[lit-ideas] Re: Saint Exupery

Some of you may be following the news about Saint Exupery--NYT, April 11 etc. The short version is that a plane has been found, a German says he shot the author down and he's now writing a book about this. Wikipedia has an up-to-date version of events.
I thought it might be fun to have Lawrence and Bill Ball and maybe Robert Paul and others wade in on the matter. Here's my reading of the situation.
The puzzle in my mind as I read the article over lunch was that the NYT didn't mention what kind of plane the German was flying. Why is that a puzzle? When I was at the Evergreen Air museum recently, a cursory reading of the display notes showed the kind of aircraft that Saint Exupery was flying--a P38--outpacing the German fighters on show in that museum by a hundred miles an hour. So my question was, how did the German catch him and shoot him down?
The article says that Saint E was not in good physical shape, and old (44!), and that his evasive moves weren't very good. But a hundred miles an hour of extra speed is a lot to make up!
There are clues online. First, in the Wikipedia article on Saint E, there's mention that the German fellow may not be quite what he seems. Also there's no "combat damage" to Saint E.s plane. But elsewhere I found that the French may have been given P38s that were a hundred miles an hour slower than the American ones, sans turbochargers, and that some P38s were notoriously hard to control once they went into a dive.
Do I conclude that the German may not have shot him down, but he might have forced him into the water? 

David Ritchie,
Portland, Oregon

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