Operation Fish: the summer Britain put its gold to sea
In the summer of 1940, Britain expected to be invaded. France had fallen in six weeks. The army had come home from Dunkirk without its equipment. Twenty one miles of water was all that lay between the island and a force that had not yet lost a campaign. So the government asked a question no wealthy nation had ever had to answer: if the country falls, what happens to its portable wealth? The answer was Operation Fish, and it remains one of the most extraordinary secrets of the Second World War.
The decision was to ship it. All of it. The gold in the Bank of England, and the negotiable securities held in British hands, packed into ordinary wooden crates and sent across an ocean that was, at that moment, the most dangerous stretch of water on earth.
An ocean nobody would insure
The scale of the risk was not a matter of opinion. The Bank of Canada Museum records that in May 1940 alone, more than 100 ships were sunk, over 40 per cent of all transatlantic traffic. Into that, on 24 June 1940, the first of Churchill's convoys began to sail.
The Museum also records the detail that says everything about how the War Cabinet understood the odds: it chose not to inform the War Risk Insurance Office of the shipments, on the reasoning that if a ship went down, the loss could never be compensated anyway. Britain sent its national reserve to sea uninsured, because there is no policy that covers the wealth of a nation.
She crossed alone
The first ship was the light cruiser HMS Emerald, loaded at Greenock on the Clyde. Into her hold went 2,229 bullion boxes, each containing four bars of gold, a total of £30 million sterling, alongside five hundred boxes of marketable securities conservatively valued at £200 million, according to Canada's History. Roughly nine thousand bars of gold, in crates labelled as fish.
She sailed with two destroyers as escort. CBC News reports that a relentless gale forced both escorts to turn back, leaving Emerald, under Captain Francis Flynn, to cross the U-boat Atlantic alone and in a full gale. The Bank of Canada Museum puts the crossing at 4,600 kilometres, and records her arrival in Halifax harbour at 7:35 a.m. on 1 July 1940. Every box was still aboard.
She was only the first. Canada's History lists the ships that followed through that summer: the Revenge carrying £40 million, the SS Antonia and SS Duchess of Liverpool with £10 million each, the Furious with £20 million. Then, in July, a single convoy of five ships, HMS Revenge and Bonaventure with the former liners Monarch of Bermuda, SS Sobieski and SS Batory, carrying between them £192 million in gold bullion and a conservatively estimated several hundred million pounds in foreign securities.
The vault beneath the office workers
At Halifax the crates went onto the trains of the Canadian National Railway, and at Montreal the treasure was split in two. The securities stayed in the city. The gold went on to Union Station in Ottawa, as the Historical Society of Ottawa describes.
Beneath the Sun Life Building in Montreal, a vault was built for the paper: fifteen metres below street level, with steel ribbed concrete walls three feet thick, holding nine hundred four drawer filing cabinets crammed with securities, guarded around the clock by twenty four men of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. It was given a deliberately dull name, the United Kingdom Security Deposit. The Historical Society of Ottawa notes that the roughly 5,000 staff of the Sun Life working in the offices above never knew what was stored beneath their feet.
The gold went into the Bank of Canada in Ottawa. Canada's History records 186,332 gold bars and more than 8 million ounces of gold coins received there between 1938 and 1945, a figure that covers the vault's wartime intake as a whole and not Operation Fish alone. The Bank of Canada Museum puts over 1,500 tonnes of gold ingots and coin into the Bank's vault by the end of the operation, part of an order of almost two thousand tonnes.
Roughly 120 retired Canadian bankers, brokers and investment firm secretaries were hired to count and track it. Nearly 300 armed guards escorted the trains. More than 600 people, by the Museum's count, were inside the secret, and it held: the Historical Society of Ottawa records that Operation Fish remained secret until after the war.
Not one bar
The Museum's verdict on the shipping is flat and remarkable: not a single gold bearing vessel was lost. Canada's History adds that there was nary a bar misplaced, and not one treasury bill lost. The Museum values the whole movement at approximately $160 billion in 2017 dollars and calls Operation Fish the largest movement of physical wealth in history.
On the valuations, the honest position is to keep them apart rather than add them up, because they come from different sources on different bases. The Historical Society of Ottawa gives the gold at more than £470 million and the United Kingdom Security Deposit at £1,250 million in period terms. Those are two separate reckonings, and this article presents them as such.
Watch what they carry to the lifeboat
Seven years earlier, as we saw in The Day They Took the Gold, a government took gold from its own citizens with a signature. Here is the same machinery of state, one ocean away, at the edge of its own extinction. Look at what it chose to save.
It did not evacuate its promises. Nobody loaded the ledgers onto a cruiser, and nobody risked a crew's lives for a warehouse of banknotes, because those could be printed anywhere. Britain shipped the metal, and the securities it could genuinely sell, because in the summer of 1940 those were the only two things that would still buy an aeroplane from someone who did not care what London said. What Britain did next with that metal, at a New Hampshire hotel in 1944, is the subject of The Golden Promise of Bretton Woods.
Governments will tell you what money is in the good years. Watch what they carry to the lifeboat.
Chapman Gold deals in the same metal those crates carried. See The Vault, or if you have gold of your own, sell with Chapman Gold.