My father having restored the cistern on the Pic Occidental on the island of Riou and the one he had discovered in Fontagne was still looking for the spring. A few feet away and higher up was a slab of rock. He decided to investigate the base and was digging away when he realized he was coming across some human foot bones. He unearthed a skeleton laying along the slab, his arms crossed over his chest, about 1 1/2 feet down. He brought Mr. Charles from the Anthropology museum of Paris, who declared it to be a male 35 years of age , about 400 to 600 years old and a macedonian. Since the Turks had attacked and killed the guards in 1527, and the man was missing the right leg under the knee, we concocted a story whereby this man had been wounded , caught the gangrene, was amputated (there was no peg leg) . We nicknamed him the Turk
My father having restored the cistern on the Pic Occidental on the island of Riou and the one he had discovered in Fontagne was still looking for the spring. A few feet away and higher up was a slab of rock. He decided to investigate the base and was digging away when he realized he was coming across some human foot bones. He unearthed a skeleton laying along the slab, his arms crossed over his chest, about 1 1/2 feet down. He brought Mr. Charles from the Anthropology museum of Paris, who declared it to be a male 35 years of age , about 400 to 600 years old and a macedonian. Since the Turks had attacked and killed the guards in 1527, and the man was missing the right leg under the knee, we concocted a story whereby this man had been wounded , caught the gangrene, was amputated (there was no peg leg) . We nicknamed him the Turk
His teeth were worn out, he had cavities in his wisdom teeth, he was short one on the left , he was prognathous, his nose was bend to the left, and he had scoliosis. He was 1.77 m which is rather tall for the time. My father knew that, from the Vigie the guards could not see the cove of Fontagne, and the saracenes whose ships were seen quite often in the area at the time could hide there. He also concluded that the Fons must have disappeared in the middle ages, filled by the desintegrating rocks , for sailors would not have risked contaminating a water hole by burying one of their men right above it.
From the watch tower of Riou , guards could not see if the Saracenes were in Fontagne
Forty years later..
During the summer of 2004, there was a "sensation" article in a local paper about a book written about St Exupery, the famed author of the Little Prince. Was he the man buried on the island of Riou?
They were pointing at the wrong place of burial, they were saying Escalon de Fonton had identified him. They had this story about a couple of Italian fishermen and a kid living on the island during the war, who had found a body floating with a parachute in 1944 , and the man who had told the story, never wanted to talk about it again after that and now he was dead! I thought about calling the paper, and dismissed it as a story written during the summer for entertainment.
I had stored the Turk next to a gorilla cranium my grandfather, Guy Maxime Albert, had brought back from Senegal when he was a doctor on ships going to Brazil. I had used them for comparative anatomy for my kids and grand-kids. One day the youngest one, Giorgio came in and asked to see "the Man", then softly inquired if this was his grandfather!! His older brother Roberto had made up a story to scare him.
St Ex had already made the news when Jean-Claude Bianco, a fisherman from Sormiou, had retrieved in his nets a silver bracelet inscribed with the name Antoine de St Exupery, New York.
I had read the Memoirs of the Rose , the memoirs of his wife Consuelo, and so I knew that he, indeed, was living in the USA before joining the war. So, when the fisherman was attacked by the family as a fraud, it was obvious to me he could not be, because what local fisherman would be knowledgeable enough to make a fake "gourmette" with an american address? It had to be real.
This spurred the owner of the Comex to launch a search for the plane in that area and eventually they did find it near the Conclus. The fact that the bracelet had been at the bottom of the sea also meant that the body had not been buried on the island unless the hand had been separated during the crash, and hence would have been missing from the skeleton. Our skeleton had both hands!
In 1944 St. Exupery had joined the fight and was stationed in Corsica. He was 44, had survived many crashes and was considered too old to be a pilot, and it took General Eisenhower (nice to have connections !) to allow him to fly missions. He was flying a P 38 or rather an F5B Lightning, unarmed, to take pictures of German installations. It is thought that having taken some incredible pictures of Genoa defense installations, he had decided for his swan song to go over Marseille and Toulon and do the same. A previous attempt had aborted due to an engine fire. He is said to have passed out on the runway on take off the day before, so he was told this would be his last trip.
