There's that anecdote of the Russian -recently drafted from the countryside- soldier who took the lightbulbs he found in Germany to take back home to his farm, where they had no electricity.
Also, it's been pointed out that the general European attitude towards black people was different from that of the Americans. In doing so, it might be interesting to recall the fact that the USA was amongst the last countries in the civilised world to abolish race-based slavery. Even compared to its neighbours (Canada,
Act Against Slavery -a pioneering law- from 1793, then the
Slavery Abolition Act from 1833 by which the British Empire abolished slavery in most of its territory; and Mexico, where slavery was abolished first in 1810 -start of the Independence War, though there had been no significant slave trade since 1739- , and formally in 1829 with President Vicente Guerrero -
which didn't make most Texans any happier), the US doesn't come out looking good. This of course means that the US was way off the Western mainstream when it came to race-based slavery (since it assigned African blacks a pretty much automatic slave status), which makes them a Western
rara avis, a country with it's own,
sui generis outlook regarding races and rights. It's something to consider when comparing the views of the French or the British to the views of the Americans, during that particular moment near the end of the Second World War.
BTW, in this interesting
Abolition of slavery timeline, it's quite interesting to see which countries come after the US in abolishing slavery.
The French can read about
L'histoire oubliée des Tirailleurs sénégalais de la Seconde Guerre mondiale themselves
here. The researcher at some point laments the fact that these brave men have been all but forgot.
