May 14 was mostly a day of consolidation, with heavy equipment still crossing the river in preparation for the next stage of the attack. The tank units of Guderian and Rommel again led the way. As General Manstein wrote after the war, the goal was “the envelopment of the whole French Army with a powerful right hook.” The Germans successfully trapped Allied armies in Belgium and northern France, leaving each group too weak to make a meaningful response to the rapid Nazi offensive.6
After dark and with the Germans largely across the river, the local French commander sent a message to headquarters saying that there had been “a rather serious pinprick.” That evening Ambassador Bullitt was meeting with French War Minister Édouard Daladier, when General Maurice Gamelin, the army’s supreme commander, called to tell him about the collapse of Allied defenses at Sedan. Daladier shouted into the phone, “It cannot be true! Impossible!”
The stunned minister finally told his general to attack immediately, but the general responded that he did not have enough men. Finally after fifteen minutes of pointless exchanges, Daladier hung up. He and Bullitt walked over to a wall map to see how far the Germans had advanced. Gamelin had told them that the French city of Laon had fallen. That meant the Wehrmacht was only seventy-five miles from Paris, and there were no French units in the way to stop them.
Bullitt bluntly asked, “So it means the destruction of the French army?”
Daladier replied, “Yes, it means the destruction of the French army.”7
Only four days into the war, Lucien Lamoureaux, the minister of finance, telephoned Pierre-Eugène Fournier, the governor of the French central bank, and told him that the government had decided to move all the country’s gold out of the country. Paris at that point had just short of two thousand tons located around the country plus the Belgian, Luxembourg, and Polish gold. The first objective was to move the bullion from the central part of the country to three major ports: Brest on the Atlantic coast of Brittany in the north, Le Verdon also on the Atlantic but in the south, and Toulon on the Mediterranean coast. The shipments to Toulon and Le Verdon were to take place mostly by train. The deliveries to Brest, which were the largest, were both by train and truck, which became a nightmare because roads north of Paris were packed with Belgian and French refugees trying to escape the conflict.8
At 7:30 on the morning of May 15, French Premier Reynaud woke up the new British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who had taken office only five days earlier. Speaking in English, the Frenchman said with great agitation, “We have been defeated; we have lost the battle.” Churchill attempted to calm him, saying that the situation could not be that bad. Reynaud responded frantically, “The front is broken near Sedan.” Churchill again tried to soothe him, but Reynaud repeated, “We are defeated; we have lost the battle.” Finally, the prime minister said he would fly to Paris to discuss the situation. He added that he would ask his war cabinet to approve sending to France the British planes intended for his own country’s defense.9
Churchill left London for the French capital with two top military aides, General John Dill, the vice chief of the Imperial General Staff, and General Pug Ismay, the prime minister’s military aide. When they arrived, the group went first to the British embassy and then to the Quai d’Orsay, the foreign ministry, which is located on the left bank of the Seine River in the heart of Paris.
The three visitors were ushered into Reynaud’s study at 5:30, where Reynaud, Defense Minister Daladier, and General Gamelin, the supreme commander of French armed forces, were waiting. The entire group remained standing as they discussed the dire situation. The French said the German army had made a fifty- to sixty-mile breakthrough at Sedan. Gamelin explained that German armored units had advanced with a speed that no military man thought possible. Then the room was silent. Using his schoolboy French, Churchill finally asked about the country’s strategic reserves, the units every military commander keeps on hand for just such an emergency. Gamelin shook his head and replied simply, “Aucune.” None. He had none.
Churchill walked over to a window and looked down at the Quai d’Orsay’s courtyard, where foreign ministry officials were throwing wheelbarrows of documents onto a bonfire. The smell of burning paper drifted up to the room where the meeting was being held. No one had to explain that the French government was preparing to evacuate the capital. Churchill finally asked Gamelin where he would attack, and the commander simply replied, “Inferior numbers, inferior equipment, inferior method,” and shrugged his shoulders. Wrote Churchill in his war memoirs: “There was no argument; there was no need of argument.”10
After the Allied summit, the French went back to waging a war that many of the country’s leaders felt had already been lost, and Churchill returned to London, where some members of his cabinet, including his foreign minister Lord Halifax, seemed open to a settlement with Hitler in order to avoid an invasion.