One can get more technical details on Luc Vanrell's website www.Immadras.com and Philippe Castellano's www.aero-relic.org who had accumulated a lot of knowledge during the years of his unsuccessful search for St Ex plane
In 2006 I met Helene Desvals who was making a video of vulgarisation about Les Calanques. She thought I should contact Luc Vanrell, who had commented that my dad had kept careful notes about his find, and he was hoping to locate them.
I thought he was one of those professional divers living most of the time in MarseilleVeyre, a beautiful spot on the shore across from Riou but marred by the stench from the sanitation plant pouring out nearby. I was slow calling him. I was not sure I wanted to explain about the skeleton in my closet, mainly because of all the polemics around St Ex" bracelet and around the Cosquer Cave.
We finally met in september 2006 at a gathering in the hills to listen to Anne-Marie Durupt, a local historian talk about the "farots" or Medieval watch towers using fire to communicate .
With a couple of friends Luc had been investigating immersed plane wrecks, and found the serial number of St Exupéry's plane on a piece of metal. They also discovered there were 2 planes, and by identifying the motor they came to the conclusion they had not only a P38 , but also a Messerschmitt 109. More research into the archives led them to 2 german planes being shot down in that area in 1943. One of the pilots was prognathous . Unfortunately for Luc, his contact, the kid who in 1943 had been on the island and saw the floating body would not discuss it any further, maybe because he had been sworn to secrecy by the couple. He did mention a foreign uniform, and a cockpit falling from the sky!
At first I had been annoyed. After meeting Luc and appreciating the amount of work he and his friends had put in this detective work I was more sympathetic but I still disagreed with his conclusion. The man would have been buried naked, because my dad had found it not even 20 years after the presumed burial, and there was no trace of material or buttons.
Even if the couple had taken the parachute and the clothes, why did they bother to bury a nazi who had been starving them for 3 years, when it was so easy to push him back in the water to the fish?
And what about the leg missing? Even if it had been ripped by the crash , the couple would not have taken his pants off with half a leg missing.. or would they?
And what about the teeth.. If the german pilot had been prognathous and if he had been wearing braces, wouldn't his dentist have taken care of the cavities in his wisdom teeth? And how could his teeth be so worn out if he was only 22.
When the Germans invaded the south of France they built bunkers every three feet. They kicked everybody but 4 persons out of Les Goudes, one of them an old woman Mme Moulin to whom they gave some bones so she could make some soup for herself! It was hard to believe that a couple could live on the island at that time . It would have been easier to survive but for the fact that if you started a fire they would have seen you from their look-out posts: The couple had to be allowed by the germans to be there and maybe fish for them. Maybe the fact that they were italians, helped in some sort of way. But then why not turn the body over to the germans.. unless they had cleaned him of valuables. I can only see that reason for the burial and the reluctance of the "kid "to talk about the whole gruesome scene.
But what about if Charles was wrong in his identification , which seemed more and more likely. So I gave Luc a vertebra for his team to conduct analysis and try to determine first if we were looking at a man 50 or 500 years old.
I came back to the US to take a course in forensic anthropology, and while learning the sutures, I realized that the skull had a particularity. There is above the nose the remnant of a suture which normally disappears in adults, a suture in the middle of the frontal bone. The book went on to say, that the metopic suture is found in some individuals today, not as a pathology, but as indication of a race. After the outburst from Gantès I had been wondering why Charles had identified the skeleton as a macedonian.. maybe this was my answer, for my Turk has 2 frontal bones. So I turned to Jean Courtin once again. He backed LF Gantes completely, and told me that Charles had been a walking encyclopedia, but he had invented a race "dolménique" from the Aegean, which had invaded the indigenous tribes in the neolithic times , when, says Courtin, there are no dolmen in the Aegean,... so Charles is dismissed today.
I will get back to the archeologists and their fakes , their muddying the water as there is more on Riou . However J. Courtin noted that there are many instances of metopic sutures in the neolithic algerians..!
During the summer of 2004, there was a "sensation" article in a local paper about a book written about St Exupery, the famed author of the Little Prince. Was he the man buried on the island of Riou?
They were pointing at the wrong place of burial, they were saying Escalon de Fonton had identified him. They had this story about a couple of Italian fishermen and a kid living on the island during the war, who had found a body floating with a parachute in 1944 , and the man who had told the story, never wanted to talk about it again after that and now he was dead! I thought about calling the paper, and dismissed it as a story written during the summer for entertainment.
