416th Bombardment Group (L) "Letter to an American" by Antoine de Saint Exupery French Aviator and Writer KIA July 1944
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"Letter to an American"
by Antoine de Saint Exupery
French Aviator and Writer KIA July 1944
I
left the United States in 1943 in order to rejoin my fellow flyers of
"Flight to Arras". I traveled on board an American convoy. This convoy
of thirty ships was carrying fifty thousand of your soldiers from the
United States to North Africa. When, on waking, I went up on deck, I
found myself surrounded by this city on the move. The thirty ships
carved their way powerfully through the water. But I felt something
else besides a sense of power. This convoy conveyed to me the joy of a
crusade.
Friends in America, I would like to do you complete
justice. Perhaps, someday, more or less serious disputes will arise
between us. Every nation is selfish and every nation considers its
selfishness sacred. Perhaps your feeling of power may, someday, lead
you to seize advantages for yourselves that we consider unjust to us.
Perhaps, sometime in the future, more or less violent disputes may
occur between us. If it is true that wars are won by believers, it is
also true that peace treaties are sometimes signed by businessmen. If
therefore, at some future date, I were to inwardly reproach those
American businessmen, I could never forget the high-minded war aims of
your country. I shall always bear witness in the same way to your
fundamental qualities. American mothers did not give their sons for the
pursuit of material aims. Nor did these boys accept the idea of risking
their lives for such material aims. I know - and will later tell my
countrymen - that it was a spiritual crusade that led you into the war.
I have two specific proofs of this among others. Here is the first.
During
this crossing in convoy, mingling as I did with your soldiers, I was
inevitably a witness to the war propaganda they were fed. Any
propaganda is by definition amoral, and in other to achieve its aim it
makes use of any sentiment, whether noble, vulgar, or base. If the
American soldiers had been sent to war merely in order to protect
American interests, their propaganda would have insisted heavily on
your oil wells, your rubber plantations, your threatened commercial
markets. But such subjects were hardly mentioned. If war propaganda
stressed other things, it was because your soldiers wanted to hear
about other things. And what were they told to justify the sacrifice of
their lives in their own eyes? They were told of the hostages hanged in
Poland, the hostages shot in France. They were told of a new form of
slavery that threatened to stifle part of humanity. Propaganda spoke to
them not about themselves, but about others. They were made to feel
solidarity with all humanity. The fifty thousand soldiers of this
convoy were going to war, not for the citizens of the United States,
but for man, for human respect, for man's freedom and greatness. The
nobility of your countrymen dictated the same nobility where propaganda
was concerned. If someday your peace-treaty technicians should, for
material and political reasons, injure something of France, they would
be betraying your true face. How could I forget the great cause for
which the American people fought?
This faith in your country was
strengthened in Tunis, where I flew war missions with one of your units
in July 1943. One evening, a twenty-year-old American pilot invited me
and my friends to dinner. He was tormented by a moral problem that
seemed very important to him. But he was shy and couldn't make up his
mind to confide his secret torment to us. We had to ply him with drink
before he finally explained, blushing: "This morning I completed my
twenty-fifth war mission. It was over Trieste. For an instant I was
engaged with several Messerschmitt 109s. I'll do it again tomorrow and
I may be shot down. You know why you are fighting. You have to save
your country. But I have nothing to do with your problems in Europe.
Our interests lie in the Pacific. And so if I accept the risk of being
buried here, it is, I believe, in order to help you get back your
country. Every man has a right to be free in his own country. But if
and my compatriots help you to regain your country, will you help us in
turn in the Pacific?"
We felt like hugging our young comrade! In
the hour of danger, he needed reassurance for his faith in the
solidarity of all humanity. I know that war is indivisible, and that a
mission over Trieste indirectly serves American interests in the
Pacific, but our comrade was unaware of these complications. And the
next day he would accept the risks of war in order to restore our
country to us. How could I forget such a testimony? How could I not be
touched, even now, by the memory of this?
Friends in America,
you see it seems that something new is emerging on our planet. It is
true that technical progress in modern times has linked men together
like a complex nervous system. The means of travel are numerous and
communication is instantaneous - We are joined together materially like
the cells of a single body, but this body has as yet no soul. This
organism is not yet aware of its unity as a whole. The hand does not
yet know that it is one with the eye . And yet it is this awareness of
future unity which vaguely tormented this twenty-year-old pilot and
which was already at work in him.
For the first time in the
history of the world, your young men are dying in a war that - despite
all its horrors - is for them an experience of love. Do not betray
them. Let them dictate their peace when the time comes! Let that peace
reassemble them! This war is honorable; may their spiritual faith make
peace as honorable.
I am happy among my french and american
comrades. After my first missions in the P-38s Lightnings, they
discovered my age. 43 years! What a scandal! Your American rules are
inhuman. At 43 years of age one does not fly a fast plane like the
Lightnings. The long white beards might get entangled with the controls
and cause accidents. I was therefore unemployed for a few months.
But
how can one think about France unless one takes some of the risks?
There they are suffering, fighting for survival-dying. How can one
judge those - even the worst among them - who suffer bodily there,
while one is oneself sitting comfortably in some propaganda office
here? And how can one love the best among them? To love is to
participate, to share. In the end, by virtue of a miraculous and
generous decision by General Eaker. My white beard fell off and I was
allowed back into my Lightning.
I rejoin Gavoille (French
pilot), of "Flight to Arras", who is in charge of our Squadron in your
reconnaissance Group. I also met up again with Hoched�, also of "Flight
to Arras", whom I had earlier called a Saint of WAR and who was then
killed in war, in a Lightning. I rejoin all those of whom I had said
that under the jackboot of the invader they were not defeated, but were
merely seed buried in a silent earth. After the long winter of the
Armistice, the seed sprouted. My squadron once again blossomed in the
daylight like a tree. I once again experience the joy of those
high-altitude missions that are like deep-sea diving. One plunges into
forbidden territory equipped with barbaric instruments, surrounded by a
multitude of dials. Above one's own country, one breathes oxygen
produced in America. New York Air in a French sky. Isn't that amazing?
One flies in that light monster of a Lightning, in which one has the
impression not of moving in space but of being present simultaneously
everywhere on a whole continent. One brings back photographs that are
analyzed by stereoscope like growing organism under a microscope. Those
analyzing your photographic material do the work of a bacteriologist.
They seek on the surface of the body (France) the traces of the virus
that is destroying it. The enemy forts, depots, convoys show up under
the lens like minuscule bacilli. One can die of them.
And the
poignant meditation while flying over France, so near and yet so far
away! One is separated from her by centuries. All tenderness, all
memories, all reasons for living are spread out 35,000 feet below,
illuminated by sunlight, and nevertheless more inaccessible than any
Egyptian treasures locked away in the glass cases of a museum.
Antoine de Saint Exupery.