There is a substantial amount of evidence available about events in the air over Southern France on 30 and 31 July 1944, including precise references to the shooting down of an Allied aircraft on the former date. This evidence comes from both sides and even if the German material had been suppressed or doctored back in 1944, the Allied files would have been beyond their reach.

My own opinion is that, after all the Luftwaffe had done — and been proud of — in the war up until then, it is implausible to suggest that killing this one individual would have brought on a sudden attack of embarrassment.

The Luftwaffe was officially concerned with individual scores to a degree not seen in the RAF and USAAF. Units obsessively recorded their cumulative, collective tallies and those of the individuals in their ranks, reporting them up the chain of command. When pilots were transferred, their victories were listed against their names. The number of aircraft a fighter pilot shot down determined the award of medals via a points system. As time went on it influenced who led a formation. By the last months of the war, with fuel scarce, it even determined who got to fly at all. In this climate, how likely is it that a pilot or his commanders would have suppressed all mention of a victory when these were increasingly hard to come by? There are records of victory claims by JGr. 200 throughout July and for its final operations in August 1944 but none for 31 July.

Practicalities also militate against a "suppressed" victory: any claim would have been passed to higher authority days before the Luftwaffe learned Saint-Exupéry was missing. The Jafü's daily report of 30 July was filed 6 hours after Herbert Guth shot down Gene Meredith. Intervals of 6–8 hours seem to have been typical whereas the Allied broadcast that Saint-Exupéry was missing came over the distress frequency on 2 or 3 August, according to Georg Pemler (see below). If Horst Rippert claimed a P-38 on the morning of 31 July, there is good reason to expect that a report would have gone up the chain of command that afternoon or evening. The downed pilot's identity was not broadcast until 2–3 days later, so how might the German pilot, however conscience-stricken, have withdrawn a claim that the Allies had just confirmed? Additionally, any victory by JGr. 200 was not the sole property of the pilot. In his Order of the Day No. 8 (2 December 1943), Jafü Süd had laid down that:

On the raids to date the radar sites of Luftnachrichten Regiment 51 have distinguished themselves by good measurement results and careful work. With these they have provided the basis for control of the fighters and contributed to the kills achieved …

Participation in kills will be awarded to the whole radar site. Silhouettes (top view) of the aircraft types shot down are to be painted on all Freya sets with the name of the victorious airman in white. Würzburg-Riese sets have the right to mark shot down aircraft only when they have provided usable height information.

The diary of the highest Luftwaffe command in France recorded only missions against ground targets in Southern France on 31 July.

Allied Signals Intelligence daily monitored the radio traffic from the unit's pilots, their contacts with hostile formations, their losses and victories. No contacts were recorded on 31 July.

I 'd like to emphasise that I could be wrong. My main effort to research the disappearance of Saint-Exupéry was when I was in contact with Georg Pemler 15 or so years ago. I was interested in the Luftwaffe's response to the Allied landings on the Riviera in August and he asked what I could find out for him in the British archives. He had been involved in an inquiry in 1944 and had been well placed to debunk a post-war story that one of his NAG 13 comrades, Robert Heichele, had shot the Frenchman down. That account, published in 1972 in the war-story magazine Der Landser (The Squaddie) Nr. 725, was purporedly based on a letter from Heichele to Leutnant Wilhelm Manz of 4./JG 3 and dated 1 August 1944. It appears little better than a fairytale when compared to contemporary documentation:

What's here is what I had when the Rippert story broke, supplemented by radio monitoring reports first released in 2001, a day’s archival research in September 2008 (using files not released in the 1990s) and some downloads from the Bundesarchiv in 2023 but it's pretty clear where it points. There is one piece of the jigsaw that I didn't find for Pemler or since: a deciphered operations report for 31 July from Jafü Süd. I have not found it in the National Archives’ DEFE 3 file series nor in HW 5: I may have missed it or it may simply not exist. If it turns up and it it records a combat with a Lightning then I will gladly stand corrected.

Like other researchers, I look forward to seeing what contemporary documentary evidence Lino von Gartzen's two years of research unearthed. I don't think I'm alone in believing that something more substantial is needed than one man's memory of events then 64 years in the past.

continued on next page …

PART FIVE OF SIX

Some conclusions.