Mermoz, glory and mysterious death of one of the aviation legends

On May 11, 1930, 90 years ago, an airman completed the first direct air mail link between France and South America. His name: Jean Mermoz. In this new episode of "At the heart of history", produced by Europe 1 Studio, Jean des Cars paints a portrait of this figure of Aéropostale.

On May 11, 1930, an incredible crowd crowded along the river, in Saint-Louis of Senegal. The roar of an airplane puts these hundreds of people at the height of joy: it is the magnificent and brand new seaplane out of the Latécoère factories. It lands on the Senegal River. The doors open. The first to leave is Didier Daurat, the legendary boss of the Latécoère and Aéropostale factories. Then the crew appears: the navigator Gimié and the radio Dabry. Finally, the one everyone is waiting for, Jean Mermoz. Tall, blond, magnificent, he was chosen by Daurat to pilot this seaplane. It is a real challenge to make the South Atlantic cross the plane in one go. According to him, Mermoz, already covered with glory, is the only one who can raise it.

Mermoz arrived a few weeks before from Buenos Aires, Argentina, to test the device, baptized the Count of La Vaulx, on the Etang de Berre, near Marseille. He passed his seaplane pilot license, performed a compulsory test flight of 3,500 km. Taking advantage of this opportunity, Mermoz and his crew tackled the world distance record, which they took to 4,308 km in 30 hours and 25 minutes. A great baptism for the new device!

Then, they flew from Marseille to Senegal. Daurat, the boss, absolutely wanted to be with them for the departure of the inaugural flight. Parties and receptions occupy all day. The next morning, at 11 a.m., the Mermoz-Gimié-Dabry trio set up in the cabin. It is the first time that Mermoz has been on such a comfortable aircraft. He is comfortable, his two companions too. The radio will have two relays during the crossing, with two boats, notices. One, the Phocaea, is set 1,000 km from Senegal and the other, the Brintivi, 1,000 km from Natal, on the Brazilian coast.

The day of departure was well chosen because this night there will be a full moon. A necessity for such a night flight. The weather is ideal, not a cloud on the horizon. It is at 6 o'clock in the evening that the most perilous moment of the trip comes, the famous crossing of the doldrums. A nightmare for all aviators. It is a dark cloudy mass that looms on the horizon, swells, becomes gigantic and swallows the device. Mermoz holds up well in the crash of wind, hail and downpours. And Count de La Vaulx resisted. It passes between two columns of floods. Let Mermoz speak:

"Phenomenal sensations, I rustle with joy, weightlessness, out of time, suddenly, far away, a beam of divine luminosity tears me out of my trance: the full moon of May! Although it forces me to a detour costly in fuel, I embark on the promise of liberation ... We have the splendor of the star in reflection on the sleeping ocean. Suddenly, I feel like a pony that we let loose in a meadow , I would jump up, jump, dance if I could leave my seat. We succeeded! We passed the doldrums! "

They still have 1,000 km to go. They fly to a degree of the Brintivi with which Gimié establishes contact. They fly over Natal, the capital of the State of Rio Grande, in the northeast of Brazil, before landing gently on the Potengi River, in front of the base of the Aéropostale, after 21h and 15 minutes of flight. As soon as they arrived, Mermoz slipped to the tail of the plane, dislodged the mail bags and threw them at Gimié and Dabry.

In 20 minutes, the bags will be on the plane that Barbier will fly to Rio de Janeiro and Rio, it will be Guillaumet who will chain the flight to Santiago de Chile. The Aéropostale won its bet. But who is the winner, Jean Mermoz?

A young man who wanted to be an aviator 

Jean Mermoz was born on December 4, 1901 in Aubenton, in the Ardennes. His father is an innkeeper. He mistreats his mother who leaves him in 1902. She leaves taking her son away. She has to earn a living, entrusting the baby to her parents. They raise it without tenderness. Little Jean only sees his mother, whom he adores, on Sundays. He works well at school. He has a passion for reading. Three authors will accompany him all his life: on each trip, at each stopover, he will have with him Baudelaire, Verlaine and Armand Sylvestre, a Parnassian poet, well forgotten today. 

