One aim of the Nazi conquest of Europe was a simple grab for gold. After the Germans won the war, the city of Berlin (grandiosely rebuilt as ‘Germania’ by Albert Speer) was to replace London as the financial centre of Europe, with the Reichsmark as the currency, pegged to a new gold standard. The Nazis lusted after gold like Wagnerian dwarves. The Anschluss or incorporation of Austria in 1938 netted around ninety tons of gold and the occupation of Czechoslovakia the following year another forty-five tons, raising the German gold reserves to almost US$750 million (around US$12.6 billion today). But by the time the Second World War broke out, much of this had been spent and the Reichsbank was almost bankrupt. Hence the urgent need for more gold, to be converted into Swiss francs to purchase what the German war machine required from abroad: tungsten/ wolfram from Portugal, oil from Romania, iron from Sweden, chrome from Turkey. In spring 1940, only very fast footwork by people in Denmark, Norway and Holland got their gold away before the Third Reich laid hands on it.

France promised the Nazis the richest pickings, because so many other countries had moved their bullion there. The Banque de France, by clinging to the gold standard, had increased its share of world gold reserves from 7 per cent to 27 per cent between 1927 and 1932, accumulating an astonishing total 2430 tons of gold ingots and coins in its Paris vaults. As a precautionary measure after the Munich crisis, however, this had all been moved out of the capital and cached nearer key ports. Then, during the May 1940 Blitzkrieg, the order was given to ship it all out of the country, which duly went ahead. The last thousand tons of French gold was hidden from the Germans in Brittany. Shuttling this precious hoard to Brest harbour on 17 and 18 June, using too few (and too small) vehicles that had to struggle through roads clogged with refugees, was a nightmare. The Wehrmacht was pressing nearer; sporadic air attacks interrupted the loading that went on night and day. Imprisoned convicts were promised freedom if they helped lug and stow boxes. Only three hours after the last bullion ship sailed, German troops were on the quayside.

The five French warships carrying twelve hundred tons of gold bars arrived at Casablanca on 21 June 1940, the day Hitler handed over the terms of armistice to France. The Bank of France’s representative in Morocco ordered the shipment to move on south to the port of Dakar in Senegal, one of the federation of nine colonies that made up French West Africa. There, the French gold joined that of other nations: an unknown quantity from Latvia and Lithuania, ninety cases from Luxembourg containing a total of 319 gold bars, perhaps two hundred tons of Belgian gold in 4944 packing cases, and seventy-five tons of Polish gold which had been diverted from Martinique in late May. The entire hoard was buried seventeen miles inland from Dakar, near Thies air base.

‘Nervos belli pecuniam,’ said Cicero two thousand years ago: ‘the sinews of war are money.’ War is ruinously expensive, and this one was costing Britain over £10 million a day (perhaps around £160 million today). The debts accumulated in the Second World War almost bankrupted Britain in the 1940s and early 1950s, and were not finally paid off until 2006.

Money was a perpetual problem for Winston Churchill, but it was a far more vexing one for General de Gaulle, starting from scratch in raising his French force of volunteers to fight the common enemy. Recruitment was an uphill struggle for de Gaulle. When French sailors interned in Britain were asked to choose, only nine hundred opted to join de Gaulle, while more than nineteen thousand wanted to go back to Vichy territory. Many other potential volunteers for the Free French turned away in disgust after the British sank the fleet at Mers-el-Kébir. By the end of July, de Gaulle claimed to have seven thousand ‘effectives’ wearing their new badge of the Cross of Lorraine, although British Cabinet figures suggest half that. Nevertheless, Churchill wanted to support de Gaulle, and on 7 August 1940 the two men signed an agreement at Chartwell (backdated to 1 July) in which the British government agreed to fund the Free French.

Churchill also backed a plan, put up by the liaison officer Edward Spears and the secret fixer Desmond Morton, to install de Gaulle in Dakar on the Atlantic coast of West Africa. This operation, initially called Scipio, the first wholly seaborne invasion of the Second World War, was at first going to employ three battalions of Free French. But with Churchill, in Correlli Barnett’s phrase, ‘truly bulldozing the project through’, it evolved into the Anglo-French Operation Menace, including the warships Resolution, Barham and Ark Royal and eight destroyers diverted from Force H at Gibraltar. Four battalions of Royal Marines would make up the spearhead, among them an acerbic Captain Evelyn Waugh (who would later portray the whole thing as a fiasco in his Sword of Honour novel trilogy).

Churchill told President Roosevelt that the Dakar expedition was a strategic move to foil any German attempt to set up a naval base there which would threaten Atlantic shipping routes. But at the back of Churchill’s mind must have been the hope of gold. On 7 July, General Władysław Sikorski, prime minister of the Polish government in exile and commander of its armed forces, had asked Churchill for help in retrieving the Polish gold that was stored there. When Churchill spoke about Dakar to the chiefs of staff on 8 August, among the reasons he gave for the operation was: ‘The Poles and the Belgians would also have their gold recovered for them.’

