DEARTH OF FOOD

Wairarapa Times-Age, 1 December 1941, Page 8

DEARTH OF FOOD

IN UNOCCUPIED FRANCE. EVEN MILLIONAIRES GO HUNGRY.) A young French airman, who escaped from Vichy Franc not long ago, told in a British broadcast of the internal conditions in the unoccupied territory. He had been staying, he said, in the Riviera —former Mecca of millionaires where the hotels were crowded with rich people from the north. When he left he had not tasted butter, or margarine, for six months. He had not had meat for a month. Fish? There was no fish. All the fish worth eating was sent to Paris for the German officers. The bread was the colour of mud, and about as palatable, what they got of it. That, for the French, who eat so much of it, must be a sore deprivation. Coffee is mainly a substitute made from cereals. And everyone knows what coffee means to a Frenchman! Of sugar, the allowance per head was under half a pound a month. And olive oil, the main crop of the south, and so essential to every French cook, not even those who grew the crop had seen a drop of oil. The Germans took it all away. , , n. The men of Vichy tell the people—the Germans see that they do —that the scarcity of food is all the fault of the British blockade. But even though semi-starving, his countrymen, he said, were not so stupid as to believe that. Everyone has a story of food being taken away “to feed the Boche.” “I can tell you straight,” he declared, “that in unoccupied France eighty per cent of the people are strongly antiVichy and pro-British. Of the remaining 20 per cent, maybe five per cent believe in a German victory. The others are just following Petain, ‘the great Marshal.’ Those figures,” he insisted, “were not guesswork. The state of the country is estimated every week by means of the postal censorship. And you can bet Admiral Darlan has the figures on his desk every morning.” “Everybody in France,” he added, “listens to the 8.8. C. Let us hope the news bulletins which stricken France waits for will not be long delayed."