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One of the great mysteries of aviation and literature appears to have been solved by a German fighter ace’s claim that he shot down Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the French pilot and author of Le Petit Prince.

Horst Rippert, 88, who lives in Berlin, said that he had suffered remorse all his life after discovering that Saint-Exupéry was the Free French Air Force pilot that he blew from the Mediterranean sky on July 31, 1944.

“If I had known that it was him, I would never have fired,” Mr Rippert told French authors who traced him.

“Saint-Ex”, the lyrical novelist and poet who is still one of the world’s bestselling authors, was flying a twin-engined Lockheed P-38 Lightning on a lone observation mission from Corsica when he disappeared at the age of 44. “Pilot did not return and is presumed lost,” his US-run Corsican aerodrome recorded.

Major Saint-Exupéry’s fate was unexplained until a fisherman found his bracelet off Marseilles in 1998 and then in 2001 Luc Vanrell, a diver, retrieved parts of a Lightning that were identified as the author’s.

There were no records of German action in the area and it remained unknown whether Saint-Exupéry had just crashed or been shot down. Even mystical explanations circulated.

Saint-Exupéry was an overweight literary lion with rusty skills. After the allied liberation of northern France, the author of Night Flight, Southern Mail and other classics was allowed to fly the high-performance Lightning as a gesture to his celebrity. He had been depressed and suicide had long been considered a possibility.

Mr Vanrell and Lino von Gartzen, a German expert on the wartime Luftwaffe, set out to trace surviving pilots who might have been involved. They ran into a wall of silence from members of squadrons that had been based in southern France. Then they were pointed towards Mr Rippert, a war hero who went on to a career as a sports journalist.

“You can stop searching – I was the one who shot down Saint-Exupéry,” Mr Rippert told Mr von Gartzen when he telephoned.

Mr Rippert, whose story is told in the book Saint-Exupéry, L’Ultime Secret, described how he was patrolling in his Me109 and found the lone Lightning heading along the coast from German-occupied Toulon to Marseilles. The pilot was flying carelessly, as if enjoying himself, at a vulnerable 6,000ft, he said.

“If you were used to hard-combat flying, that was not normal . . . He was looking around,” Mr Rippert said. “He wasn’t bothered about my presence. I said to myself, ‘Ok old chap, if you don’t clear out, I’m going to pot you’. I dived towards him and fired at the wings. I hit him. The kite ditched, hit the water, smashed up. No one baled out. It would have been impossible to know that it was Exupéry. I hoped and still hope that it was not him,” Mr Rippert continued.

“In our youth, at school, we all read him and adored his books. He knew admirably how to describe the sky, the thoughts and feelings of pilots. His work drew many of us to the profession. They told me later it must have been Saint-Exupéry. What a disaster. What have you done, I said to myself.”

The book’s authors, Mr Vanrell and Jacques Pradel, a leading French broadcaster, said that the German pilots appeared to have agreed a pact of silence when they learned from American radio traffic that the search was on for Saint-Exupéry.

Mr Rippert told the authors that he had been temporarily taken off flying duties because he was Jewish. He said he had later been decorated for his victories over Allied aircraft by Hermann Goering, the Luftwaffe commander.

While Mr Rippert’s story appeared to fill in the blanks in the mystery, it has been greeted with some scepticism, given that it has taken so long years to emerge. French historians are expected to seek corroboration of his account. His wife told The Times in Berlin yesterday that he was too ill with flu to be disturbed.

Saint-Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince, a children’s story about an airman who crashes in the desert and meets a boy from outer space, is one of the world’s bestsellers. In the 1930s and early 1940s, Saint-Exupéry was a glamour figure, a pioneering long-distance air mail pilot and writer. He is still admired by pilots as the greatest aviation author and in the literary world as an author who transcended the genre.

Author who inspired pilots

“I fly because it releases my mind from the tyranny of petty things . . . I am very fortunate in my profession. I feel like a farmer, with the airstrips as my fields. Those that have once tasted this kind of fare will not forget it ever. Not so, my friends? It is not a question of living dangerously. That formula is too arrogant, too presumptuous. I don’t care much for bull-fighters. It’s not the danger I love. I know what I love. It is life itself. Flying is a man’s job and its worries are a man’s worries. Transport of the mails, transport of the human voice, transport of flickering pictures – in this century as in others our highest accomplishments still have the single aim of bringing men together . . . War is not an adventure. It is a disease. It is like typhus."

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