French military leaders remained convinced that their major problem was the lack of aircraft, and the Reynaud government rushed to buy more planes from the U.S. Paris would pay for them with gold just as it had done during the Phony War that had now morphed into a bona fide conquest. France, though, had problems that something as simple as more planes could not solve. The country’s morale was broken, and its army was in chaos and retreat. Many French leaders were already resigned to defeat. Communications, between one part of the country and another, between one government department and another, or even with foreign countries, were difficult, if not impossible. Refugees flooded French roads. The Luftwaffe controlled the skies and strafed the caravans of farm wagons and automobiles. Drivers hopelessly tried to protect themselves by putting mattresses on their roofs. At a time when everything had to work, nothing worked. As the French lamented, their country was en pagaille—in a mess.
On May 16, the day after the Anglo-French meeting, an order went out from Paris to the commander of the naval installation in Toulon telling him to contact nearby French Bank offices to pick up gold that was to be shipped to Canada on the aircraft carrier Béarn. The following day the navy sent out a series of cables explaining the gold operation in greater detail. The Admiralty had arranged for a convoy that would include three ships. The Béarn would leave from Casablanca, the strategically important French port on the Atlantic coast of French Morocco, while two light cruisers, the Jeanne d’Arc and the Émile Bertin, would depart from Brest. They would all drop off gold in Halifax and pick up war materiel to bring back to France. The vessels were all relatively new, and the maximum amount of bullion allowed was raised from 100 to 200 tons per ship. The Jeanne d’Arc had been launched in 1931 as a naval training ship, but had gone into war service in late August 1939. The commanding officer was Rear Admiral Albert Rouyer. The Émile Bertin had entered active duty in January 1934, and in the fall of 1939 had carried the Polish gold from Beirut to Toulon. Commodore Robert Battet was still the senior officer on board.11
The Béarn was assigned to carry 194 tons of gold, while the Jeanne d’Arc and the Émile Bertin would carry 212 tons between them. After unloading the cargo in Halifax, the Béarn, because of its speed, was to return immediately to France with as many airplanes as it could get on board. Its destination would be decided later. While waiting for their departure and out of fear of hitting recently laid German magnetic mines in the harbor, the Jeanne d’Arc underwent a demagnetization process. At least one French National Bank staff member would travel with each gold shipment.
On May 18 in the early morning, twenty trucks filled with gold for the Béarn began arriving at the Toulon docks. Loading was completed just before midnight, and tugs then pushed the ship out to sea. Two French torpedo boats, the Chacal and the Léopard, escorted the aircraft carrier into Mediterranean waters. With the two French ships still protecting it, the Béarn headed for Casablanca. The following morning, three other escorts took over, and on the morning of May 21 they guided the gold ship into port. Twenty-four hours later and after repairs were made and the fuel tanks topped up, the Bé
arn departed, heading north. Two large ships, the D’Entrecasteaux and the D’Iberville, escorted it for the first part of the trip.
The departures of the two gold ships from Brest were equally flawless. The Jeanne d’Arc and Émile Bertin were both docked at the Quai de Laninon on May 20, when trucks carrying bullion began arriving at 7:00 in the morning. In each vehicle a gendarme rode shotgun next to the military driver. Sailors aboard the Émile Bertin knew exactly what was in the heavy containers because of their experience a few months before with the Polish gold, and they warned the Jeanne-d’Arc crew about the heavy lifting. The cargo consisted of 4,233 wooden boxes that each contained 110 pounds of gold.12
When Rear Admiral Rouyer returned that evening to the Jeanne d’Arc after the ship had been loaded, one of his officers told him that during the afternoon the crew had heard a message over the radio from someone calling himself “The Traitor of Stuttgart.” In perfect French he had said: “We wish a bon voyage to the two cruisers who are leaving Brest to carry gold from the Banque de France to the U.S.” So much for military security.
