Chasing Gold: The Incredible Story of How the Nazis Stole Europe's Bullion (42 page)

A message came back saying that navy officials in Royan would be responsible for the gold until further notice. The
Victor Schoelcher
did not hear anything for two hours, and shortly after noon, Captain Moevus again asked for confirmation. This time he got no reply. He later heard reports over his radio from a French ship saying that planes had attacked it and that another vessel that had been torpedoed. At 10:30 P.M., the captain sent out another message: NO RESPONSE TO MY REQUESTS STOP CARRYING 250 TONS GOLD STOP UNLESS ORDERS TO THE CONTRARY ON A ROUTE TO CASABLANCA STOP POSITION 270 SPEED 15 KNOTS STOP.

Finally just before 1:00 in the morning, the French Admiralty sent back a message saying that the earlier one had not come from them. It added: VICTOR-SCHOELCHER PROCEED ON ROUTE TO CASABLANCA AND PLEASE CONFIRM RECEPTION STOP. Moevus by then was certain the first message had not come from the French admiralty but was probably a ploy of German warfare.
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With little to do but listen to the radio, the captain and Michalski continued toward North Africa. On June 21 they heard that the unescorted Belgian passenger steamer
Ville-de-Namur
had been hit by two torpedoes and sunk. In the afternoon they heard an SOS from the vessel
Yanarville
, which had been torpedoed. At 11:00 P.M., the
Aragaz
radioed that it had been hit by submarine, and at midnight the
Asheres
reported it had been attacked five miles off Spain’s Cap de la Nau.

Finally on Sunday, June 23, Michalski and Moevus saw the Moroccan coastline, and the gold flotilla with its rich cargo soon pulled into Casablanca.
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The French National Bank still had many more tons of gold left inside the country. Bank officials decided not to use a Mediterranean location since Italy might soon enter the war on Hitler’s side. Le Verdon, a port near Bordeaux on the Atlantic coast, was the alternative departure point.

Charles Moreton, a veteran French National Bank official who only recently had taken over as head of the office at Boulogne-sur-Mer in northern France, had just arrived in Paris on May 24 for a temporary assignment. At 6:30 that evening, he got a phone call instructing him to be in the office of the bank’s secretary general in ten minutes. When he arrived, Moreton was told to get on the 10:00 P.M. train to Bordeaux. There he was to organize a shipment, out of France and away from the Nazis, of approximately 200 tons of gold from ten regional bank centers. The gold would then leave Le Verdon for a still undetermined location, and he was to go with it. When he got to Bordeaux, he should have pictures taken for a passport because he might be going abroad. That’s all he was told.
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Moreton’s formal assignment letter said he was to accompany the shipment to Canada, where it was to be deposited at the Bank of Canada’s Ottawa office. It did not say exactly how the bullion was supposed to get to Canada, but indicated there might be a temporary stop in Casablanca.
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The following morning at 11:00, Moreton’s train from Paris pulled into Bordeaux four hours late. The city was overrun with wounded soldiers, refugees, and men on their way to the front. He described it a “total nightmare.” Nonetheless, he and a small crew put together a large shipment of gold that had arrived from a variety of locations. Bordeaux had two railroad stations, Saint Jean and Saint Louis, and often he did not know where it would arrive until a couple of hours before the gold actually showed up. He used taxis to move his cargo between stations. At one point a train carrying seventeen tons derailed, and it took five hours to get everything back on the track. Finally at 9:00 P.M. on May 28, a twenty-three-car train was ready to leave the Saint-Louis station for the nearby port of Trompeloup-Pauillac. The cargo would then be taken to a
paquebot
, a small ship that traditionally carried mail and a few passengers. One was docked sixty miles away in Le Verdon. Moreton had to wait another twelve hours for his train to depart because there was only one very busy track.
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Following a two-hour trip to the port, the banker’s crew was about to move the boxes of gold from the train to the ship, when two customs agents ambled up and asked him what they were shipping out of the country. He explained it was part of France’s national gold, adding with irritation that this was a matter of national defense. He also mentioned that he was an official of the Banque de France. That didn’t impress the civil servants. They demanded to see a signed document authorizing the shipment. Impatiently, Moreton explained that he was a bank director on special assignment. A soldier accompanying him richly enjoyed the bureaucratic confrontation, but the banker called the whole affair “grotesque.”
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At last officials at the bank office in Bordeaux sent someone with the proper papers for the obstinate customs officials, and then a small team of men loaded 3,080 heavy sacks and 758 cases that weighed more than 300 tons onto a requisitioned passenger ship. During the transfer, a few sacks broke, and gold coins went rolling in all directions although most were quickly rounded up. A bank official arrived with Moreton’s passport and a fistful of French francs, Moroccan francs, U.S. dollars, and British pounds to get him through the unknowable voyage he faced. The immediate destination was Casablanca, but Moreton still thought he would ultimately be going to Canada.
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Finally on June 3, the ship received orders to fill the ship’s tanks with fuel and then pick up their torpedo escort
Hardi
before heading south toward Casablanca. While waiting for its instructions, Moreton got to know the ship’s crew. All but one had been working for maritime companies before being called up for war duty. While still at sea on June 5, they learned that the British were evacuating Dunkirk. The banker wrote in his report of the journey that night, “At the end of this sad day, despite a glassy sea and beautiful weather we sadly and quietly smoked pipes or cigarettes near the captain’s bridge until 10 P.M.” There was a submarine alert the next day near Cadiz, Spain, and a French ship sank a German sub.

