The Nazi invasion of Britain seemed imminent and inevitable.

The newly formed Winston Churchill government needed to develop a plan to prevent the nation’s wealth from falling into Hitler’s hands. Some of them have already crossed the Atlantic, but Britain needs a way to move the rest.

This is a story about the great courage of many people.-Tim Cook, Canadian War Museum

Operation Fish was hatched and soon became the largest single transfer of material wealth in history at the time-although in the UK or Canada, billions of dollars worth of gold and securities would be sent to safekeeping places and few people have ever smelled it.

“[It was] Completely secret. People just never knew it, and all these resources were used to prosecute the war when Germany invaded the UK,” explained James Powell, a historian and retired Bank of Canada executive from Ottawa. Researched and wrote articles on bold wartime actions.

‘A bunch of fish’

Powell’s story begins with Sidney Perkins, an employee of the Foreign Exchange Control Commission of the Bank of Canada. On the morning of July 2, 1940, Perkins left his home on South Euclid Street in Old Ottawa, and when he arrived at the workplace, he learned that he had been assigned to perform a top secret mission. The stakes are unimaginably high.

Later that day, Perkins and the bank’s acting secretary David Mansour met with Alexander Craig of the Bank of England at Bonaventure Station in Montreal. The men shook hands, and Craig announced that he had brought them “a lot of fish.”

In fact, there was no seafood on the heavily guarded train that had just arrived from Halifax. Instead, it holds almost inestimable wealth in the form of gold and securities-the latter seized from the British public under the Emergency Powers Act.

The previous morning, Craig and his “school of fish” arrived in Halifax on the light cruiser HMS Emerald after a painful 7-day voyage. A relentless gust of wind forced the two destroyers escorting the cargo to return, leaving the “Emerald” and its precious cargo at the mercy of the U-shaped submarine lurking in the North Atlantic. In May alone, more than 100 Allied and neutral ships were sunk.

For Britain, losing a ship carrying gold and securities would be catastrophic.

“To say the least, it was indeed a brave decision to take a gamble and bring all these resources over,” Powell pointed out.

Desperate decision

Bold, but absolutely necessary. Britain needs to use its financial assets freely in order to purchase much-needed supplies from the United States. At that time, the United States maintained official neutrality and therefore did not allow credit for war supplies. This is strictly cash and carry. For the United Kingdom, losing this purchasing power is likely to mean losing the war.

Tim Cook, the research director of the Canadian War Museum and author of more than a dozen books on Canadian military history, said: “Britain did not transfer hundreds of millions of dollars in gold because it was an easy task.” “They were forced to do so. Do this because it looks like Britain is really going to collapse.”

The cargo that arrived in Montreal on July 2 was divided into two parts. Five hundred boxes full of securities, estimated to be worth £200 million at the time, were taken to the Sun Life Building there, and gold—about 9,000 bars packed in more than 2,000 boxes of gold bars, with a total value of £30 million at the time— Continue to Union Station in Ottawa.

Under the cover of night, armored vehicles transported the treasure to the newly built Bank of Canada building on Wellington Street, where staff worked in 12-hour shifts to transport crates and bags to the bank’s 60 x 100-foot underground vault.

“The story I heard was that once a lot of gold came in. They just stuffed it in the corridor, in the incinerator room, just to put it in before the accountant came to check it. All the boxes, And record them all to make sure they are all there,” Powell said.

‘chill’

That shipment paved the way for more cargo, including a larger convoy, which left the UK a week later.

“Seeing the tens of millions of gold piled up on the wharf made me shudder,” Perkins later said of one of the cargoes he had witnessed unloading in Halifax.

According to the Bank of Canada, approximately 1,500 tons of gold bars and coins eventually entered the vault and remained there during the war.

Powell estimated the value of all gold at 470 million pounds, equivalent to nearly 90 billion Canadian dollars today—making the Bank of Canada’s Ottawa vault the largest gold reserve outside of Fort Knox. Powell said that the value of securities stored and traded by British bankers in Montreal is immeasurable.

Therefore, the value of Operation Fish to the war effort of the Allied forces is the same.

“This is a bureaucratic act, but you can imagine that if the British invaded, the Germans would immediately hunt down all this gold and securities,” he said. “If this gold is confiscated by the Nazis, who knows how the war will progress?”

The mission is still a secret

Perhaps one of the most shocking aspects of Operation Fish is that although hundreds of Canadians were involved-bankers, brokers, secretaries, laborers, guards, and many others-it remained a secret. No gold ship has ever been lost, and no gold ingot has been misplaced.

Cook said: “During wars, secrets are difficult to keep. Only one person can trigger a real chain of events here.”

For Cook, Operation Fish is a testament to the “quiet professionalism” of the men and women involved.

“This is a story of the great courage of bureaucratic planning… These things are usually not written in history, but they are actually one of the key events that keep the UK fighting,” he said.

“I believe Canadians should understand this history. This is part of what we have achieved today.”