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In October 1940, Benito Mussolini, itching for a personal triumph in Hitler's war, launched his Blackshirt attack on Greece through Albania. Eagerly seizing her first opportunity for service, Crown Princess Frederika plunged four-square into the task of mobilizing Greece's women in a drive to provide clothing for the pitifully under-equipped Greek army. The army stopped the Duce's Fascists cold, Frederika's clothing drive was a huge success, and both won new respect in the eyes of the Greek people. Then, early irf the next year, Hitler sent the Wehrmacht into Greece. The royal family was forced to flee, first to Crete (where bombs rained about Frederika's curly head), then to Egypt (where fat King Farouk tried in a cursory way to seduce her), and finally to South Africa, where Frederika's third child. Irene, was born.
The Constituents. In 1946, once again by popular vote, the Glücksburgs were called back to the throne of a Greece ravaged by war and torn with internal strife. Scarcely more than half a year later, George II died, leaving his bleeding country and its battered crown to Paul and Frederika. Greece was all but bankrupt, and much of it was reduced to rubble. Aided and supplied from outside, Greek Communists were fighting—and winning—a bloody guerrilla war against their fellow countrymen. The future of Greece's throne offered at best a long-shot gamble, but with the fervor and thoroughness of a born politico, Frederika set to work canvassing her constituents and winning them over to her side. During the first years of Paul's reign, scarcely a square mile in all the 51,000 that formed Greece was left untrodden by either the King, the Queen or the royal couple together. They rode in jeeps, crossed mountains on muleback, slept on dirt floors and ate with the peasants. No fighting front was too hot to keep them away. Once with Paul at the wheel, the royal jeep took a short cut through a mined road. The Queen picked up her husband's baton of rank, and. waving it over his head in a burst of feminine illogic, vowed to bash his head in if he dared hit so much as a single mine.
At a reconstruction project, the husky King delighted local workers by seizing a shovel and making the dirt fly with the best of them. In a hospital, Frederika held the hand of a dejected soldier whose head was so swathed in bandages that only his eyes peeped through. The Queen listened quietly to his fears about being scarred and ugly, and answered all his worries with a radiant smile. "You could never be ugly," she told him, "not with such beautiful eyes."
Frederika organized and personally supervised every detail of The Queen's Fund, a vast charity whose original object was to find food and shelter for the thousands of homeless children wandering lost in her land. Her impassioned pleas for her pet causes seldom fell on deaf ears. "If you could have a vote taken at this minute," said Wisconsin's Senator Wiley after hearing Frederika talk at dinner one night, "you would get the American aid to Greece doubled."