Paris After the Liberation_ 1944 - 1949 - Antony Beevor [69]
This coolness was accompanied by another development which embarrassed and shocked the American military authorities. According to a SHAEF report, very young girls had begun to loiter in large numbers outside US army camps, offering themselves to GIs. It is hard to tell whether this was juvenile prostitution driven by hardship or thrill-seeking by children disturbed by the war. The Americans put forward various suggestions, including the imposition of a curfew for girls under sixteen and an increase in the age of consent to sexual intercourse from thirteen to fifteen, but the French government reacted frostily to any hint of interference from its ally.
With fewer young Frenchwomen prepared to go out with soldiers, the behaviour of servicemen began to provoke trouble. The conduct of US airborne troops in Nancy, a designated rest area from the front, led to a rash of complaints. What American officers regarded as the natural high spirits of their men was more often seen by the French as insulting behaviour.
The Hotel Meurice was the Paris officers’ mess for SHAEF. Staff were also billeted at the Crillon, but those in the Meurice remember the smell in cupboards from the thick, greased leather of Wehrmacht boots. Morgan’s Bank in the Place Vendôme was taken over as SHAEF’s offices in Paris, but the bulk of Eisenhower’s swelling military court was out at Versailles.
SHAEF was dominated by the Americans, with General Walter Bedell Smith as Eisenhower’s chief of staff, but the British were also well represented. Bedell Smith’s deputy was General Freddie Morgan, the chief planner of D-Day. But the two main administrators were General Lewis and his British counterpart, General Dixie Redman. Redman lived in some style, having taken over the apartment of Lady Mendl, best known as the decorator Elsie de Wolfe. There he entertained, with a limitless supply of whisky, gin and sandwiches made from NAAFI bread and tinned salmon.
Almost inevitably, SHAEF represented a state within a state, and Duff Cooper’s concern was that ‘all the Generals at SHAEF are violently anti-French except Morgan’. General Kenneth Strong, Eisenhower’s chief intelligence officer, was prepared to show the British and American ambassadors intelligence reports only on condition that they did not show them to the French. Clearly, diplomats were suspected of being too sympathetic. Strong told even British colleagues that American officers at SHAEF ‘did not have a high opinion of Mr Caffery’, and that the ambassador was ‘likely to be subordinated to General Eisenhower as long as the latter is in France’.
The fact that it was fighting a war gave SHAEF licence to do whatever it pleased, ignoring Allied diplomats and the French provisional government. In the autumn of 1944 it obstructed the return of French officials from Algiers to Paris and British journalists coming over to France. The British also complained that Paris was ‘full of American businessmen dressed in uniform’, while British businessmen were refused permits to travel.
SHAEF’s worst demonstrations of bloody-mindedness were reserved for the end of the war. It suddenly decided to destroy all the German equipment which the Americans did not need and refused to give any to the French. ‘It seems hardly believable,’ wrote Duff Cooper, when he heard. A month later SHAEF went further, ordering the French to hand over all captured enemy arms and equipment for destruction. ‘The French have very sensibly refused,’ wrote Duff Cooper in his diary on 13 June.
American diplomats appear to have had much more sympathy for France’s predicament. When the American ambassador made ‘a quiet and unostentatious visit to some of the so-called “red banlieues” of Paris’ he was ‘shocked and disturbed by the misery’ he saw there and was surprised at the calm way their inhabitants regarded the terrible destruction from Allied bombing attacks on the marshalling yards. Over a thousand