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Safe in Allied Hands — A Time Outside of Time: The Home Front III

Reid spent his first night in Allied hands talking late with a fascinated group of American and Canadian officers, the latter just arrived in Tokyo to prepare for Canadian POWs coming out of the camps. After a short sleep on the American hospital ship Marigold, he was given the choice of flying out to Manila or having a sea trip to Guam on the USS Ozark. This was the day the U.S. Navy decided to take over care and transport of all Canadian POWs and foreign civilian detainees as well as American POWs in Japan. The Ozark was loaded with 250 just-released Canadians from other prison camps. Given the choice of air or sea, Reid’s new American friends recommended the latter: “They said there is only one way to go home and that is by ship. You get food and rest and reoriented and so on. By flying you arrive looking a wreck. So I got out to the Ozark and fifteen minutes after I got aboard we sailed.”1

The Ozark departed Tokyo the morning of September 8 and arrived in Guam on September 12. Here, the men were put into hospital for a battery of tests — chest, blood, electrocardiogram, stool examination, urine examination, hemoglobin, blood smear examination, dentists for the teeth, a special examination of the eyes. Food-wise, they were treated to whatever their hearts desired. A week later, the men well enough to travel, Reid among them, re-boarded the Ozark and sailed on to Pearl Harbor, moving along the enormous pipeline put in place by the Americans to get the sick and rescued safely home. “A very thorough going over, with the seriously ill kept in hospital [in Guam], but any particularly ill ones were flown out by priority from Guam,” says Reid. “There was just a sort of leapfrog going on across the Pacific all the time. Coming in by plane, out by boat, in by boat, out by plane and so on — just as fast as possible.”2

To while away the time on board, Reid wrote letters. Almost 40 years later, Doug Dadson, his old school friend, recalled the one to him, filled with Reid’s plans of all the things he was going to do when he got home. Clearest in Dadson’s memory was Reid’s closing declaration: “And, I shall sire a son!”3

The Ozark arrived in Pearl Harbor at noon on September 25 for a 24-hour stopover before continuing to San Francisco. That evening, Reid called home. Hawaii was six hours behind Toronto, so it was the middle of the night when the telephone rang at 5 Scholfield and the overseas operator identified the caller as Captain Jack Reid, on the line from Honolulu. The pandemonium of emotions overwhelming Jean as she took the phone can be imagined. Yet this dreamed-of moment, coming without warning, was the prey of its circumstances: two disembodied voices, separated by four years and 4,700 miles, trying to reconnect over a telephone line suffering transmission delays, sound dropouts, and the hissing and buzzing of static interference. Reid’s low-key, almost cross-sounding murmurs were hard to understand, and what Jean could make out wasn’t what she was longing to hear. His voice was clipped, giving the basics of where he was, how he was coming home, handling this surreal reunion, hindered by technical difficulties, the best he could.

“Say something nice to me,” Jean finally blurted.

Reid’s questioning garble was lost on her, so she said again, “Please, say something nice to me.”

He mustn’t have understood because he paused. Now the overseas operator, still on the line, piped up: “She says, ‘Say something nice to her!’”4

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In recent months, Jean had been on a roller coaster of hope, fear, and guarded exultation. After hearing nothing since George Pollak’s radio message of July 1944, good news had reached her in early June 1945. Several weeks earlier, a Radio Tokyo broadcast was picked up by ham operators in Corvallis, Oregon, Sacramento, California, and by a serviceman aboard the aircraft carrier USS Tripoli in the South Pacific. It was a recording of Reid speaking. The civilian reports came later, but the broadcast transcript and an accompanying note from the serviceman on the Tripoli were forwarded to Jean by the U.S. War and Navy Departments V-Mail Service on June 5:

Dear Mrs. Reid,

I am a radioman serving aboard a carrier attached to the Pacific Fleet. While listening in on a shortwave radio broadcast from Radio Tokyo, I intercepted quite a few messages from boys who are interned in the Japanese homeland as prisoners of war. Not knowing whether or not the government notifies the people back home about these messages I have taken the liberty to do so in the hopes that it will throw a little light as to the whereabouts of your loved one. These messages are copied as accurately as possible. I sincerely hope this letter reaches you and with it brings a little ray of sunshine you so rightly deserve.

This message was intercepted on May 27, 1945, and came from the War Prisoners Camp at Tokyo.

