Cantès, André

Date of birth:: May 16th, 1906 (Tours, France)
Date of death:: March 8th, 1982 (La Rochelle, France)
Nationality:: French

Biography

Bachelor, he enlisted for three years in June 1925 for the 31st Aviation Regiment. Quickly promoted to corporal, he was certified as an airplane mechanic in August 1926 and then appointed sergeant the following December.

Assigned to the 39th Aviation Regiment in Beirut, he was wounded in the arm in commanded air service in Kourgoulous (Syria). In October 1931, he was again shot in the forearm in the Sahara operations. Staff-sergeant in 1932, he joined the 1st group of aeronautical workers which became the 1st Air Battalion in July 1933.

Promoted adjutant mechanic in January 1937, he was assigned in June 1939 to the school of radio-navigants of Saint-Jean-d´Angély where he was appointed chief warrant officer. During the campaign in France, his father and mother were killed in a bombardment.

From June 20, 1940, refusing defeat, under the direction of Chief Warrant Officer James Denis, Chief Warrant Officer Cantès took off from the Saint-Jean-d'Angély field with a Farman 222 coming out of the repair shops of La Rochelle, with 19 passengers on board, including Captain Goumin, Roger Speich and Louis Ferrant, most of them young students from the Radio School.

He landed the same morning in England where he joined the Free French Forces and took part in all the battles on the African front: Operation "Menace" in front of Dakar, Cameroon and Gabon until November 1940. Under the orders of the Commander Goumin, he trained, in Brazzaville then in Takoradi in the Gold Coast, as part of the formation of a squadron on Glenn-Martin, Bombardment Group n ° 2 (GB 2). At the beginning of May 1941, the unit, attached to the 24 Squadron of the South Africa Air Force, left for Egypt and then for Palestine.

As a machine gunner he received two citations for having shot down an enemy fighter in flight and demonstrated remarkable composure during an armored column attack. Aboard a Glenn Martin piloted by Commander Goumin and with the radio gunner Albert Marteau, he was seriously injured during a mission to drop leaflets on May 16, 1941 over Syria.

Wounded for the first time during a strafing of German planes on the ground, while the plane was attacked by the fighter and the Flak, and two of the crew members were seriously injured. He was wounded a second time while returning from the mission to Beirut.

Amputated of his right leg in June 1941, he remained in the Beirut hospital for a year and underwent ten successive operations. After his release from the hospital, Second Lieutenant Cantès immediately wanted to resume service as a mechanical officer in an air unit and was assigned at the end of 1942 to the Damascus air base. Despite his disability, he continued to carry out war missions and received a new wound during a dangerous mission in Heraklion in May 1943.

Appointed lieutenant in September 1943, André Cantès returned to France in March 1945 and served successively at the air base at La Rochelle and then at Cognac. He received his captain's stripes in March 1947 and spent thirty months in Algeria, at Colomb Bechar, at the Center of experience of spacecraft. Back in France in 1950 he retired the same year.

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