Moving tonnes of gold doesn’t look like huge pallets of gold with tarps over them like a James Bond movie. It looks like a handful of supply crates.
I imagine that the French Navy visits NY ports of a regular basis. Pretty normal for Navy’s to sail into the ports of allies during peace time. There would be nothing unusual about a French Navy vessel sailing into NY loading up with some supplies and leaving.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_trucking_indust...
[1]https://archives-historiques.banque-france.fr/ark:/56433/115...
[2]https://www.lesechos.fr/finance-marches/banque-assurances/st...
It happened though. Here are the sources for it:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon_shock#Criticism_and_decl...
- https://www.thegoldobserver.com/p/how-france-secretly-repatr...
- https://www.elibrary.imf.org/view/journals/001/1994/128/arti...
Your source confirms it as well:
> Involving the French Navy was considered, but that would have blown the operation’s cover. Instead, BdF used ocean liners from the Compagnie Générale Transatlantique
So it was multiple trips and in commercial liners.
You've probably driven past more than a few.
So yes, if you need to move national quantities of gold/silver across the ocean, then for legal reasons, it is best to ship it via your navy.
1963: Operation Empty-the-purse ("vide-gousset")
It was also by warship that De Gaulle planned to conduct "Operation Empty-the-purse" in 1963, the code name for the repatriation of French gold deposited at Fort Knox in the United States (1). More than 1,150 tons—the result of converting French dollars into gold, a decision made by De Gaulle in response to the lax monetary policy of the United States—were being used to finance a growing trade deficit through the printing of money.
Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, then Minister of Finance, recounts (2): "De Gaulle was getting impatient and asked me at every meeting: 'So, has that gold finally come back?' One day, he told me: 'We need to move much faster: we're going to send the navy cruiser 'Colbert' which will bring back all the gold that's still there.'" “I told him that if we did that, we would alienate American public opinion forever.” Ultimately, De Gaulle abandoned the Colbert plan, and French gold returned from the United States in small quantities. Not for very long, it's true. The events of May 1968 and the ensuing monetary crisis depleted the reserves, which fell from 4,650 tons to 3,150 – 1,500 tons had crossed the Atlantic again to defend the franc, which De Gaulle refused to devalue.
> Ultimately, De Gaulle abandoned the Colbert plan, and French gold returned from the United States in small quantities.
So I think the story about the warship got twisted from a plan or threat to "it actually happened". Doing it in small quantities over a few years was the right way, indeed. Looking back it seems like it didn't make many waves in the news at the time, so Giscard was absolutely right.
Whether the exact ship was a battleship or a destroyer might make the search result.
Based on some sibling discussion it seems it just never happened. It was multiple shipments, over many years, going over commercial liners. It may have well been armored trucks but they just didn’t all do it at once. It worked well that it didn’t create much of a media uproar.