851.5018/88: Telegram
The Ambassador in France (Leahy) to the Secretary of State
[Received March 2—10:16 p.m.]
253. Embassy’s telegram No. 218, February 23, 7 p.m. The Foreign Office showed this morning a copy of a telegram sent yesterday to Henry-Haye. It instructed him to ask the Department to send to unoccupied France immediately by clipper one or two American “agents qualified in questions pertaining to wheat to make contact with the French Administration” with a view to drawing up bases of control over the hoped-for wheat shipments to the unoccupied zone. The Ambassador was instructed to point out that for several years the French have had a system of control of all wheat and flour movements from the grower down to the baker. The French are agreeable to issuing “certificates of a special color” for American wheat and are open to any other suggestions which our Government may care to offer.28 The French Government is likewise offering to pay the expenditures of the aforesaid agents.
Ambassador Henry-Haye is also instructed to state that the bread ration is being reduced a further 20 percent in the free zone and that no pastry is to be permitted in any part of France. Furthermore, the percentage of substitute grains in bread is to be increased from 10 percent to 20 percent.
The French point out in their telegram that the wheat situation is becoming “more and more critical” and that it is of “imperious necessity” that the first two shiploads mentioned in the aforesaid telegram be permitted to depart at a very early date.
I should like to add that the bread ration has been reduced by 20 percent effective this date and that I am personally convinced that the French are genuinely disturbed at the existing wheat shortage in the unoccupied zone and that the reasons for sending a quantity of wheat to this zone, as set forth in my several previous telegrams, are as valid today as ever.
- In telegram No. 258, March 2, 10 a.m., the Ambassador in France transmitted a statement from the French Foreign Office outlining in detail the methods of controlling American wheat (851.5018/89).↩