To defeat the Nazis, Ottawa has grasped a golden opportunity in World War 2

The Second World War was not going well for the United Kingdom in June 1940. More than 300,000 Allied troops and sailors had recently been evacuated from the French port of Dunkirk. The French army quickly disintegrated, and by the middle of the month, German forces were advancing towards Paris.

The Nazi invasion of Britain appeared to be both impending and unavoidable. Winston Churchill's newly established administration required a strategy to keep the nation's wealth out of Hitler's clutches. Some of it had already crossed the Atlantic, but Britain needed a method to transport the remainder.

Operation Fish was created, and it would soon become the single-largest transfer of tangible wealth in history — despite the fact that few individuals in the United Kingdom or Canada, where billions of dollars in gold and securities would be moved for safety, ever caught a whiff of it.

" completely hidden. People simply were not aware of it, despite the fact that all of those resources were available to prosecute the war in the event of a German invasion of Britain "James Powell, an Ottawa historian and retired Bank of Canada executive who researched and wrote about the daring wartime operation, explained.

Powell's account begins with Sidney Perkins, a Foreign Exchange Control Board official at the Bank of Canada. Perkins left his house on Euclid Avenue in Old Ottawa South on July 2, 1940, and arrived at work to find he was being dispatched on a top-secret assignment. The stakes were out of this world.

Later that day, Perkins and the bank's acting secretary, David Mansur, met Alexander Craig from the Bank of England at Montreal's Bonaventure Station. Craig shook their hands and stated that he'd brought them "a lot of fish."

In reality, the heavily guarded train that had just arrived from Halifax had no seafood on board. Instead, it possessed a virtually incalculable amount of money in the form of gold and securities, the latter of which was taken from the British people under the Emergency Powers Act.

Craig and his "load of fish" had landed in Halifax the day before aboard the light cruiser HMS Emerald after a perilous seven-day journey. A ferocious gale had forced two destroyers escorting the convoy to return, leaving the Emerald and her valuable cargo at the mercy of the U-boats lurking in the North Atlantic.

More than 100 Allied and neutral ships were sunk in the month of May alone. It would have been terrible for Britain to lose even one ship laden to the gunwales with gold and securities. "To take the risk and move all these resources across was, to say the least, a brave choice," Powell said.