On the evening of May 21, the Jeanne d’Arc and the Émile Bertin pulled out of Brest. The French navy that same day sent a message labeled “very secret” to its attachés in London and Washington outlining the mission and instructing them to have everything ready for the arrivals in Halifax. The two messages named the three ships and gave their estimated arrival as “about June 1.” They also said that the vessels would be carrying an “important weight of precious metal.” The order reiterated that the Béarn should load as many airplanes as possible and immediately return to France.
Three days later, Hitler had a triumphant meeting with his generals in northern France. The invasion had been a total success. It had gone so well that he thought his units were racing too rapidly across northern France. German tanks were by then only a day from the Atlantic port of Dunkirk. The Führer told General von Rundstedt to regroup his units in preparation for the next phase of the invasion, which was the drive toward Paris. That would begin on May 31. German units stopped twenty miles from the coast. Hitler’s order said, “Dunkirk is to be left to the Luftwaffe.”13
The pause in the Nazi offensive allowed the Allies to evacuate thousands of troops from Dunkirk to Britain. On May 27, the British began the rescue operation that in nine days saved 338,226 men to fight another day. Tons of British and French weapons had to be left behind, but the soldiers survived. According to von Rundstedt, Hitler deliberately let the Allied armies escape because he believed it would facilitate an early settlement with Britain, but that was probably post-war rationalization. The more likely explanation was that the Führer wanted to let Göring’s air force share in some of the glory that up until then had gone to the army. General Manstein later called the order, “One of Hitler’s most decisive mistakes.”14
At dawn on May 25, the Béarn, Jeanne d’Arc, and Émile Bertin converged on the Madeira Islands, their agreed meeting point. By 7:30 A.M. they were in sight of each other. With the Béarn in the middle, the three ships then left on a course to Halifax at twelve knots. The captains of each wanted to arrive as soon as possible, but had to stay together, which caused complications. The Émile Bertin could travel as fast as forty knots, but that would eat up a lot of fuel. The other two ships had slower maximum speeds and had less fuel. The three captains balanced off speed and fuel consumption.
The three commanders maintained radio silence for most of the trip in order to avoid tipping off the Germans about their location. They listened, however, to radio reports of war developments in northern France. The news was terrible. At one point the navy broadcast, “The country has all its eyes fixed on Boulogne, Calais, and Dunkirk.”
On May 31, the three ships broke radio silence to inform officials in Halifax that they would arrive the next day at about 4:00 P.M. The French had already alerted the New York Federal Reserve that a shipment was coming, and the French National Bank official aboard the Béarn, sent a message to the other ships that all the gold on his vessel should leave by train for New York City as soon as they arrived.
At 8:00 A.M. on June 1, two Canadian military planes began circling the three ships. An hour later, both the British naval station in Bermuda and the Canadians warned the French vessels that an enemy submarine was at the entrance to the port. In response, Admiral Rouyer on the Jeanne d’Arc increased his speed to seventeen knots and put his ship on a zigzag course. The French vessels as well as Canadian escort ships soon pulled into the harbor. The Jeanne d’Arc was the first ship to land, arriving at Pier B at 11:30 A.M., followed by the Béarn a short time later.
The gold on the Béarn was unloaded and put directly onto an armored train; as soon as the job was finished it left for the New York Federal Reserve. Between 6:00 A.M. and 2:00 P.M. the next day, the crew of the Émile Bertin transferred its gold to another train. The bullion from the Jeanne d’Arc was put in railroad wagons between noon and 6:00 P.M.
After some delay, the Admiralty in France finally sent new instructions to the three ships in Halifax: FIRST RETURN AS SOON AS POSSIBLE THE CRUISER ÉMILE BERTIN TO BREST STOP PROCEED AT A GOOD PACE STOP SECOND JEANNE-D’ARC WILL STAY IN HALIFAX UNTIL NEW ORDERS FROM HERE STOP THIRD LET ME KNOW AS SOON AS POSSIBLE DATE APPROXIMATELY WHEN THE AIRCRAFT LOADING OF BÉARN WILL BE FINISHED STOP.
