Chapter 171
< World War II - Versailles (3) >
The Prime Minister of France, Jean-François de La Rocque, truly surprised us in many ways.
We had leisurely assumed that France would use the full week's deadline to deliberate before reluctantly responding, but La Rocque replied on the very day we demanded they come to peace negotiations, agreeing to attend the talks.
Furthermore, the fact that the Prime Minister himself was coming, not the Foreign Minister Paul Baudouin, put the Allied Powers on high alert.
Within the Allied Powers, La Rocque was openly considered something of an axis of evil, and if an act of terrorism against him were to occur during the talks in Belgium, the aggrieved party, it would be us who would be in trouble.
In the end, although La Roque had given an immediate answer, we were the ones who had to postpone the talks after several days of discussion, moving the venue to the Netherlands, which held strong animosity towards Japan and thus had relatively fewer feelings about France.
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February 13, 1941
Amsterdam, the capital of the Netherlands