During the First World War, his grandparents retired with him to Aurillac, in Cantal. He will not find his mother until 1918, in Paris ... She is a nurse at Laënnec hospital. They live in an artists' studio in Montparnasse. Jean Mermoz brilliantly passes the writing of his baccalaureate but fails to speak because of his great shyness. A friend of his mother, operetta singer, advises him to enlist in the army and choose aviation. Planes have proven themselves during the war, they symbolize the future. 

Mermoz is doing his classes. One morning in December 1920, having just celebrated his 19th birthday, he got into a Bréguet 14 which he was going to ride alone for the first time! It's the revelation! He feels the plane, he tames it but misses his landing: the Bréguet crashes on the runway. Mermoz fractured his jaw and a tibia. It's not that serious. On the other hand, it is certain to have found its way. He trained and obtained his military pilot's license on February 10, 1921. Mermoz was posted to Metz in a squadron. 

An incredible charisma, an ease of conviction

Let's talk a bit about his physique: he is a true athlete, who loves sport. He practices French boxing and gladly lifts weights. He is also an excellent swimmer. Her appearance is impressive. A blond mane makes him look like an archangel. Women like it; they frequent prostitutes who introduce them to cocaine. But above all, he has an incredible charisma, a generosity, an ease of conviction that will always put him a little above the others.

His next assignment is Damascus, more precisely Palmyra where, in application of the mandate given to France, French planes help the troop to pacify the rebel tribes. It is in Palmyra that Mermoz frees himself from cocaine: he runs towards a dune, he buries his stock there. He suffers. He resists. He will never touch it again. If he loves abundant foods, happy dinners, feasts of all kinds, he will always be able to moderate himself in his consumption of alcohol. It was in the Syrian desert that he had his first experience of an air crash. With his mechanic, they will suffer several days of dehydration before being saved by a platoon of meharists.

In 18 months in Palmyra, Mermoz reaches its 600 flight hours. He made friends that he found under other skies, Etienne and Guillaumet. He returned to France, spent a year in Thionville and then left the army. In Paris, he settles in a furnished room. He thinks that his pilot experience will allow him to easily find a job in an airline. But it's not easy. He had to wait until September 23, 1923. That day, he received a letter from the Latécoère factory in Toulouse. He was offered a pilot engagement.

"Au Grand Balcon": meeting of aviators

Mermoz arrived in Toulouse on October 13, 1923. As of the Armistice of 1918, the industrialist Pierre Latécoère had decided to establish an air link between France and Argentina. It was a crazy dream: no plane could cross the Atlantic obstacle. But this Pyrenean believed in it. What he called "the line" was taking a turn: once a week, the mail was routed from Toulouse to Casablanca. 

Mermoz is received by the director, Didier Daurat, former pilot, hero of the Great War. It was he who had discovered, during a reconnaissance flight over the German lines, the terrible Grosse Bertha who had bombed Paris in 1918, in particular the Saint-Gervais church. If Jean Mermoz thought of flying right away, he was wrong. At Latécoère, all the pilots first pass through the workshops. They learn to peel the engines, to clean them. The factory workers patiently reveal the secrets of the engines to them. It is mandatory. 

In the evening, the pilots meet in a small family pension in Toulouse "Au Grand Balcon", run by three adorable old girls who take great care of the pilots. After three weeks, Jean Mermoz is finally authorized to fly. There, he indulges in an exercise of high virtuosity, chaining the loopings, convinced of having dazzled the boss! Daurat le douche: "I need pilots, no circus acrobats!".

