Here in my adoptive homeland, France, we would like to know more about what happened to the great aviator who wrote the fabulous story of The Little Prince: a tale that has charmed the people of our planet, which might one day convince warring humans that naive fascination with the Cosmos should replace hatred. In fact, an 88-year-old German, a former Luftwaffe ace named Horst Rippert, has just revealed that he considers himself [what an appalling claim to fame] as the poor bastard who shot down Antoine de Saint-Exupéry over the Mediterranean on July 31, 1944.In the Antipodes of my childhood, we would like to know more about what happened to fellows aboard this Australian boat:
HMAS Sydney disappeared abruptly and totally, inexplicably, off Western Australia on November 19, 1941, after a short and violent battle with a Germain raider, Kormoran, disguised as a merchant vessel. This last photo shows some of the 645 Australians, spread out like the icing on a cake, who disappeared with HMAS Sydney:
Shattered wreckage of the Kormoran has just been salvaged. Maybe, I hope, we'll soon find traces of the lost boys whose disappearance haunted my childhood epoch.BREAKING NEWS: During the twelve or so hours since I published the present blog article, Australian PM Kevin Rudd told reporters in Canberra that the intact hull of HMAS Sydney had just been located some 22 kilometers from that of the Kormoran, at a depth of about 2470 meters, in waters 800 kilometers north of Perth.
