He was born in Brazil, to a father from Alsace and a mother from Lorraine, and learned to fly at a club in Rio. He would end the war a wing commander in the Royal Air Force at the age of twenty-four, and General de Gaulle would call him "France's First Fighter." Then Pierre Clostermann did something even rarer than becoming an ace: he wrote a book about it that has never gone out of print.

His memoir, Le Grand Cirque — "The Big Show" — has sold more than two and a half million copies. William Faulkner called it the finest aviation book of the Second World War. And yet the exact number of aircraft Clostermann shot down remains, to this day, a matter of genuine debate.

From Curitiba to the cockpit

Clostermann grew up in a French diplomatic family in Brazil, fluent in Portuguese, and as a boy met the legendary Aeropostale pilots Jean Mermoz and Henri Guillaumet. He trained as an aeronautical engineer in San Diego and already had more than 300 flying hours when he reached England to join the Free French Air Force in March 1942. By January 1943 he was a sergeant pilot with No. 341 "Alsace" Squadron RAF, flying the Supermarine Spitfire.

Spitfires, D-Day, and home soil

Moving to No. 602 Squadron, he flew fighter sweeps, bomber escorts, high-altitude patrols over the Royal Navy's Scapa Flow anchorage, and attacks on V-1 flying-bomb sites along the French coast. On D-Day he flew cover over the Normandy beaches, and on 11 June 1944 he became one of the first Free French pilots to set his Spitfire down on liberated French soil, at a rough forward strip near Bazenville. For a young Frenchman who had come the long way round to fight for his country, it was the moment of a lifetime.

Le Grand Charles

In December 1944 he returned to combat on the powerful new Hawker Tempest Mk V with No. 274 Squadron. He named his aircraft Le Grand Charles — a double tribute to Georges Guynemer, the First World War ace whose fighter was called "Vieux Charles," and to the towering figure of de Gaulle. Over northern Germany he flew punishing sweeps, airfield strikes, and "rat scramble" interceptions against the Messerschmitt Me 262 jets as they took off and landed — the most dangerous game in the sky.

He was wounded by flak, belly-landed a shot-up Tempest, and rose to command a flight, then a wing — Wing Commander (flying) of 122 Wing at twenty-four. On 12 May 1945, during a victory fly-past, a mid-air collision sent his formation tumbling; three pilots died, and Clostermann bailed out with his parachute snapping open just metres above the ground.

The number that won't settle

Officially, across 432 sorties, Clostermann was credited with 33 aerial victories, 19 of them solo. But the figure has never rested easily. Some of the tally may fold in aircraft destroyed on the ground, and recent, careful re-examination of his combat reports and squadron records suggests his confirmed air-to-air score was more likely somewhere between 15 and 18. Clostermann himself maintained the British had validated 23.

It is a debate that will probably never be fully resolved — and, in a sense, it hardly diminishes him. Whatever the exact count, he flew hundreds of the war's most dangerous missions, was decorated by two nations, and survived when so many of his friends did not.

The book that outlived the war

In 1951 Clostermann published Le Grand Cirque. It was one of the first great fighter-pilot memoirs, and it became a phenomenon, translated worldwide and selling in the millions. He went on to a second career as an engineer, served eight terms in the French National Assembly, and even flew ground-attack missions in Algeria in the late 1950s. He died in 2006, in the Pyrenees, at 85.

De Gaulle gave him a title; Faulkner gave his book a crown. But Clostermann's own legacy is simpler than either: he made a generation of readers understand what it felt like to fly and fight at the sharp end of the sky — and to come home when the men beside you did not.

Sources: Wikipedia; Aces High (Shores & Williams); Typhoon and Tempest Aces of World War 2 (Osprey); Daily Telegraph obituary.