Yet this location was far off Saint-Exupéry’s flight path. This led to the rediscovery of reports from August 1944, of the discovery of a body that could not be identified but was in French uniform washing ashore nearby at that time. In 1998, a French fisherman found Saint-Exupéry’s identity bracelet in the ocean off Marseille, and two years later divers found the remains of his aircraft in the same area. Eight days later Saint-Exupéry was officially declared missing in action, presumed shot down by the enemy. On July 31, 1944, in preparation for the impending Operation Dragoon, the Allied invasion of southern France, Saint-Exupéry took off from an airfield on the island of Corsica to take reconnaissance photographs in the area of Grenoble, France. A crash on his second flight boded ill for Saint-Exupéry’s future, but he was nevertheless ushered back into service after recuperating.Ī P-38 Lightning in North Africa, 1944. He therefore returned to service in North Africa as a reconnaissance pilot in April 1943, flying an F-5B variant of the P-38 Lightning. Saint-Exupéry was a figure of international renown, however, whose participation in Free French military efforts would have tremendous publicity value and so it was inevitable that his repeated applications to return to service would be granted. Yet he was 43 years old, with a bevy of injuries that left him unable to turn his head to the left or even to dress without assistance. Saint-Exupéry was desperate not just to return to the air, but to rejoin the fight for his homeland. It was during his time in the United States that Saint-Exupéry wrote The Little Prince, which was published there in 1943. After the collapse of France, he fled to the United States, spending the next couple of years there and in Canada advocating for the liberation of his country from German occupation and also denouncing the Vichy French rump state that collaborated with the Nazis. He nevertheless applied for and was accepted as a reconnaissance flier in the French Air Force, using a two-engine Bloch 174 aircraft.

When World War II began in 1939, Saint-Exupéry was in the process of recovering from severe injuries he had received in yet another aircraft crash in Guatemala during the previous year. A Bloch 174 reconnaissance aircraft, 1940.

The prince antoine de saint exupery