Later that day, Moreton’s ship pulled into Casablanca. A group of small but stocky Arab dockworkers quickly moved the heavy boxes and bags of gold from the ship to the vaults of the Moroccan State Bank. Customs agents spent nearly a day verifying the contents. The French navy didn’t have a ship that could take the gold to Canada, so it was not clear how it was going to cross the Atlantic.

When Moreton returned to his hotel in Casablanca at noon on June 7, he learned that Julien Koszul, a French National Bank inspector, had arrived by plane that morning with new instructions. The gold was due to depart on the
USS Vincennes
, which would be arriving in two days. The two men were to go on board and monitor the transfer.
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After the German invasion of France began, American Ambassador Bullitt met almost daily with Premier Reynaud and knew well the dangers facing the country and its gold. In cables Bullitt pressed President Roosevelt to help the French war effort by supplying them with weapons, despite American neutrality. In a telegram on May 28, the ambassador wrote, “I ask you solemnly and urgently to send immediately a cruiser to Bordeaux for two purposes: First to bring to Bordeaux immediately from 5 to 10,000 Thompson submachine guns caliber .45 model 1928 A-1, and one million rounds of ammunition; and second to carry away from Bordeaux the entire French and Belgian gold reserve. The French reserve is 550 tons. The Belgians 100 tons.” He added ominously, “The French have no ships available.”
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Bullitt temporarily interrupted his telegram, but returned to report, “Reynaud has just told me that if we can send a cruiser to Bordeaux or any other port, he will put the entire gold reserve on it and send it to the U.S.” Roosevelt replied that he would send three warships to pick up the bullion at Saint-Jean-de-Luz on the Atlantic coast near where France and Spain meet.
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Reynaud was grateful for the American offer, but several of his cabinet members believed that both the British and the Americans had become shameful vultures at France’s most dangerous time. They charged that London wanted to grab France’s navy, while Washington was after its gold. The Reynaud cabinet eventually decided to send only 200 tons more to the U.S. for safekeeping. The rest, or about eighty percent of the country’s remaining gold including what they were holding for Poland and Belgium, would go to France’s colonies, and the French navy would handle the shipment.
²⁹
Since transporting the gold on U.S. ships would have violated American neutrality, the transfer had to be done at sea, and the ownership of the bullion had to be transferred for the duration of the trip from the French to the Americans. Saint-Jean-de-Luz was also now too dangerous a location, so it was decided to load the gold in the open ocean off Casablanca.

