A Japanese mission went to the NL.-Indies to negotiate on oil, which ended unsatisfactory for Japan. Later a Japanese military spokesman said it would give the Dutch “one last chance.”

All the open spaces around the great naval airfield at Surabaya, Java, are set with bamboo stakes, about waist high, their tops whittled razor-sharp. A visiting journalist recently asked what they were for. The commander of the base explained that they were designed as an unpleasant reception for parachutists, and…

It is winter in Europe. There’s a scarce of meat and fish and steel, iron and wood in the Netherlands. 2000 Dutchmen were imprisoned for acts of resistance.

To most of the 130,000,000 U. S. citizens mid-December is a time to make themselves comfortable for the winter: a time to muffle up in warmer clothing, to eat more warming food, to use more fuel, to read more and listen more to the radio, to look out for colds,…

Royal Dutch-Shell had virtually agreed, under pressure, to supply Japan with 40% of her oil needs for the next six months out of their Netherlands East Indies wells.

The only important war material which the U. S. has not embargoed against Japan is oil. In the past Japan has bought about 75% of her oil from the U. S.; in the future she may get none. Last week Japan’s eagerness to find other sources for oil before the U. S. gusher goes dry…

The U.S. might find itself at war with Japan. Such an attack would give the U. S. Britain and The Netherlands as allies.

As Washington talked under its breath last week of the possibility that the U. S. might soon find itself at war with Japan, Admiral Harold Raynsford Stark, Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral James Richardson, Commander in Chief of the U. S. Fleet, and Secretary of Navy Frank Knox conferred in…

In case the Japanese were to accomplish the creation of a New Order in East Asia the U. S. economy might be severely dislocated.

In December 1938, Prince Fumimaro Konoye, then Premier of Japan, made a famous speech in which he proclaimed that Japan’s aim was the creation of a New Order in East Asia. Ostensibly this meant that the Orient should be for Orientals, working in cooperation with each other; actually, it…

Wilhelmina, Juliana and her kids left for Canada. A Dutch cruiser brought the war’s first royal refugees to the New World.

With three echoing cheers for Juliana, three more for a free Holland, the plump blue-clad jack-tars of the Dutch cruiser that brought the war’s first royal refugees to the New World last week said good-by to their princesses at Halifax. Immediately, butter-cheeked Juliana, Crown Princess of The Netherlands, and her…

The food situation in the war is troublesome. The Dutch have ruined much of their arable land by opening the dikes against the Nazi invasion.

Its agriculture crippled by just about everything that a hard winter and the perversity of man can do, Europe faces a famine this winter that may well be worse than any ever known in the Old World. No man knew this better than Quaker Herbert Hoover, who 25 years ago…

In New York members of a Dutch diamond firm concluded that some of The Netherlands’ skilled cutters had escaped to London and asked to ship cutting equipment.

In their rich, paneled offices off an awninged terrace overlooking the Hudson in downtown Manhattan, officials of the Dutch diamond firm of J. K. Smit & Sons were solemn last week. Amsterdam and their home office were in Nazi hands. So, too, they feared, were snow-haired Johan Smit, head of…

Reporters returning to Berlin saw life went on in the NL., but admitted that the Protestant Dutch taught all Europe 350 years ago that foreign domination could be resisted and overthrown.

Last week tall, tart Alexander Ernst Alfred Hermann von Falkenhausen, who as Chiang Kai-shek’s chief military adviser once taught Chinese troops to goose-step, took over the military Government of the Low Countries for Adolf Hitler. At the same time Berlin let it be known that Dr. Arthur Seyss-Inquart of Austria…

Nazi invaders drove Wilhelmina to England. Most notable refugee of World War I, Wilhelm II, did not fled and stayed in The Netherlands.

n 1918 the most notable refugee of World War I reached safety in The Netherlands, just in time, settled at Doom. Last week the world was significantly reminded that Adolf Hitler regards World

War II as the continuation of World War I when, at his special orders, his mechanical cavalry…

Months prior to the invasion the Dutch quietly and succesfully moved their valuable possessions outside the country.

Last week the wry-crossed flag of Germany floated blood-red over counting houses and office buildings where Continental Europe’s No. 1 commercial nation. The Netherlands, had transacted the rich business of her vast empire. But bare as a tooth socket was many a captured vault and till. For months their contents…

At 6:58 p.m. on May 14, The Netherlands was told she had capitulated, General Winkelman announced.

The little Dutch boy who saved his country by plugging the dike with his fist was missing last week. His duty this time would have been to blow up the Moerdijk Bridge, longest on the Continent, connecting Rotterdam and the heart of The Netherlands with south Holland across the…

With The Netherlands at war, Japan might cut off the supply of rubber and tin from The Netherlands-Indies, from where the U. S. gets major portions of the two strategic materials.

Far out on the Pacific last week lay the U. S. battle fleet, its maneuvers completed, its next job not yet laid out. Beyond the battle fleet and across the Pacific many a U. S. businessman cast an uneasy mind’s eye. For south and east from the foot of Thailand…

Report on Nazi invasion of The Netherlands. The Dutch were forced back to their secondary Grebbe Line.

On the evening of May 9 last week, Adolf Hitler went to a cinema in Berlin, a sentimental musical film like The Student Prince. His No. 2 man, Field Marshal Hermann Goring, and Propaganda Minister Paul Joseph Goebbels attended the premiere of Cavour, a play on which Benito Mussolini, onetime…

The U.S. faces a changing world. Germany invaded the NL. In the West-Indies refineries are protected by the French. In the East-Indies German ships were seized by the Dutch.

We . . . believe in a civilization of construction and not of destruction. . . . Can we continue our peaceful construction if all the other continents embrace by preference or by compulsion a wholly different principle of life?

That question President Roosevelt last week asked of 2,500 delegates…