The vessels responded: ÉMILE BERTIN WILL LEAVE 3 JUNE ARRIVE BREST 9 JUNE STOP LOADING BEARN COMMENCED YESTERDAY BUT LACKING MANY PARTS AND AWAITING HALIFAX STOP TOTAL TIME OF ASSEMBLY AND LOADING MAY LAST EIGHT TO FIFTEEN DAYS DEPENDING ON THE ARRIVAL OF PARTS STOP WILL BE PRECISE AS SOON AS POSSIBLE STOP.15
Despite the French navy’s bravado, the French Admiralty did not have enough ships to evacuate quickly all the country’s gold holdings plus the bullion that France was guarding for foreign countries. More and more of the country’s commercial ships had to be pressed into service. Gold was now even traveling on passenger liners. One of those was the SS Pasteur, a luxury cruiser that was the pride of the French South-Atlantic Company. It had been designed to carry 751 people across oceans in style. The luxury steamer’s owners were so proud of it that they had arranged for the French post office to put it on four million postage stamps that were slated to come out simultaneously with its launch. The war, though, upset that plan. The Pasteur had not been commissioned when the French navy took it over and gave orders for it to go to Brest and pick up four hundred tons of “precious metal” that was to be taken to Halifax. The shipment was later cut in half for security reasons.
On June 2 at 9:00 P.M., the Pasteur, accompanied by two escort ships that would stay with it for the first twenty-four hours of the voyage, left Brest for Halifax with 213 tons of gold. It was a highly risky trip since the ship had no on-board means of defense, but it did have one great advantage. It could travel at twenty-four knots, twice as fast as the convoy that had included the Jeanne-d’Arc. Only six days later, the Pasteur entered the Halifax harbor. The gold was immediately transferred to an armored train guarded by Canadian mounted police. Representatives of the Royal Bank of Canada carefully checked the weight of all the containers before they were deposited in vaults in Ottawa. Although this shipment was to buy still more planes, the Pasteur couldn’t carry them back. Its luxury cabins and ballrooms were not appropriate for large aircraft. The ship’s captain eventually received orders to leave Halifax for New York City, where it would have stabilizers installed for the return trip to Europe.16
While the commanders and the crews of the Jeanne d’Arc and Béarn were waiting for their ships to be loaded with war materiel, French sailors in Halifax learned that Italy had declared war on France and Britain. Speaking at the University of Virginia that same day, an angry President Franklin Roosevelt said, “The hand that held the dagger has struck it into the back of its neighbor.” Mussolini’s war objective was modest. As he told his army chief of staff, “I only need a few thousand dead so that I can sit at the peace conference as a man who has fought.”17
Frenc
h commanders in Halifax were realistic enough to know that their country’s military situation was now hopeless, but they remained determined to continue fighting. On June 15, Curtiss planes from the U.S. arrived by air in Halifax, and by 10:00 P.M. twenty-three fighter aircraft, forty-eight bombers, and twenty-five transport planes were on the deck of the Béarn. The captain left for Casablanca the following morning. Six fighter aircraft and eight liaison planes were loaded that night on the Jeanne d’Arc, and that ship was also ready to leave. The next morning the two vessels, escorted by a Canadian torpedo boat, pulled out of Halifax.18
That same day in Paris shortly after 7:00 P.M., four German military officers arrived at the French National Bank in Paris. The building was on the rue de La Vrillière near the Louvre Museum. The Nazi Economic Squad wanted to pick up any gold that was still there.
The soldiers were immediately taken to the office of Henry de Bletterie, the bank’s controller general, where several other officials were also present. A decidedly cool meeting ensued.
“What’s the name of your president?” demanded a German soldier.
“Monsieur Fournier, governor of the Banque de France,” replied de Bletterie.
“Where is he?”
Chasing Gold: The Incredible Story of How the Nazis Stole Europe's Bullion Page 27