[lit-ideas] Re: Saint Exupery

lit, he was old and with lots of physicla damage (bones ahttered,
because of prior engagements)

On Mon, 28 Apr 2008, David Ritchie wrote:

> 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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