The Last Flight of the Little Prince/Le dernier vol du Petit Prince

Antoine de Saint-Exupery wrote the little Prince in New York during the last years of the Second World War, just before going back to fight the Germans with the Allied troops out of Corsica and Sardinia. Saint-Exupéryy disappeared on his last mission over Southern France on July 31, 1944. Since his disappearance, all kinds of legends have since the light of day: Saint Ex was prisoner of the Germans, has gone to Paradise, had disappeared in the Mont Blanc, etc. Nobody could tell what really happened to him until the exhibition of his unpublished drawings at the Pierpont-Morgan Library in New York, in November 1993. It is at this exhibition that Jean-Pierre de Villers met Wilhelm von Stadde, one of the two pilots who shot Saint-Exupery's plane on that fateful day. The Last Flight of the Little Prince is not a work of fiction. It is the story of what happened as narrated by von Stadde to Jean-Pierre de Villers. The story has been corroborated by Rudolph Gander, a German radar operator who witnessed the three planes from his radar station on July 31, 1944, in Agay, in Southern France. It is the story of an unusual frienship across enemy lines. The book came out in 2000 in Ottawa, Canada. The story of von Stadde has been shamelessly pirated by Horst Rippert who claimed in 2008 that it was he who shot down a P 38, the one of Saimt-Ex, over Marseilles. His story is not believable since all the reports of the experts who anlyzed the pieces found east of Marseilles have concluded that these parts of Saint-Ex's plane had been carried over long distances over the bottom of the sea. Jean-Pierre de Villers