Chasing Gold_The Incredible Story of How the Nazis Stole Europe's Bullion by George M. Taber

Author:George M. Taber [Taber, George M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pegasus
Published: 2014-12-15T08:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty

BRITAIN ON THE BRINK

It was called the miracle of Dunkirk, but others in the United Kingdom viewed it as something other than a miracle with regard to Churchill’s handling of the war. During nine days in May and June 1940, a ragtag armada of ships evacuated 338,226 Allied forces from under the noses and guns of Nazi armies to Britain to fight another day. The new Prime Minister Winston Churchill had no illusions that his country had suffered a horrific setback. In a speech to the House of Commons on June 4, 1940, he called the events in France “a colossal military disaster,” and added “wars are not won by evacuations.”1

Many members of the British establishment at the time did not think Churchill was up to the job of leading the country in wartime. He had just botched the Allied effort to help the Norwegians in their struggle against Hitler. The day after the new prime minister’s appointment, John Colville, his private secretary, wrote in his diary: “There seems to be some inclination at Whitehall to believe that Winston will be a complete failure and that Neville [Chamberlain] will return.”2

The failure on the continent, though, led some nervous Britons to reach for their gold. Mrs. Edith Parr, a housewife from the Isle of Wight, wrote in a letter to the Times of London, “Let us beat our enemies by learning from them. The Italian women, in the Abyssinian War, gave up their wedding rings, receiving in exchange rings of baser metal.” Kingsley Wood, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, picked up the idea, and argued that it might raise £20 million for the war effort. Churchill rejected that extreme measure unless it became necessary to shame the Americans into coming to his country’s aid, but he still liked to quote Lord Macaulay’s poem “Horatio at the Bridge”:

Romans in Rome’s quarrel

Spared neither land nor gold.3

The British were already aware of the Nazi gold strategy and the importance of getting the Bank of England’s reserves out of the country and to safety abroad. In addition, Britain was custodian of hundreds of tons of bullion for other nations, much of which had just been sent over for safekeeping in the past three years. Always lurking in the back of the minds of British leaders, however, was the fate of the White Star Line’s SS Laurentic during World War I. Launched in 1908, the ship at first carried passengers from Liverpool to Canada, but in the Great War it became an armed merchant cruiser. On January 25, 1917, the vessel hit two mines north of Ireland and sank within an hour. It was carrying 43 tons of gold stowed in the second-class baggage room. After the war, Royal Navy divers recovered most, but not all, of the bullion. That tragedy was never far from the minds of the men making decisions about what to do with Britain’s gold now that the German threat had finally reached their shores.4

While the United States was the destination of choice for the British bullion, America’s strict neutrality stance caused complications.

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