740.00112 European War 1939/4884
The French Embassy to the Department of State
Memorandum
The enclosed tables show the size of the shipments made from the United States to Africa in execution of the Murphy–Weygand agreements.
It is enough to consider these tables to see how incomplete and intermittent the supplying of North Africa has been. Even as it is, it has nevertheless offered France and the United States real advantages the importance and interest of which cannot be missed.
From the French point of view, it has made it possible to provide the native populations of North Africa—in, it is true, a very low proportion—with the clothing and foodstuffs which they most lacked. More generally, this plan of supply has constituted a material bond between France and the United States the symbolic importance of which can escape no one. If it had been possible for this plan of supply to reach such proportions that it would have effected the economic independence of North Africa, its influence on French [Page 260] policy would doubtless have been considerable. As it has hitherto existed, nevertheless, limited by the available tonnage and by the very vicissitudes of its own history, it represents a real utility of which the North African authorities and populations are perfectly aware.
From the American point of view, the supplying of North Africa has been the sole possibility offered to the Government of the United States to manifest in a concrete fashion the interest which it takes in the lot of the French and native populations during the trials which they continue to undergo. Furthermore, the very mechanism of the supply plan for North Africa has made it possible for the Government of the United States to multiply and extend its means of contact with the populations of North Africa through the presence of numerous observers intended to guarantee the regular application of this plan.
Finally, it seems that to date in the supplying of North Africa the Government of the United States has seen, quite aside from the temporary political circumstances, a means of giving constant evidence of the concern and friendship of the American people for the French people. There should not, it seems, be any reason for this essential objective to be lost from view. The French people are, in fact, living today in such conditions of distress and isolation that any pledge of material assistance and sympathy given them cannot fail to impress them deeply.
The general political considerations of the European blockade which may appear so demanding seen from the territory of the United States cannot actually be felt by a people whose essential and daily preoccupation is to obtain and to hold on to the articles necessary for a minimum existence which becomes more precarious daily.
Now, if the supplying of unoccupied France is always clashing with these imperious necessities, the same is not true for North Africa. The disillusion of the French and native population would then be great if these supplies should come to be definitively suspended, the more so since it is possible to continue it without going contrary to the purposes of a blockade policy to which the Government of the United States had adhered.
It would doubtless be still more useful if a certain number of shipments intended for the children of France could be made from the United States.
If, indeed, the United States wishes one day to have again the support and friendship of a nation whose qualities and geo-political situation remain important, it is essential that its children at least do not perish, when its youth is imprisoned and its aged population becomes more feeble every day.
[Page 261]The American Government, by alleviating the sufferings of the children, would gain the immediate gratitude of hundreds of thousands of French families.
To come back to the more special problem of the supplying of North Africa, it will be recognized that it is politically useful and that in the form in which it has been conceived it does not present any danger for the United States.
On the one hand, none of the goods imported into North Africa has to date been the object of a delivery to the Axis powers. On the other, the very nature of the goods imported—tea, condensed milk, pharmaceutical products, cotton goods, tobacco, sugar, coal, rosin, clothing—is such that these goods are distributed to the civilian population and used or consumed immediately. Their use by powers hostile to the United States is not possible even on a most pessimistic hypothesis.
One is thus led to ask himself whether the Government of the United States has not come to the time when it would be well to establish an extremely clear distinction between relations of a political and diplomatic order, which are subject to various vicissitudes, and problems of supply which enter into a really democratic policy of support from people to people, which should be by that fact protected from ephemeral contingencies and crises in order to realize their actual purpose: that of giving evidence of the permanent interest of the United States in a nation for which it has never ceased to have sentiments of esteem and great sympathy.