>
If it were true, which of course it isn’t. Herr Rippert should stop listening to all those other harshing bastards…
</obligatory denial mode off>
I fixed that link:
Whether it was St-Ex or not, you were doing your duty as you saw it. You weren’t gassing kids or carrying out reprisal massacres or anything, you were a pilot on a mission, like a lot of other guys on both sides of a big nasty impersonal business.
Act well your part; there all the honor lies. - Alexander Pope
He was doing his duty, but it’s terribly sad all the same. War is an awful waste, and here’s one more of a million stories to bring it home.
It’s a bummer too that he killed the man that was going to find the cure for cancer, but ya don’t hear about him.
If you’re going to play that game, though, shouldn’t we also talk about the benefit he did by killing the Rhone River Killer before he could kill, stuff and mount the heads of 47 young runaways on highway kilometer markers? That seems just as likely, IMNSHO.
The tragedy here, for Herr Rippert, is not that he killed someone who provided something of value for mankind, but that he personally feels responsible for the death of someone whom he greatly admired. He expressed it as a mourning for what else Saint-Exupery might have produced had he lived, but I suspect that even if we could prove that Saint-Exupery would have gone on to do nothing more, Herr Rippert would not be absolved of the new-found guilt.
Thank you Cajun Man and riker1384 for the fixed links.
I have a BD/manga book from my uncle titled Le Dernier Vol de St. Exupery (The Final Flight of St. Exupery). As he’s flying, he sees visions of all the figures and events from his past (including the Little Prince), who question him on the choices he’s made in life and how he’s ended up where he is. The final frame is his plane disappearing into the clouds.
I’ve never been able to read it all the way through without choking up.
I don’t understand all you people.
St. Exupery isn’t dead. He’s on the little Prince’s planet, admiring the rose and helping to clean out the volcanoes.
(On preview: damn, OtakuLoki beat me to it. By “it”, I mean pointing out the truth, of course…)
Wondering how it could have been discovered who had shot down St Exupery’s plane, I found a much more detailled article on a french website. Actually, it appears that the German pilot had heard about the author’s fate mere days after the event and understood that he was the pilot who shot him down (Even though he says “Still, I hoped and still hope it wasn’t me”).
So rather than being told about it recently, it’s the other way around : he told it recently to an historian writing a biography of Saint-Exupery. It was apparently already known to which air unit the attacking pilot belonged. Only his exact identity was unknown.
Another tidbit of information from the same article : the author had been sent that day on a photo reconnaissance mission over the Vercors Plateau where the Wermarcht was engaged in a significant operation against a french “maquis” (actually, the only large fight the resistance was ever involved in). Unbestknown to him, the person who first published his books (and who was also a writer) was part of this maquis and had been killed too the previous day.