I had stored the Turk next to a gorilla cranium my grandfather, Guy Maxime Albert, had brought back from Senegal when he was a doctor on ships going to Brazil. I had used them for comparative anatomy for my kids and grand-kids. One day the youngest one, Giorgio came in and asked to see "the Man", then softly inquired if this was his grandfather!! His older brother Roberto had made up a story to scare him.
St Ex had already made the news when Jean-Claude Bianco, a fisherman from Sormiou, had retrieved in his nets a silver bracelet inscribed with the name Antoine de St Exupery, New York.
I had read the Memoirs of the Rose , the memoirs of his wife Consuelo, and so I knew that he, indeed, was living in the USA before joining the war. So, when the fisherman was attacked by the family as a fraud, it was obvious to me he could not be, because what local fisherman would be knowledgeable enough to make a fake "gourmette" with an american address? It had to be real.
This spurred the owner of the Comex to launch a search for the plane in that area and eventually they did find it near the Conclus. The fact that the bracelet had been at the bottom of the sea also meant that the body had not been buried on the island unless the hand had been separated during the crash, and hence would have been missing from the skeleton. Our skeleton had both hands!
In 1944 St. Exupery had joined the fight and was stationed in Corsica. He was 44, had survived many crashes and was considered too old to be a pilot, and it took General Eisenhower (nice to have connections !) to allow him to fly missions. He was flying a P 38 or rather an F5B Lightning, unarmed, to take pictures of German installations. It is thought that having taken some incredible pictures of Genoa defense installations, he had decided for his swan song to go over Marseille and Toulon and do the same. A previous attempt had aborted due to an engine fire. He is said to have passed out on the runway on take off the day before, so he was told this would be his last trip.
One can get more technical details on Luc Vanrell's website www.Immadras.com and Philippe Castellano's www.aero-relic.org who had accumulated a lot of knowledge during the years of his unsuccessful search for St Ex plane
In 2006 I met Helene Desvals who was making a video of vulgarisation about Les Calanques. She thought I should contact Luc Vanrell, who had commented that my dad had kept careful notes about his find, and he was hoping to locate them.
I thought he was one of those professional divers living most of the time in MarseilleVeyre, a beautiful spot on the shore across from Riou but marred by the stench from the sanitation plant pouring out nearby. I was slow calling him. I was not sure I wanted to explain about the skeleton in my closet, mainly because of all the polemics around St Ex" bracelet and around the Cosquer Cave.
We finally met in september 2006 at a gathering in the hills to listen to Anne-Marie Durupt, a local historian talk about the "farots" or Medieval watch towers using fire to communicate .
With a couple of friends Luc had been investigating immersed plane wrecks, and found the serial number of St Exupéry's plane on a piece of metal. They also discovered there were 2 planes, and by identifying the motor they came to the conclusion they had not only a P38 , but also a Messerschmitt 109. More research into the archives led them to 2 german planes being shot down in that area in 1943. One of the pilots was prognathous . Unfortunately for Luc, his contact, the kid who in 1943 had been on the island and saw the floating body would not discuss it any further, maybe because he had been sworn to secrecy by the couple. He did mention a foreign uniform, and a cockpit falling from the sky!
At first I had been annoyed. After meeting Luc and appreciating the amount of work he and his friends had put in this detective work I was more sympathetic but I still disagreed with his conclusion. The man would have been buried naked, because my dad had found it not even 20 years after the presumed burial, and there was no trace of material or buttons.
Even if the couple had taken the parachute and the clothes, why did they bother to bury a nazi who had been starving them for 3 years, when it was so easy to push him back in the water to the fish?
And what about the leg missing? Even if it had been ripped by the crash , the couple would not have taken his pants off with half a leg missing.. or would they?
And what about the teeth.. If the german pilot had been prognathous and if he had been wearing braces, wouldn't his dentist have taken care of the cavities in his wisdom teeth? And how could his teeth be so worn out if he was only 22.
When the Germans invaded the south of France they built bunkers every three feet. They kicked everybody but 4 persons out of Les Goudes, one of them an old woman Mme Moulin to whom they gave some bones so she could make some soup for herself! It was hard to believe that a couple could live on the island at that time . It would have been easier to survive but for the fact that if you started a fire they would have seen you from their look-out posts: The couple had to be allowed by the germans to be there and maybe fish for them. Maybe the fact that they were italians, helped in some sort of way. But then why not turn the body over to the germans.. unless they had cleaned him of valuables. I can only see that reason for the burial and the reluctance of the "kid "to talk about the whole gruesome scene.