Although furious, he did not dismiss Mermoz. It gives him a second chance. This time, the exercise is perfect. Jean Mermoz will now be assigned to Toulouse-Barcelona-Alicante mail. Then, on January 1, 1925, the line lengthens, exceeds Spain, bringing a weekly mail to Morocco, Casablanca and Dakar, Senegal. It's "La ligne des sables", with three refueling stops, one of which will become legendary in the aerial conquest of the Atlantic, Cap Juby. 

It is a fort in what is then a Spanish colony in Morocco. The conditions are rustic: the sun is scorching, the winter nights freezing and there are frequently winds of sand. There are many accidents. Mermoz is not spared. Between Agadir and Juby, he gets lost in the mist and his engine breaks down. He managed to land without engine and without much breakage, in an unknown city. He had already experienced this kind of mishap near Palmyra and is not too worried. He and his mechanic are finally recovered by Tuaregs who will demand a ransom .... paid ruby ​​on the nail by Latécoère! Mermoz and his companion are very precious!

His friendship with Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

In June 1927, a new station manager welcomed him at Cap Juby. He is dressed in a gandoura and has a round head and a upturned nose. He is a little awkward but receives Mermoz warmly. He said to her: "I wanted to meet you so much. I am Saint-Exupéry. They call me Saint-Ex!"

Between these two men, the friendship is immediate, definitive and total. To celebrate this meeting, Jean Mermoz, who arrived with a cargo of food, is preparing a feast. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry gets on his plane with bottles to, he says, "refresh them at altitude"! These two men have in common that they were bruised by the absence of a father. Mermoz had never known his own, Saint-Ex, who is a year younger than Mermoz, was an orphan at a very young age. The two also share an extreme sensitivity, a passion for their respective mothers and, of course, a love of literature. Mermoz draws well, Saint-Ex too and he crunches his new friend as a lion. Saint-Ex also likes to write and Mermoz will be the first reader of the sketch of Saint-Exupéry's first real book, Courrier Sud, during the fifteen days they share at Cap Juby.

But for Mermoz, the line continues: after Dakar, it will be South America. He leaves for Buenos Aires. Daurat appoints him chief pilot responsible for clearing the line that will connect Brazil to Chile, passing through Paraguay, Uruguay and Argentina.

A challenge: fly over the Andes mountain range 

As soon as he arrived in Buenos-Aires, Mermoz persuaded Marcel Bouillou-Lafont to buy the line from Latécoère, who would now devote himself solely to aircraft construction. Bouillou-Lafont is a Frenchman who made his fortune in Argentina by building bridges and railways. It has its own banking network. Totally seduced by the Mermoz project, he envisages regular postal traffic between Europe and Santiago de Chile, via Africa. The businessman gives himself five years as the deadline for the complete start-up of the line. And he finds a name for it: Aéropostale, which will become legendary. 

Mermoz becomes chief pilot of South America. It is up to him to develop the Rio-Buenos-Aires-Santiago line. It will then cross the South American continent. It marks out the Buenos-Aires-Rio route, also travels the north of the continent, Guyana, Uruguay and Paraguay to find places that can be converted into airports. To save time, he invented night flights between Rio and Buenos Aires. On April 16, 1926, at 2 a.m., he left Rio. He arrives the next day in Buenos Aires. Instead of three days, it took less than 24 hours to connect the two cities.

On March 9, 1929, Mermoz tackles the most difficult part of the route: Buenos-Aires-Santiago, and therefore the crossing of the Andes Cordillera. After numerous locations and a few accidents, the pilot succeeded. It takes advantage of ascending drafts, allowing it to cross these mountains dominated by Aconcagua, which culminates at almost 7,000 m and marks, spectacularly, the border between Argentina and Chile. It would have been easier to fly south but it was taking too long. Mail must get through as quickly as possible!

