Half a month ago, when John was busy in New York Harbor to "welcome" George VI's upcoming visit, hundreds of kilometers away in Canada, Halifax Harbor, there was also a group of people anxiously waiting for a group of special "guests". Pen % fun % Pavilion www.biquge.info

These people were waiting not for His Majesty the King and Queen, but for the cruiser "Emerald", which had secretly departed from a small port on the River Clyde in Scotland a few days earlier. The cruiser contained 2,230 boxes of gold and 50 boxes of securities, with a total value of more than $5.3 billion.

This covert operation of the cruiser "Emerald" was part of a top-secret program codenamed "Operation Torpedo". According to the decision of the British wartime cabinet, a considerable part of the gold and marketable securities in the treasury of the British Empire were to be secretly transferred to Canada and the United States. Once the Germans landed in Great Britain and lost their homeland, the British crown and government would rely on this wealth to form a government-in-exile in North America to continue the fight.

After the cruiser "Emerald", a total of six high-speed cruisers, such as "Bartley" and "Bonaventche", were involved in this program. $2.5 billion worth of gold, $4.5 billion in securities, and a large number of jewelry, artifacts, works of art and precious historical documents of incalculable value were sent to Canada and the United States for preservation.

In a sense, His Majesty the King of Great Britain chose to embark on a visit to the Americas with great fanfare during the same period as part of the cover plan for Operation Fish.

When the "Emerald" quietly arrived at the port of Halifax, Canada, in the middle of the night, heavily guarded guards cordoned off the entire port area. Bank of Canada officials carefully counted the supplies and transported them by train to Montreal and Ottawa.

The securities will be deposited on the third basement floor of Sunshine Life Insurance Company in Montreal's Place des Dominions. The gold was sent to the underground vault of the Bank of Canada on Wellington Street, Ottawa.

The British did a very good job of secrecy this time, and the operation lasted three months, with nearly 2,000 people involved, but the Germans were never aware of it. During this period, 138 Allied and neutral ships in the Atlantic were sunk by German submarines, but none of the ships involved in the operation were attacked, which is not explained by "luck" alone.

Even 70 years later, little is known about the specifics of this operation. In John's previous life, he only learned about such an action in the history books. If it weren't for the fact that Chief of Staff Marshall had given him a top-secret mission, he might never have had access to the secrets.

Initially, John was ordered to arrange for a military train to go to Cleveland to receive a batch of FMC's M3A1 wheeled reconnaissance vehicles and transport them to the Fort Knox Armored Corps Base in Kentucky.

On the surface, this command couldn't be more normal. The Fort Knox base was recently converted from an artillery training camp to the headquarters of the United States Armored Corps. In addition to the Armored Corps Command, the U.S. Army Armored Research Center, the U.S. Army Armored Forces School, the 1st Mechanized Cavalry Regiment, and the newly formed 2nd Army Armored Division are stationed there.

As the assistant chief of the Army's General Staff Operations Planning Division, who is responsible for the development and approval of all transportation plans, John has been in contact with transportation plans related to the Fort Knox base for a while now. However, these plans are generally the responsibility of the Armored Forces Command and the Transportation Bureau of the Quartermaster Department, and he only reports them there.

Now, Marshall's chief of staff had so solemnly asked him to take charge of a specific transport assignment himself, and John certainly knew that there must be a mystery in it. What's more, this time the destination is such an "unusual" place as Fort Knox,

In his previous life, Louisville, where John worked, was less than 50 kilometers from the Fort Knox base. All kinds of rumors about the mysterious "super vault" inside the base, his ears were calloused.

That's right, the Federal Reserve's largest and most famous "Fort Knox Vault" sits inside the military base, protected 24 hours a day by hundreds of tanks and 25,000 armored troops. This has been no secret since the vault was built in 1937, and all Americans know it.

Generally speaking, each country reserves a considerable amount of gold for purposes such as stabilizing the national economy, curbing inflation, and improving international credit. To ensure the safety of these gold reserves, countries carefully select the places where they are stored. Often, these locations are very secretive and rarely known to outsiders.

However, the Fort Knox vault is an exception. Most of the gold stored in it was forcibly purchased from the American people at a price of more than $20 an ounce when Roosevelt nationalized gold in 1933. In order to prove that it really has a large amount of gold in its hands and boost the people's confidence in the US dollar, the US government directly disclosed the existence of the "Fort Knox" vault.

So much so that years later, the "Fort Knox" vault was almost synonymous with America's national treasure. Although this vault was only opened once in 1974 to the media and representatives of parliamentarians. But speculation about it has been going on for decades. "007" and "The Great Robbery of Fort Knox" have a lot of imagination about it in many movies and artworks.

Sure enough, John guessed correctly. It was only after he signed a high-level confidentiality agreement in front of Chief of Staff Marshall and a senior Treasury official that he was told the true purpose of the operation.

At their request, John arranged for the special train to be loaded with the M3A1 wheeled reconnaissance vehicles in Cleveland. It wasn't just going south on the Cleveland-Columbus-Cincinnati-Louisville-Fort Knox route. Instead, head north to Buffalo, the second largest city in New York State (the hub of the U.S.-Canada rail network), where two mystery freight cars from Canada are attached before heading south to Kentucky.

As the person in charge of the transport, John was required to count the contents of the two carriages together with officials from the Ministry of Finance, and he had the privilege of seeing the list of the goods: 600 chests of gold (each containing four standard gold nuggets weighing 12.5 kilograms), 40 chests of British royal treasures, and five chests of precious historical documents, including the original of the English Magna Carta of Liberty of 1215.

After reading this list of goods, John took a deep breath. Since joining the family railroad company, John has handled countless shipments, and there has never been one more stressful for him than this one. He didn't have to count on his fingers, he knew that if something went wrong on this errand, let alone him, he couldn't afford to sell the entire Vanderbilt family.

Marshall demanded that John personally draw up the entire plan for the operation and be involved in the entire transportation process with a Treasury official. While ensuring the safety of all materials, it is important to maintain absolute confidentiality and not let the outside world, especially the news media, find any clues.

Even after the entire operation was over, he could not disclose any information related to the operation to anyone, and the secrecy period was - 50 years!