But what about if Charles was wrong in his identification , which seemed more and more likely. So I gave Luc a vertebra for his team to conduct analysis and try to determine first if we were looking at a man 50 or 500 years old.
I came back to the US to take a course in forensic anthropology, and while learning the sutures, I realized that the skull had a particularity. There is above the nose the remnant of a suture which normally disappears in adults, a suture in the middle of the frontal bone. The book went on to say, that the metopic suture is found in some individuals today, not as a pathology, but as indication of a race. After the outburst from Gantès I had been wondering why Charles had identified the skeleton as a macedonian.. maybe this was my answer, for my Turk has 2 frontal bones. So I turned to Jean Courtin once again. He backed LF Gantes completely, and told me that Charles had been a walking encyclopedia, but he had invented a race "dolménique" from the Aegean, which had invaded the indigenous tribes in the neolithic times , when, says Courtin, there are no dolmen in the Aegean,... so Charles is dismissed today.
I will get back to the archeologists and their fakes , their muddying the water as there is more on Riou . However J. Courtin noted that there are many instances of metopic sutures in the neolithic algerians..!
Sooo... not St-Exupéry, not a german prince, but maybe the descendant of a neolithic algerian who could qualify as a saracene . So until we had the results of analysis of the vertebra , as far as I was concerned R. Charles had a lucky intuition! or maybe he did know something. I was wishing..
March 2008: We have the DNA now, which is not common in the judiciary police database of Marseille, but we have no C14 datation yet.
Still , the DNA should rule out (or not) the german pilot.
March 2008: We have the DNA now, which is not common in the judiciary police database of Marseille, but we have no C14 datation yet.
Still , the DNA should rule out (or not) the german pilot.
Riou and the 2 islands of the small and big Conclus are a bit like the Bermuda triangle.. There are 4 ancient ship wrecks and 2 plane wrecks in about 10 acres. One of them is Antoine de St Exupéry's F-5B Lightning, from the fateful day of July 31, 1944. The plane fell after being shot down and settled in the same area as the Messerchmidtt 109 of Prinz Alexis zu Bentheim-Steinfurt.
It took Luc and his friends about 8 years to piece all this together, with some help from the French government who decided that no one could go diving in the area for 2 years!
It started with Luc Vanrell's father, Tony, a scuba-diver and fisherman, who had spotted a wreck, and kept suggesting to his son that maybe it was St Ex' plane, but all searches were in the Cote d'Azur area along the flight line, above his mother home, in the Alps where soothsayers would say he must be!
One day, when Luc, who was diving at the Cosquer cave, surfaced, he saw the Comex ship and the trawler Horizon going back and forth behind the island, he figured something was up. A few days later he read in the paper that Antoine de St Exupéry silver bracelet was found in the nets of the Horizon.
The silver bracelet engraved with Antoine de St Exupery and the address of his editors in New York is seen on his left wrist on one picture taken in Corsica. It belonged to his wife Consuelo who apparently had given it to him when he left her in New York to join the Allies in North Africa in 1944.
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During his week-ends off, Luc went down 240 feet down to check on "his " wreck, hide it best he could from Delauze's sonar and try to find the engines.
During his week-ends off, Luc went down 240 feet down to check on "his " wreck, hide it best he could from Delauze's sonar and try to find the engines.
It takes a Luc Vanrell to figure out this gorgona is attached to a 1800 lb engine
Looking for the Lightning engines, Luc had spotted a gorgona on a stretch of sand. Knowing that they attach themselves to solid objects, he swept away the sand and found what looked like a 6 cyl engine.
Further down was the other bank. With the help of Delauze of the Comex the engine was retrieved. It had a shaft for a gun, and a strange emblem. One day Luc driving in traffic saw that emblem on a car in front of him ..It was a Skoda.
Another day, a person showed up at Luc's shop and announced :"I am Lino von Gartzen, I am a diver, and an historian" Lino had access to archives in Germany. He found out that each cylinder had 4 sparkplugs, but not all were of the same make. At the end of the war Daimler-Benz was having their motors made in Tchekoslovakia, and Lino was able to trace that particular engine , which had been crashed, and rebuilt to a Messerchmidt 109 used in the south of France. It was to lead him to 2 planes lost at sea in December 1943.
One of them , the 12 red, was at the hands of Prinz Alexis Fùrst zu Bentheim und Steinfurt.