On May 29, Washington dispatched the
USS Vincennes
and two destroyers to pick up the gold. After a two-day stop in the Azores, it continued to Casablanca. Loading the gold aboard the American ship started at 6:00 A.M. on June 10 and ended at 9:00 P.M. The work was just wrapping up, when everyone heard on the radio that Italy had declared war on France. That cast a dark cloud over Moreton and Koszul, who were going to have dinner on the ship. They were pleased that the vessel had a French name, but were not impressed with the American food, which they thought had been served too rapidly. The next morning the two Frenchmen sent a message to the French navy for relay to the French bank saying, “All well. We’re returning as soon as possible.” The
Vincennes
left the next morning for the U.S. with $242 million of gold on board that was immediately deposited at the Federal Reserve when it arrived in New York.
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Moreton and Koszul found their way back to mainland France on an Argentinian ship, arriving at Le Verdon at 9:00 in the evening of June 18. German mines by then were all over the harbor, and they watched in horror as a ship hit one and exploded. Their vessel rescued some of those on board, but fifty minutes later they watched the ship sink. When they finally arrived at the central bank’s Bordeaux office at 9:00 P.M., they had to sleep on the floor. Most Bank of France executives had moved there after the fall of Paris. Shortly after Moreton fell asleep, a German bombing raid woke him with a shock, and five blockbusters fell near the bank.
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The next afternoon, he received a new assignment. Bank of France Governor Fournier said he was calling on him because he had “experience and his first trip had gone very well.” Another official protested that Moreton had just returned from a dangerous mission, but Fournier replied, “Exactly. He’s been vaccinated and fears nothing. He’ll handle our business very well.”
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Moreton was happy to leave Bordeaux because a suffocating defeatism prevailed at the bank. At the same time, though, he was worried about his wife whom he hadn’t heard from since he left home more than a month earlier. He feared that she was on France’s crowded roads along with thousands of other refugees.

The banker had only fifteen hours to pull together a whole host of things and get them to the ship that would take him back to Casablanca. His cargo included two hundred cases of Swiss gold as well as bags of foreign currency in large denominations that had been left at a Bordeaux train station. There was also gold from regional offices that had arrived after he left on his first trip. Finally there was a large, heavy container of valuables that the Banque de l’Indochine had given the French. It belonged to Bao-Dai, the emperor of Vietnam. Moreton’s assignment was to get all that to the
Primauguet
, a navy light cruiser that was docked at Le Verdon. The ship was already carrying a number of bags and boxes of gold. At 6:00 that night, Moreton left Bordeaux for the port. When he arrived two hours later, war was exploding around the harbor, and the area was almost totally dark because of an enforced blackout. It was also raining hard.
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The banker quickly learned that German planes had attacked the
Primauguet
, and that it was damaged and located about fifteen miles away. He grabbed a nearby drunk fisherman, and told him they had to find the ship. A gang of inebriated fishermen plus a few sober bank employees loaded his cargo onto the fishing boat. Work began at 11:00 P.M. and finished three hours later. Moreton then jumped into a dripping cargo net with two suitcases and was lowered onto the twelve-foot trawler.

Despite the darkness and rain, they had to find the
Primauguet
downstream somewhere in the Gironde estuary. The fishing boat luckily made radio contact with the larger ship, and two hours later they reached it. The captain failed in his first five attempts to pull his boat close enough for the gold and passengers to be transferred, but he finally succeeded on the sixth try. Since it was dangerous to use the wet gangplank to transfer the cargo, the crew loaded it into nets that dropped it onto the deck. The net broke on the last transfer, but the two containers fell on the ship’s deck. The job was finally finished early the next morning, and Moreton went on board. He immediately took several showers hoping to get rid of the smell and feel of oil that permeated everything. The smell, though, lingered for days.
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The
Primauguet
departed quickly, and once out to sea, the voyage went smoothly in contrast to the chaos it had just left behind. While traveling they learned over the ship’s radio that the armistice agreement with Germany had been signed. They also received notices that the British fleet might soon attack French ships. The ship’s captain received an instruction that if there were British officers on board, he should watch them closely and disembark them in the first French port.
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The trip was uneventful, and the
Primauguet
pulled into the Casablanca harbor two days later at 10:00 in the morning. The armistice with Germany had gone into effect at 1:30. The ship had made the trip at a rapid speed of twenty-five knots. There was not a single place, though, for the ship to dock. The captain and Moreton went ashore in a dingy to see Admiral Emmanuel Ollive, who briefed them on conditions there and told them that he was now urging all French gold ships to go immediately to Dakar, where their cargo would be far from the Germans. At 11:30 A.M. a message went out from the French Admiralty: ALL SHIPS CARRYING PRECIOUS METAL SHOULD BE DIRECTED TO DAKAR STOP. Moreton, though, wanted new instructions from his Bank of France superiors. Since it was too risky to leave the gold on board, he decided to transport it to the vault of the Bank of Morocco. The process took twenty-three hours, and the cargo was finally officially weighed in at fifteen tons.
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