Belgium reaffirms its neutrality

On 27 October 1939 King Leopold III of the Belgians gave a radio address directed at the people of the United States. It was broadcast as part of the annual forum organised in New York by the New York Herald Tribune, at which President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had also spoken on 26 October. The King spoke in English and explained to Americans why his country was taking no part in the war and did not intend to enter it, while warning that if attacked Belgium would fight. Some chronologies state that on this day Belgium declared its neutrality in the conflict. Formally, it had already done so on 3 September, when it issued a declaration of neutrality together with many other states. The speech of 27 October changed nothing in that status. It was a solemn reaffirmation of it, delivered by the head of state at a moment when Belgium felt increasingly threatened.

Belgium in the autumn of 1939

Belgian neutrality had a short but distinct history. In October 1936 Leopold III announced a “policy of independence”: the country withdrew from its alliance with France and resolved not to bind itself to any power. In April 1937 Britain and France released Belgium from its obligations under Locarno, and in October of that year Germany assured it that it would in no circumstances violate Belgian territory. At the end of August 1939 all three powers repeated these assurances, and on 28 August Leopold III and Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands offered the parties to the dispute their good offices. When war broke out, the government of Hubert Pierlot, with Paul-Henri Spaak as Foreign Minister, declared neutrality, and on 4 September the King took personal command of the army. Mobilisation was carried out in stages. By the spring of 1940 Belgium had put some 600,000–650,000 men under arms, an enormous effort for a country of eight million inhabitants.

In October Belgium’s position deteriorated markedly. The campaign in Poland had come to an end, and on 6 October Adolf Hitler offered the Western powers peace in the Reichstag, assuring Belgium and the Netherlands of his friendly intentions. Three days later he signed a directive ordering the preparation of an offensive through Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg, of which the Belgians knew nothing. What they could see, however, was German divisions returning from Poland and taking up positions on the left bank of the Rhine, opposite their border. According to an official Belgian publication of 1941, the number of German divisions facing Belgium and the Netherlands grew from week to week, and intelligence reported the assembly of river-crossing equipment, ammunition dumps and field airfields. On the other side, along the Franco-Belgian border, the British Expeditionary Force was digging in, and Britain and France had rejected Hitler’s offer. The war in the west, though still “phoney”, could at any moment shift onto Belgian fields.

Neutrality required Belgium to be impartial even towards those who were its natural defenders. Brussels refused the French and British open staff talks, would not allow them onto its territory before a German attack, and kept part of its forces on the French border too, to show that it would defend itself against anyone. Complaints came from both camps: the Germans grumbled about restrictions on trade, the Allies that Belgium was hampering their preparations for a common defence.

The address to the Americans

Leopold III began by thanking the Americans for the food aid they had given occupied Belgium in the First World War. The theme proposed by the organisers was “an appeal for the defence of civilisation”, and the King declared that his country was defending civilisation precisely through the attitude it had adopted towards the European conflict. He recalled that in 1937 Belgium’s three great neighbours had taken note of its policy of independence and of their own free will had given it formal assurances, and that the declaration of neutrality at the outbreak of war was the logical consequence of that policy. Neutrality, he said, accorded with the traditions of a nation whose character had been shaped by centuries of struggle, and for Belgium it was a matter of life or death: a small country, one of the most densely populated in the world, lived by the work of its people and by its exports, and were it drawn into the war it would become a battlefield and, whatever the outcome, would be utterly destroyed. Belgium had no territorial ambitions and had not contributed to the outbreak of the conflict. Together with the Netherlands it formed an “oasis of peace” that limited the area of the fighting.

The most important passage concerned an anniversary. “Exactly twenty-five years ago”, the King said, the Belgian army under the command of his father, King Albert I, had after hard fighting halted a cruel invasion. This was a reference to the Battle of the Yser in October 1914, when the remnants of the Belgian army, supported by the French, stopped the Germans on a strip of the country behind the flooded polders. Should Belgium be attacked, despite the solemn undertakings of 1937 renewed on the eve of the war, it would fight without hesitation – and, Leopold assured his listeners, with resources ten times greater than in 1914 – and the whole country would stand behind the army. He immediately added, however, that he did not believe the belligerents would break a promise given before the world. He closed with the hope that the Americans, close to the Belgians through similar institutions and aspirations, would support their efforts for peace.

It was no accident that the speech was addressed to the most important of the neutral powers. The United States, neutral since the beginning of September, was at that very moment debating the lifting of the arms embargo on the belligerents. Leopold III wanted American public opinion to see Belgium as a state that had given no one a pretext for attack – and, should an attack come, to know who its victim was.

After 27 October

The first alarm came at the end of October. Dutch and Belgian intelligence received information that the Germans would strike at dawn on 12 November; Hitler had indeed set that date at the time, and on 7 November he postponed it because of the weather. On the evening of 6 November Leopold III travelled to The Hague, and the next day he and Queen Wilhelmina sent a telegram to King George VI, the French President Albert Lebrun and Hitler, once again offering their mediation in peace talks. London and Paris replied courteously but made the restoration of freedom to Poland and Czechoslovakia a condition of peace. Berlin regarded the matter as closed.

In the months that followed Belgium held to its line. It strengthened its fortifications along the Albert Canal and the Meuse, and maintained only secret, unofficial contacts with the French and British. In November the Allies adopted the Dyle Plan, which provided for an advance into Belgium only at the moment of a German attack. Not even the Mechelen incident of January 1940, when parts of the German attack plans fell into Belgian hands, persuaded Brussels to let its allies in.

Significance

The speech of 27 October was one of the fullest expositions of Belgian neutrality policy and at the same time a testimony to its illusions. Leopold III was right that in a war his country would become a battlefield, but wrong to think that the assurances of the powers would protect it from that fate. On 10 May 1940 the Wehrmacht attacked Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg without a declaration of war, accusing them of allegedly favouring the Allies. German paratroopers captured the fort of Eben-Emael, which was meant to defend the Albert Canal line, and the French and British troops entering Belgium at the last minute fell into a trap when the main German blow came through the Ardennes. This time the Belgian army, though larger and better armed than in 1914, did not repeat the Yser. After eighteen days of fighting, on 28 May 1940, the King capitulated, against the position of the government, which went into exile. The dispute over his conduct during the war, known as the “Royal Question”, divided the Belgians for years and in 1951 forced Leopold III to abdicate in favour of his son Baudouin. Neutrality, which in 1939 had seemed to the Belgians the only sensible course, was replaced after the war by membership of the Western alliance, of which Paul-Henri Spaak was one of the architects.