Meanwhile, thanks to the American WWII pilot Jack Curtiss who had access to Lockheed archives, the landing gear was enough to convince him he had the right sort of plane in other words a Lightning
Jack Curtis assured Luc that he had 2 planes on his hands and 2 pilots!
Jack was the key element in the identification of the F-5B Lightning. Unfortunately he passed away before the whole story was put together. This is what he sent to Luc as a proof.
Jack Curtis assured Luc that he had 2 planes on his hands and 2 pilots!
Jack was the key element in the identification of the F-5B Lightning. Unfortunately he passed away before the whole story was put together. This is what he sent to Luc as a proof.
Later someone at the Comex lab found the serial number from Lockeed - 2374 L - which left no doubt as to the identity of the pilot for it was the only plane out the 5 reconnaissance F5 which had never been recovered. This is when Luc started to look seriously into information about the skeleton my father had found, hoping it was St Ex.
Philippe Castellano who helped Luc Vanrell identify the make of the 2 planes , Luc, and in front JC Bianco and Habib Benamor the "inventor" of the silver bracelet. These vestiges of the Lightning were shown at Le Bourget
As Luc and I studied my pictures of the "Turk", we could tell that the skull was prognathous and did not show any damage (St Ex had a very bad crash in South America which left him in a coma, and had very little chin) . For Luc, it had to be the German pilot. When Lino contacted the actual Prinz Christian von Bentheim, he was told he and his brotherAlexis had to wear braces when they were young and they both were prognathous. For Christian von Bentheim who agreed to a DNA sampling, he was sure it was his brother before the analysis.
As Luc and I studied my pictures of the "Turk", we could tell that the skull was prognathous and did not show any damage (St Ex had a very bad crash in South America which left him in a coma, and had very little chin) . For Luc, it had to be the German pilot. When Lino contacted the actual Prinz Christian von Bentheim, he was told he and his brotherAlexis had to wear braces when they were young and they both were prognathous. For Christian von Bentheim who agreed to a DNA sampling, he was sure it was his brother before the analysis.
Alexis Fürst zu Bentheim und Steinfurt
If we believe the experts of today the results of the DNA are, without a doubt, a match between the man buried in Fontagne and his brother Christian Fürst zu Bentheim, who came last year to put a wreath and a ribbon with the coat of arms of his family at the spot Luc Vanrell indicated to him, behind the 2 Conclu islands.
Alexis Fürst zu Bentheim was flying his very first combat mission with an instructor , in a pack of 30 planes going against 100 B17 and 50 P38 on their way to bomb a submarine base which was being built in the bay of Marseille, December 2, 1943.
He was shot , tried to put the plane down on the sea and the bulkhead of his Messerschmitt 109 would have ripped his leg off at the knee on impact, a common happening in that plane, where the feet of the pilot were held to the pedals. The reason they were told to eject was that the plane would sink right away!
Dead at the age of 22. His body floated and was retrieved by the couple of fishermen living on the island. Raoul Amari who was 10, was living with them on Riou at the time, and he was the one who mentioned to Luc Vanrell, after Luc discovered his first plane wreck in the Bay of Marseille , a Junker 88, that during the war he almost had received a cockpit on his head.. the cockpit of this plane.
Dead at the age of 22. His body floated and was retrieved by the couple of fishermen living on the island. Raoul Amari who was 10, was living with them on Riou at the time, and he was the one who mentioned to Luc Vanrell, after Luc discovered his first plane wreck in the Bay of Marseille , a Junker 88, that during the war he almost had received a cockpit on his head.. the cockpit of this plane.
Lino continued his search for St Ex, making hundreds of phone calls in Germany. Having found Alexis von Bentheim, opened more doors for him, until one day talking to a pilot who had been in the south of France in 1944 he was told :"I do not remember much, but talk to Horst Rippert, he has all his head, and he knows"
When he called Horst Rippert , Lino von Gartzen was amazed to be told he could stop looking for who had shot "Exupery": July 31, 1944 he had been sent alone from Istres to intercept a low flying airplane near Toulon. He followed him for a while not understanding why he was meandering at such low altitude. He claims that he shot in the wings to give the pilot a chance to get out alive but the plane went down and no one parachuted out.
When he went back to his base after radio-ing his "victory", Horst Rippert heard the same day french and american radios were reporting that Antoine de St Exupery, the mythic aviator had not returned to Corsica.
