Word: defiant
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...most explosive crisis last week was in Belgium. The man who might detonate it. King Leopold III, was in St. Wolfgang in the Austrian Alps. Reports that he might come home sent angry citizens swirling through the streets, shouting: "Down with Leopold!'' "Hang the King!" Defiant Walloons (French-speaking Belgians) threatened to bar his reentry into the country with their bodies. Socialist Premier Achille van Acker threatened to resign if King Leopold set foot on Belgian soil. There were rumors that Britain might intervene to restore Leopold to his throne...
...rumors found no public echo in Japan. Radio Tokyo, as defiant as ever, took full responsibility for starting the war in the East, pledged a battle alone "to smash the enemy, to avenge fallen Germany." An emergency Cabinet meeting drafted an emergency statement: the collapse of the Nazi Reich "will not bring the slightest change" in Japan's determination to fight to the finish. Emperor Hirohito gave the statement his divine approval...
Having spoken, King Peter motored home. Next day the London press, led by the sober-sided Times, called him defiant, a flouter of Churchill, one who "threatens grave embarrassment to the British Government." A spokesman of the Government called the royal statement, issued without his Government's sanction, "unconstitutional." In Belgrade, some 50,000 of King Peter's subjects shouted: "Down with the destroyer of unity, King Peter! Down with the Fifth Column émigrés...
Then suddenly, in February 1942, 54-year-old Dean Fjellbu was fed up. Calmly, and with certain knowledge of the consequences, he preached a defiant anti-Nazi sermon (TIME, Dec. 25). For over a year the quisling police kept him under house arrest, then banished him with his family to the Lofoten Islands...
When Winston Churchill uttered his defiant "We shall fight on the beaches . . . in the fields and in the streets," he knew the man to back his words with armed men. It was eagle-faced, gentle-eyed General Sir John Greer Dill, recalled from France, who had become Chief of the Imperial General Staff...