Paris After the Liberation_ 1944 - 1949 - Antony Beevor [68]
Since French shops were virtually bare, almost all the items provided by the American military cornucopia – coffee, gasoline, tyres, cigarettes, boots, soap, ammunition, morphine, Spam or whisky – were resold on the black market, thus flaunting a wild capitalist streak at a government trying to introduce an effective war socialism.
On 13 January 1945, newspapers carried a proclamation by the military governor of Paris to the population: ‘Anyone found in possession of gasoline, arms, munitions, equipment or war material will be tried by court martial.’ But such warnings did little good. The theft and sale of fuel supplies in jerrycans even started to endanger the attack on Germany.
Colouring the gasoline did little good. The court martial of American soldiers, several of whom received extremely severe sentences, made no difference. The profits to be made were so easy and so large that French drug dealers moved in on the racket, sometimes in alliance with American servicemen. It was above all the effrontery of the black-marketeers which drove the government almost to despair. On one occasion, the Minister of Supply issued an order to ‘seize three French trucks transporting food, travelling with papers signed Eisenhower’.
To the exasperation of the French government, there were other ways for American soldiers to make a killing at its expense. All US forces were exempt from French exchange controls and import duties. This meant that servicemen were allowed to convert their pay in French francs back into dollars at the official rate of exchange. Many of them promptly sold their dollars for francs on the black market at a great profit. Another money-making activity at the expense of the French government emerged later. ‘I am told,’ Caffery reported to Washington, ‘that a large number of New York firms are mailing American cigarettes and nylon stockings to [Army Post Office] addresses here. Much of this merchandise is illegally bartered or sold by American purchasers enjoying benefits of APO exemption from French customs control.’
The nylon stockings may not have been destined for the black market. For American soldiers, they were the most obvious bait to persuade young Frenchwomen to go out with them. Overall, exploitation was probably evenly balanced between the two sides. ‘Lise’s main sport since the Liberation,’ wrote Simone de Beauvoir of a young woman who lived in the same hotel, ‘was what she called “hunting the American”.’ This meant charming them into parting with cigarettes and rations, which she then resold.
For attractive midinettes (the young Parisians who worked in the fashion industry and shops) there was no shortage of American soldiers on seventy-two hours’ leave from the front, with dollars saved up and eager to see Paris. The GIs were bowled over by the midinettes, who were brilliantly inventive in their clothes and especially their hats, piled high in Carmen Miranda-like fantasies. ‘The hats in Paris are really terrific,’ one young soldier wrote in a letter home, ‘very high, usually like a waste basket turned upside down with feathers and flowers all over them.’
The welcome for the young soldiers had been quite genuine at first, largely because of what they represented. ‘The easygoing manner of the young Americans,’ wrote Simone de Beauvoir, ‘incarnated liberty itself… once again we were allowed to cross the seas.’
Young Frenchmen, however, would not have agreed with the US Embassy euphemisms which described their troops as ‘ardent and often very enterprising’ in the pursuit of women. Many reports, in fact, suggest that within a few months of the Liberation, certainly by the spring of 1945, American ardour was no longer appreciated by most Parisian girls, who did not like the arrogance that went with it. Summoned by a whistle and a proffered packet