AFRICA: Hotel Business Picks Up

It was easy last week to get a French colonial tourist visa on your Danish, Dutch or even German passport. The best of Vichy contacts would not get one for U.S. citizens or British subjects.

So hotel men in Bizerte, Dakar, Casablanca brushed up their German, grinned with short-sighted satisfaction as their rooms filled up with men who paid their bills, made no complaints, ate early breakfasts and disappeared all day.

Kept uninformed by Vichy censorship, the businessmen of French West Africa, Morocco and Algiers had little basis for comparison of their boom with recent booms in Oslo, Sofia, Bucharest, where tourism turned to swarms of Nazi soldiers.

U.S. correspondents in Syria and Tangier were not surprised to learn that German engineers quietly arrived at the naval base in Tunisia’s Bizerte, that work on the new Trans-Sahara railroad was redoubled, that the onetime international settlement of Tangier was now fortified by Spanish soldiers. They recognized Berlin’s objective: to drive a wedge of Nazified northwest Africa between the U.S. and her allies in Libya and the Middle East.