If Churchill knew that there was an even greater amount of French gold stored at Dakar, that would have made the operation yet more pressing. In six weeks between July and August 1940, the British gold reserves had dropped from £380 million to £290 million. French gold could help restore the balance, and Operation Menace thrilled the Treasure Island side of the prime minister’s imagination. Planting the flag of the Free French in West Africa to rally their colonial empire was a splendid gesture, but scooping the gold into the bargain would have been a swashbuckling coup.

Other greedy eyes were looking for the loot. When King Leopold III of Belgium, who had surrendered his country on 27 May, asked his German captors to restore the Belgian gold (in order to buy wheat for bread), the Reich economic envoy, Dr Johannes Hemmen, went looking for it, aggressively questioning the chairman of the French armistice commission, General Charles Huntzinger, the man who had actually signed the document at Compiègne for France. Citing its Article 17 – ‘The French government to prevent the transfers of valuables and stocks from occupied to non-occupied territory or abroad’ – Hemmen demanded to know how much gold bullion and coin the Bank of France possessed and exactly where it was. On 20 August, Huntzinger informed Hemmen that, regrettably, the French gold – worth 844.6 billion francs – was now dispersed in London, New York, Martinique, Casablanca and Dakar. Hemmen warned the Vichy French that they would be liable for any loss, and advised them to move the Dakar gold away from the coast.

The Free French were making inroads in Africa. Most of French Equatorial Africa declared for de Gaulle: Chad on 26 August, Cameroon on 27 August and Ubangi-Shari (now the Central African Republic) on the 30th. This helped the Allies by offering a land and air route through friendly territory from British Nigeria to the British Sudan via Fort Lamy. This was the way many people subsequently went from the UK to Egypt, not through the Mediterranean but travelling via West Africa.

Operation Menace was as leaky as a sieve. When Charles de Gaulle went shopping at Simpson’s in Piccadilly for tropical kit (perhaps including what Evelyn Waugh put into his character William Boot’s mountain of gear for Ishmaelia, ‘a cane for whacking snakes’), he openly revealed his destination as West Africa. ‘Many got to know,’ wrote Churchill in his memoirs later. ‘Dakar became common talk among French troops. At dinner in a Liverpool restaurant French officers toasted “Dakar!”’ Churchill continued, ‘We were all in our war-time infancy’ with secrecy. A naval lieutenant wrote to the First Lord of the Admiralty, A. V. Alexander, about the gross breaches of security: ‘I was told of our destination by a man on the Liverpool docks.’ He thought the Germans must know too.

Vichy France had indeed learned what was afoot. Six of their warships – three super-destroyers and three heavy cruisers – left Toulon on 9 September, passing unchallenged through the Strait of Gibraltar on the morning of 11 September, something that would cause ructions later. Captain Alan Hillgarth, the British naval attaché in Madrid, said he had the first news of ships heading westward from a French naval officer and alerted the Admiralty in London as well as Gibraltar, with his message arriving around midnight on 10 September. The naval officer on duty in London did not choose to wake Admiral Dudley Pound, so the First Sea Lord only got the message on the morning of the 11th, when the six Vichy ships had already passed through the strait. Three of the French ships stopped at Casablanca but the three cruisers arrived at Dakar on 15 September to reinforce the Vichy presence there. The whole stash of gold bullion was moved 450 miles east towards the desert, to Kayes on the Senegal River, a fiercely hot town that today lies in Mali.

At this point Churchill wanted to cancel Operation Menace, but de Gaulle wished to go ahead. However, the Free French were not welcomed at Dakar. De Gaulle’s emissaries were all arrested or shot at by Vichy colonial forces. Fog blinded the military operations that started on Monday 23 September; ships without radar fumbled and groped; planes were shot down. The Vichy batteries at Dakar fired back at the Anglo-French force, joined, alarmingly, by the fifteen-inch guns of Richelieu, not as badly damaged in the July attack as everyone hoped. The dye from one close-landing, huge-splashing shell turned the ensign at HMS Forester’s foremast head yellow. Three Intelligence Corps NCOs who had infiltrated Dakar’s Vichy naval base disguised as Swedish and Spanish sailors discovered that two submarines were lurking. But the NCOs’ warning was ignored, and so one of the submarines, the Bévéziers, managed to torpedo the battleship HMS Resolution. The Anglo-French force at first withdrew, and then abandoned the mission entirely. The British press and Parliament were scathing about the debacle: ‘blunder’ and ‘muddle’ were the words bandied about; Ambassador Kennedy reported to the USA that Churchill’s popularity was dented.

