Chasing Gold: The Incredible Story of How the Nazis Stole Europe's Bullion (37 page)

General Gerd von Rundstedt, the commander of Army Group A, directed that operation, and under him were two key officers, Heinz Guderian and Erwin Rommel. They were to lead the attack across the Meuse River in the Belgian town of Dinant and then drive deep into France.

The Germans invaded along a forty-mile front, west of the Maginot Line. Guderian’s troops easily rolled through Luxembourg, and by 10:00 A.M. they were on the Belgian border. Rommel’s two panzer units were also soon into the Ardennes, where they moved more slowly than anticipated but kept pressing forward even at night. The headlights of their vehicles led the way in the dark. The Germans had the advantage of better communications because they had radio contact between tanks and aircraft. German tank commanders could order their air force to bomb specific areas just before an attack, and then go in for the cleanup. The French army had nothing like that. The Nazi operation on the first two days went according to plan; units passed through the Ardennes with only minor difficulty. Twelve hundred German tanks were soon heading toward France. On the evening of May 11, Rommel sent his wife the cheery message: “Everything wonderful so far.”
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The German objective was Sedan, a city on the Meuse River with historic importance to both the French and the Germans. It was there in 1870 that Prussian units captured emperor Napoleon III and effectively ended the Franco-Prussian War. In 1918, French and American units defeated the Germans in the Battle of the Argonne Forest. Five days later that war ended.

Near midnight on May 12, Rommel’s troops reached the Belgian side of the Meuse River. French forces were well entrenched on the other bank in front of the city of Sedan. Both sides brought in their air forces for support, but Nazi planes were much more effective. The intensity of the air battle increased in the afternoon, and dive-bombing Stukas terrified both French soldiers and civilians. At 3:00 P.M. the air attacks abruptly stopped, and German troops began to cross at three points along the river, using new tactics developed during training near the wine town of Bernkastel on the Mosel River. Rommel’s goal was to be ten miles past the river by nightfall. He encouraged his men by telling them that the enemy was in full retreat, and at one point jumped into the water to help pull a raft forward. By 4:00 P.M., German troops were largely on the French side of the Meuse.

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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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
Béarn
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.
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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.”
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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.”
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