Hunger Cramps

Around the town hall of suburban Saint-Denis swirled a crowd of clamorous Parisian mothers one day last week. Voices cracking, beet-faced with anger, recklessly hoisting their hungry, squalling children aloft, the rioters screamed for milk. In suburban Brunoy and Suresnes more mobs gathered. Excitement mounted. Rocks flew.

German occupation authorities promptly announced that potato distribution in Paris would be stopped for 40 days as punishment. Worried French politicos passed off the incident as just another outbreak from the tempestuous "Red Ring" of Paris, claimed to have stopped the trouble without police help.

Neither soft-pedaling nor retaliation could halt growing evidences that French hunger cramps in occupied France were increasing. Food racketeers daily pored over obituary lists in the newspapers, then, while posing as municipal police, collected ration cards from relatives of the dead. Fines as high as 100,000 francs ($2,000) and prison terms of three years could not stamp out food bootleggers.

Rationing in both occupied and unoccupied France was already tightened to the limit. With his daily food card a Frenchman could buy each day only half a loaf of bread, a chunk of meat the size of a half dollar, a few crumbs of cheese, enough potatoes for five slices if fried (and if he had something to fry them in), less than enough sugar to sweeten a cup of unobtainable coffee, less than enough butter to fry an egg (if he could find one).

Foods on the unrationed list had virtually disappeared or were only obtainable in small quantity by the wealthy.

Dietitians agree that it takes 3,000 calories a day to feed a 150-lb. man adequately, 4,000 if he is a laborer. The victuals allowed on the ration card provided 950 calories. Nutrition experts grimly watched France lose its health, forecast increases of tuberculosis and influenza.

Future prospects looked even blacker. Nazi supply officers drove inconspicuously into the markets daily, loaded their trucks with staples in return for handfuls of worthless occupation marks. These were issued to soldiers and Nazi civil officers. Since the Germans controlled the gasoline supply, they could go the rounds of farms and "insist" on the farmers selling their products.

Imports of fruits, meats and oils from the North African colonies were practically dried up by the blockade. Some experts put the total reduction in French food supplies as high as 50%. In products such as fats it was much higher*; in fruit it was nearly complete.

Skimpy harvests for next year had been assured by more strangulating, if less direct, German inroads. Farms had been wrecked after their owners fled before the advancing Germans last summer. Cattle were scattered or killed and eaten by the troops, milk-swollen cows ruined by neglect. Disrupted electric systems had stopped refrigeration, allowing precious foodstuffs to spoil in the hot summer months. Grain needed for spring sowing is expensive and hard to find.

Farmers, who had been short-handed because of mobilization last spring, found worse handicaps this year. Restrictions on gasoline were forcing the return to horse-drawn plows. But horses were at a premium and those farmers who had any could get little fodder to feed them. To relieve pressure on German fields, Nazi horses had been set to grazing in French pastures or on hay and grain commandeered from French farms, at the expense of French livestock.

Relief. Providentially for some of the French, last week waves of wildly flopping herring tossed themselves up to die on France's English Channel coast. They were taken by the trainload to hungry Paris. Vichy dispatches said the war has stopped herring fishing in the Channel, has put no damper on herring fecundity, thus "overcrowding the water" and leading millions of herring to commit suicide.

For real relief France could look only to the U. S. Total feeding was out of the question, for even if transportation and administrative difficulties could be ironed out North and South America together have less than enough surpluses to victual the 25 million Frenchmen in the occupied zone. What the French wanted was medical supplies, vitamin extracts, milk for their children--iabove all, machinery and gasoline with which to work their farms and provide for themselves.

* Last week the Italian people were down to 400 grams of oils and fats per month--about enough to fry two eggs a day.

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