Horst Rippert had learned to pilot after reading the books of St Ex. He was so distraught at having shot his idol that he kept the secret for 63 years wishing he had not shot him. And because he was sent alone to intercept one plane, it was not recorded in german archives as a victory. German archives which were dispersed anyways.
Together Luc Vanrell and Lino von Gartzen brought an end to the mystery surrounding the disappearance of St Exupery, and a closure for the Bentheim family, who did not really know either what had happened to young Alexis. A young prince whose destiny was very different from the Little Prince's written and drawn in New York by St Exupery.
When he called Horst Rippert , Lino von Gartzen was amazed to be told he could stop looking for who had shot "Exupery": July 31, 1944 he had been sent alone from Istres to intercept a low flying airplane near Toulon. He followed him for a while not understanding why he was meandering at such low altitude. He claims that he shot in the wings to give the pilot a chance to get out alive but the plane went down and no one parachuted out.
When he went back to his base after radio-ing his "victory", Horst Rippert heard the same day french and american radios were reporting that Antoine de St Exupery, the mythic aviator had not returned to Corsica.
Horst Rippert had learned to pilot after reading the books of St Ex. He was so distraught at having shot his idol that he kept the secret for 63 years wishing he had not shot him. And because he was sent alone to intercept one plane, it was not recorded in german archives as a victory. German archives which were dispersed anyways.
Together Luc Vanrell and Lino von Gartzen brought an end to the mystery surrounding the disappearance of St Exupery, and a closure for the Bentheim family, who did not really know either what had happened to young Alexis. A young prince whose destiny was very different from the Little Prince's written and drawn in New York by St Exupery.
Alexis von Bentheim - Photos and posthomous portrait , courtesy of the Bentheim Family
And what to think , when you hear that Christian von Bentheim who, like his brother Alexis was in the Luftwaffe, continued to fly after the war and named his personal plane "Antoine de St Exupery"?!!
Christian von Bentheim, Lino von Gartzen, Luc Vanrell in front of the tomb of Alexis von Bentheim
"Returned 13 December 2009"
Jean Courtin who worked with Luc Vanrell at Cosquer Cave told me: "He will amaze you"
This is an understatement.
What a story.. Thank you Luc..
"Returned 13 December 2009"
Jean Courtin who worked with Luc Vanrell at Cosquer Cave told me: "He will amaze you"
This is an understatement.
What a story.. Thank you Luc..
March 2008: Luc Vanrell has written a book relating his discovery of that plane, his search for the pilots, his conclusions. Along the way, Luc and his friend Lino von Gartzen, have found the german pilot Horst Rippert, who shot down the author of the Little Prince .
On July 31, 2009 Marseille will mark the 65th year of the death of St Exupery near the island of Riou with a ceremony and a museum in the name of St Ex will be created , which will house his plane wreck, his famous bracelet, and whatever mementos his heirs will graciously hand over to thank Luc Vanrell for his efforts .
Will Marseille be smart enough to give Luc Vanrell what he needs to also create a Cosquer Cave museum ? Both have his extreme diving talents in common, and his passion for archaeology.
Can the European Capital of Culture of 2013 afford to miss recognizing what he is bringing to the table, and what kind of special individual he really is?
October 2019: A 3d reconstruction of the Cosquer Cave is happening in front of the Cathedral . Luc has overseen the maintenance of the cave and all the activities leading to the reconstruction while also finding a beautiful blond silex knife 15 cms long.
" Luc Vanrell who found parts of the planes of St Exupery and of the prince von Bentheim and Jean-Claude Bianco, whose helper Habib found St Ex' bracelet in the nets of his fishing boat, during the ceremony in Marseille City Hall.".
31 July 2009: A P-38 Lightning flew over Marseille in hommage of St Exupéry
Antoine de St Exupéry's bracelet was retrieved in the nets of Jean-Claude Bianco by Habib Benamor
seen here with Luc Vanrell and J.C. Bianco at another ceremony at sea in 2004
seen here with Luc Vanrell and J.C. Bianco at another ceremony at sea in 2004
"I wanted to scare him away, but he did not go" Horst Rippert
DVD made by Tangram for German television "Duel in the Clouds"
DVD made by Tangram for German television "Duel in the Clouds"
In these waters Antoine de St Exupery in a F5 Lightning and Alexis von Bentheim in a Messerschmidt 109 died 8 months apart
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