Word: wilhelmina
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...popular explanation of Leopold's hasty night ride was that Wilhelmina had become perturbed when she read an article by the French political writer René Pinon in Paris' Revue des deux mondes which suggested that Germany, about to pounce on the Dutch, had offered Belgium a piece of The Netherlands in return for Belgian neutrality; that His Majesty rushed to Her Majesty to deny the story personally, and then the royal telegram was drawn up to serve as an excuse for the sudden visit...
Last week, with Nazi troops and airplanes still massing just across the frontier, with the Nazi press barraging The Netherlands for not fighting harder against Great Britain's sea blockade, and with a possible Nazi threat about airplanes hanging over Queen Wilhelmina's head (see p. 17), The Netherlands High Command stepped on the starter of its defense engines, set them idling alertly though still strictly in neutral...
Despite reassurances from The Hague and from Brussels, where King Leopold conferred long & often with his ministers and generals after returning from his sudden visit to Queen Wilhelmina, nervousness and foreboding continued through the weekend. Despite repeated German denials, all intelligence reports agreed that Adolf Hitler was planning to move somewhere, soon and suddenly, in the West. Logic for his striking through The Netherlands was compelling. With the Belgian border fortified against him almost as strongly as the French, the Dutch dike was his weakest target. His objective would not necessarily be the turning of the Allied flank but acquisition...
...take Flushing and other coastal points south of the river deltas, enjoying the Dutch flood zone as protection for their right flank from any counterattack. The likelihood of this attack, and its obvious menace to Belgium, was believed last week to have led King Leopold to tell Queen Wilhelmina that if the Germans invaded her land, his troops would have to occupy her southeastern corner to meet them. Also, it was understood, he would invite the British and French to cross Belgium to back...
...haste with which the peace appeal of The Netherlands' Queen Wilhelmina and King Leopold of the Belgians (see p. 17) was shelved last week was an indication of how desperate the Allies thought Germany's position. And the attempted assassination of Führer Adolf Hitler in such a Nazi sanctum sanctorum as the Munich beer hall lent substance to much wishful thinking that Germany was near an internal revolution. In London, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain said that the Allies were sitting pretty because: 1) the repeal of the U. S. embargo opened to the Allies the "greatest...