D-Day. The Battle for Normandy

were posted to ensure that the order was obeyed. Undeterred and unabashed, several of the deprived ladies presented themselves in a field adjoining our orchard. Lines of airmen, including, I regret to say, the worthy Roman Catholic French Canadians, queued for their services, clutching such articles as tins of sardines for payment.’ The French, meanwhile, were shocked by the attitude of American soldiers, who seemed to think that when it came to young French women ‘everything can be bought’. After an evening’s drinking, they would knock on farmhouse doors asking if there was a ‘Mademoiselle’ there for them. More enterprising soldiers had learned some French conversation from the language books produced by the army. Supposedly useful gambits were also provided in the daily lessons published by Stars and Stripes , such as the French for ‘My wife doesn’t understand me.’
    Mutual incomprehension and the clash of very different cultures affected Franco-American relations perhaps even more than the joy of liberation. A woman in a town south-east of Mortain described their ecstasy, waving flags and singing the ‘Marseillaise’ when a column of the American 2nd Armored Division arrived. The French were amused by the Creole accent of Cajuns from Louisiana, but in their turn were taken aback when they found that the Americans ‘clearly considered us to be backward. One of them asked me in English if I had ever seen a cinema.’ She replied that the cinema had been invented in France, and also the motorcar. ‘He was left stunned, and not entirely convinced.’
     
    Many American soldiers, who already saw France as almost an enemy country because of the German occupation, found their prejudices strengthened because so many people reported ‘their neighbours as German sympathizers’. Even members of the OSS and the Counter Intelligence Corps had little grasp of French politics and the ‘ guerre franco-française ’, which had simmered away ever since the Revolution and had now boiled up again. There was a widespread view, rooted in American history, that the problems of the Old World stemmed from a corrupt aristocracy and the evils of European colonialism.
    Such ideas were encouraged by left-wingers in the Resistance who provided them with intelligence, especially the militant Communist-led FTP. They had good reason to loathe the Vichy regime after the executions of Communist Party members as hostages during the Occupation. They also believed that this was the time for a new revolution. So they tried to persuade American officers, often with some success, that the French aristocracy and bourgeoisie were all collaborators. For their own political purposes, they deliberately made no distinction between those people from all classes of society who had supported Marshal Pétain after the débâcle of 1940 and those who had actively helped the Germans.
     
    The task of filtering the tens of thousands of Frenchmen and women arrested for collaboration in the summer of 1944 proved overwhelming for the nascent administration of de Gaulle’s provisional government. That autumn, there were over 300,000 dossiers still outstanding. In Normandy, prisoners were brought to the camp at Sully near Bayeux by the sécurité militaire , the gendarmerie and sometimes by US military police. There were also large numbers of displaced foreigners, Russians, Italians and Spaniards, who were trying to survive by looting from farms.
    The range of charges against French citizens was wide and often vague. They included ‘supplying the enemy’, ‘relations with the Germans’, denunciation of members of the Resistance or Allied paratroopers, ‘an anti-national attitude during the Occupation’, ‘pro-German activity’, ‘providing civilian clothes to a German soldier’, ‘pillaging’, even just ‘suspicion from a national point of view’. Almost anybody who had encountered the Germans at any stage could be denounced and arrested.
    Tensions between liberators and liberated arose with incidents both large and small. A major source of resentment came with hundreds of road accidents, mainly the killing of livestock but also civilians, due to the constant stream of heavy trucks rushing south to supply the fighting troops. At the other end of the scale, a woman who saw a British soldier give an orange to a German prisoner was furious because French children had never even tasted one. Yet army cooks and others were kind to