Yours sincerely,

Julio Gonzalez, United States Navy5

Reid’s message had been recorded at 3D in March 1945, shortly before the camp was closed. It runs as follows:

From: Captain J.A.G. Reid

To: Mrs. J.A. Reid

Text: Dearest One

I take this opportunity of sending to my wife, parents, and friends best wishes that will embrace your hearts’ desires. On my account, I am well and busy and find little change from day to day. I have received letters from you telling me of your well-being. I hope that all is still so with you. The other officers here are: Lieutenant Commander C.D. Dockweiler, United States Navy; Lieutenant C.R. Finn, United States Naval Reserve; Ensign E.G. Pollak, United States Naval Reserve; and Major E.S. Kagy, United States Medical Corps. All are well. The men are in relatively good health and spirits and their jobs pass the time. You dwell constantly in my memory and have my love always.6

Jean was elated. But the topsy-turvy reports of the war situation in the daily papers throughout June, July, and the first half of August gave no clear picture of what was going to happen next. Headlines from Toronto’s Globe and Mail show the uncertainty of the outcome, right up to the end:

In the late afternoon of Tuesday, August 14, Jean left work at Dr. Farquharson’s office and boarded the Bloor streetcar at St. George Street, heading east to Sherbourne Street and its northbound bus into Rosedale. It was the sixth day of a heat wave in Toronto — the temperature was 86 degrees Fahrenheit — and the car was not only hot but slow-moving. At Queen’s Park, Bay Street, then at Yonge Street, there was growing clamour at the intersections, rowdy noise, then headlines being shouted by the paper boys: “Japanese Quit!” and “Peace at Last!”

Dumbfounded, Jean stumbled off the streetcar at Yonge Street and waded through the jostling maelstrom of revellers. Around her, as though at a great distance, swirled sounds of laughter, whistling, shouts, honking horns. She stared at the newspapers, trying to absorb the sudden, stunning truth: it was over, the war was over!

How she got home that summer evening remained a blur forever after, a time outside of time, a glorious walk on air: Jack was coming home!

On August 17, Jean received a telegram from Bill Bigelow, still posted to a military hospital in Britain with the Royal Canadian Army Medical Corps: “I join you in thanksgiving today,” wrote Reid’s old friend. And though these were euphoric days for Jean, they were shadowed by the need to know Reid was safe. Word finally came three weeks later, the day after Reid reached Tokyo. At 10:15, the evening of September 10, the phone rang at 5 Scholfield and an operator at the Canadian Pacific Telegrams office in Ottawa read the longed-for message to Jean: “An Unconfirmed Report Has Been Received That Captain John Anthony Gibson Reid Is Safe in Allied Hands” — Stop — “No Further Information Presently Available.”

It was enough.

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The USS Ozark docked in San Francisco on October 2. For 24 hours the several hundred Canadian troops who disembarked were billeted at Fort McDowell on Angel Island in San Francisco Bay, prior to travelling north. This gave Reid time to call his father in Toronto, to phone Lyall Hodgins in Vancouver for help with travel arrangements home, and to buy a ring.

Charles Finn had given Reid the name of a San Francisco jeweller who would give him special treatment as an ex-POW. When Reid walked out of the jewellery store that afternoon, he had in his pocket the emerald-and-diamond ring that became the keepsake Jean would wear for the rest of her life. With this and little else, he boarded a train to Seattle with the other Canadians the next day, where they embarked on a boat to Victoria.

In Toronto, Jean booked a suite at the Royal York Hotel and moved in to await Reid’s arrival — exact time unknown. It was a homecoming of sorts. The Royal York, completed in 1929 and the tallest building in the British Empire when it opened, was the site of the annual medical school parties Jean and Jack had attended throughout the 1930s as well as their destination on personal evenings out when they went dancing to live bands in the Royal York’s grand Imperial Room. Just walking into the elegant, balconied lobby of the hotel recalled those happy, innocent times. Royal York staff, knowing the reason for her stay, coddled her like a queen. But once in her suite, with no idea when Jack would arrive, all Jean could think of to pass the time was to take bath after bath. On the other side of the country, Reid reached Canada:

On the morning of October 5th we got into Victoria, at noon on the 5th actually…. They were prepared to do medicals on all the prisoners coming back and I went to Gordon Head [Military Base] about 2 o’clock — I had had my medical in Guam, but I was to have waited for the other records — the only one who had to because the others came through Hong Kong and Manila. I argued my way for three hours — a number of officers … saw no necessity for my being held there for an extra two days and as far as uniforms and pay went, I wasn’t interested. Meanwhile my [medical] friends in Vancouver were working on a plane for me. I was through [the administrative hoops] by five [o’clock] and by six I was on the plane flying home and got into Toronto the next day with my [medical] records as the only baggage.7

Early in the morning of October 6, 1945, four years to the day since he went away to war, Reid landed at Toronto’s Malton Airport. During the flight, somewhere over the Prairies, he had turned 32 years old. His father was at the airport to meet him. After a stop at 9 Grenadier Heights in High Park for a reunion with Eva, Harry Reid drove his son to the Royal York. Except for outgoing calls, the telephone in the Reids’ suite was off the hook for the next 10 days.