But there was a sort of happy ending to de Gaulle’s first, failed, adventure in West Africa. A small Free French force under Colonel Philippe de Hautecloque – now known as ‘Colonel Leclerc’, a pseudonym to protect his family in occupied France – had successfully wrested French Cameroon from Vichy control in late August, and in early October General de Gaulle himself arrived in the Cameroonian port of Douala. ‘Beautiful reception, simple but perfect,’ wrote Lieutenant Christian Girard in his diary. ‘Troops impeccable, crowds enthusiastic, Marseillaise … The general [de Gaulle] jumped from the boat onto the quay to be welcomed by Leclerc in dazzling whites and dress sword. Once again we were in France.’

*

En route home from West Africa by ship from Freetown in Sierra Leone to Gourock in Scotland, Captain Evelyn Waugh RM spent three days at Gibraltar, 15–18 October 1940, and caught some of its flavour in his diary:

Winston Churchill was bitterly disappointed by the failure to get the port of Dakar and the gold, and the losses brought out the vindictive side of his character that must be acknowledged along with his virtues. (In August 1940, for example, the prime minister had hectored General Wavell for retreating from British Somaliland with only light casualties. Wavell’s stinging reply, ‘Heavy butcher’s bill not necessarily indication of good tactics’, marked him for the sack, which came in June 1941.)

Now Churchill wanted a scapegoat for the West African fiasco. In his speech to the House of Commons on 9 October, he alleged that the situation at Dakar

… was transformed in a most unfavourable manner by the arrival there of three French cruisers and three destroyers which carried with them a number of Vichy partisans of the most bitter type … By a series of accidents and some errors which have been made the subject of disciplinary action or are now subject to formal enquiry, neither the First Sea Lord nor the Cabinet were informed of the approach of these ships to the Straits of Gibraltar until it was too late to stop them passing through.

The relevant signals were traced. Admiral Dudley North in Gibraltar had seen Alan Hillgarth’s message but merely followed standing Admiralty instructions: ‘If French warships are seen passing through Straits identity is to be reported immediately but no action taken.’ The British mania for secrecy was also partly to blame. Because Admiral North was not in the picture about the Dakar expedition and, like Admiral Somerville, only learned about it later from the BBC, he naturally did not realise the threat that the Vichy warships posed to it. By contrast, Sir Samuel Hoare in Madrid, who had been informed in confidence about the Dakar raid, was told about the six Vichy warships by Juan Beigbeder ‘as a friend’ on 11 September and immediately telegraphed the information to London. Hoare wrote later, ‘From the Madrid angle it seemed as if the London reaction was disappointingly slow.’

But Admiral North was the senior flag officer at Gibraltar and was now in the line of fire. North had already blotted his copybook with the prime minister two months earlier on 4 July, when he wrote a letter explaining why most naval officers in Gibraltar opposed the use of force on the fleet at Mers-el-Kébir. This affronted Churchill, who minuted A. V. Alexander on 20 July: ‘It is evident that Admiral Dudley North has not got the root of the matter in him, and I should be very glad to see you replace him by a more resolute and clear-sighted officer.’

Someone’s head had to go on the block for Dakar, so on 25 October 1940, after forty-four years of service in the Royal Navy, Sir Dudley North, Admiral Commanding North Atlantic, received a formal letter from the Board of Admiralty concerning his reaction to the naval attaché’s signal. Their communication ended: ‘Their Lordships cannot retain full confidence in an officer who fails in an emergency to take all prudent precautions without waiting for Admiralty instructions. They have accordingly decided that you should be relieved of your command at the first convenient opportunity.’

Until the day he died in 1961, Admiral North tried to get an inquiry or a court martial so he could clear his name. After the Daily Mail journalist Noel Monks wrote an impassioned book about North’s dismissal, That Day at Gibraltar, published in April 1957, the prime minister, Harold Macmillan, finally met with a group of senior admirals and made a placatory statement to the House of Commons on 23 May, which declared that Admiral Dudley North was not guilty of negligence or dereliction of duty, and his integrity was not impugned. Nevertheless, it was always up to the authorities to decide to whom command should be entrusted, Macmillan added, and ultimately this was a matter of judgement of character. Therefore he saw no point in holding any further inquiry.

It was Admiral Dudley North’s misfortune that Sir Winston Churchill outlived him by three years. Only when both men were long dead did Admiral Lord Mountbatten feel free to tell Charlotte and Denis Plimmer, the authors of A Matter of Expediency, their book about the Admiral North case, what he really thought:

If you pursue this matter it comes back to Winston.

The great magic formula was, ‘We mustn’t offend the great old man. After all, he saved England and he saved the world. He may have made a few mistakes but it’s a terrible thing during his lifetime that he should be accused of vindictiveness and so forth.’

And so there was a conspiracy of silence.