Bystander Bagged

Jean Chiappe was born a few blocks from the birthplace of Napoleon, and like the greater Corsican he hated the British. He was best known as Prefect of the Paris Police, a job he lost in the Stavisky scandal. In the years leading up to World War II he was an indefatigable behind-the-scenes worker against the British orientation of French policy and had been accused of plotting a Fascist coup. When the armistice came he naturally stood with Vichy, but until last week the Vichy rulers had found no job for him.

Last week he was appointed High Commissioner to Syria and Lebanon, a job in which his ruthless efficiency would be appreciated by a Government facing revolt in its colonial possessions. Stocky, bald-headed Jean Chiappe immediately set out for his post by air. His plane passed over Corsica and Sardinia, winged on over the blue Mediterranean toward Africa. About halfway there Jean Chiappe got a bird's-eye view of British and Italian naval forces fighting a battle. Above the warships planes dodged and swooped in an air fight. One of them (British, according to the Italians) caught sight of the Chiappe plane, got on its tail, fed it a burst of machine-gun bullets.

Jean Chiappe's pilot had time to send this message over his radio: "We are being machine-gunned. Plane on fire. SOS." Three days later Vichy announced that the body of Anglophobe Jean Chiappe was lost in the sea that washes his native island.

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