On July 14, 1929, it was the inauguration of the regular line Rio-Buenos-Aires-Santiago. A few months later, in mid-October Saint-Ex joined him in Buenos Aires. It is a fascinating city. It is full of restaurants, cabarets. The nightlife is thrilling. Mermoz frequents the most famous place of pleasure in the line, Tabaris. Saint-Ex will share with him crazy Argentine nights. Saint-Exupéry is working on his new book Vol de nuit and asks Mermoz for details on this navigation that he invented and practiced.

Although traveling non-stop, Jean Mermoz fell in love. The previous year, he had met the very young daughter of a French diplomat, Gilberte Chazottes, 18. We call her Betina. He decides that she will be the woman of his life. Their love story is a bit complicated because the girl divides her life between Buenos-Aires and Paris where she spends six months of the year. It does not matter: if it is not there, they are written. Mermoz's life is a perpetual movement. His passion for Betina will not change but his life as a pilot has priority over everything else and Betina may not see him often ...

Meanwhile, despite the disappearance of Nungesser and Coli, the North Atlantic is no longer invincible. It was crossed by Lindbergh on May 20 and 21, 1927. Aéropostale was therefore urged to send the mail no longer by boat but by plane over the Atlantic. And that brings us back to what I told you at the beginning of this story, the victorious Dakar-Natal crossing in May 1930.

His last crossing

If the Dakar-Natal flight went well, the return flight turns into a nightmare. Technical problems prevent takeoff. The floats on the seaplane have to be changed, which is a huge waste of time. Takeoff is laborious. Mermoz does it several times. He is forced to lighten the device as much as possible. Finally, on July 6, 1930, everything went well, including crossing the doldrums until an oil leak came to the end of the engine. The seaplane is approximately 1,000 km from Dakar. But he spots his radio relay, the Phoea adviso. Mermoz docks. The sea is rough. One of the floats fails. The Count of Lavaux will sink. The crew and mail will be picked up by the Phocaea.

Mermoz returns to Paris at full speed, just in time to marry Betina on August 23, 1930. During their honeymoon in Saint-Raphaël, they find an old Russian friend of Jean who introduces them to an extraordinary character, who will also become , a steadfast friend, Joseph Kessel. They have so much in common, their taste for adventure, the passion for life. Very soon, when they are in Paris, Saint-Ex will join them. 

The 1929 crisis rocked Aéropostale. Bouillou-Lafont is ruined. Several small companies, including Aéropostale, merged to become, on October 14, 1933, Air France. Mermoz is promoted. He made several transatlantic trips in an extraordinary plane designed by the engineer Couzinet, L'Arc-en-Ciel. But it will ultimately return to a monumental, four-engine seaplane built by Latécoère, La Croix du Sud. 

On December 7, 1936, Mermoz left Dakar at 4:32 a.m. Eight minutes after takeoff, the large four-engine landed again on the base. There are problems with the right rear engine propeller. After repair, it leaves at 6:52 am. Everything is fine until 10.43 am when the radio transmits: "We have cut the right rear engine". Communication stops. "The Southern Cross" sank in the Atlantic. Despite intense research, no trace will be found. Despite the luck he had always had, this transatlantic flight was the last. In an article published by L'Intransigeant, Saint-Exupéry writes: "Forgive me Jean Mermoz. I was asked for this article, but how will I write it? I do not know if you have sunk or if in your canoe glued to the ocean like an insect to the glue of a carnivorous plant, you can no longer get out of it ... Ah, Jean! Forgive me, I can not yet believe you perfect, the perfection of the dead Once again, you're going to be resurrected. Ten years you've been resurrected "

The blond archangel is not risen. But it has become a legend that all airmen around the world continue to worship.

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"At the heart of history" is a Europe 1 Studio podcast

Author and presentation: Jean des Cars 

Project manager: Adèle Ponticelli

Realization: Laurent Sirguy

Diffusion and edition: Clémence Olivier

Graphics: Europe 1 Studio

Bibliography: Marc Menant The man who believed in his luck  (Ramsay, 2018)