Medical doctor, professor, and author Charles G. Roland interviewed Jean Reid about her husband in 1993 for his book Long Night’s Journey into Day: Prisoners of War in Hong Kong and Japan, 1941–1945. Roland asked her: “And how was he then, that first week or so?”
Jean answered:
The first week or so. I think he was so — it was so unbelievable to him, that he was back in his own city, and there we were, together…. He was sort of quiet and subdued. He hoped no one would ask any questions about what it was like…. It took some time before Jack began to — well, they’re never the same. There was just no way that someone can endure these things without some changes. I knew that. I recognized that. That is just human, it doesn’t matter what terrible event … it’s going to make a difference to your personality, the way you think….
Because this is the truth — there was a lost sequence of years to be made up, to return to our society after what they’d been through…. You’re making up for over four years. It was almost more than they could contend with….
Of course, everybody wants to have you for dinner, or the evening, and look at this person that’s returned after that. And Jack would say, “I can’t do it anymore.”1
Two weeks after his return, Reid was sent for medical follow-up at Chorley Park, the temporary military hospital occupying what had been the lieutenant governor of Ontario’s palatial residence in North Rosedale. Here, a short walk from 5 Scholfield, he underwent 10 days of observation, tests, and treatment for symptoms of dysentery and beriberi. Dr. Hoyle Campbell, who had known Reid in medical school, was consulted about the latter condition:
I examined him for some neurological problems he had — numbness. I thought it was beriberi — vitamin B1 deficiency, that was causing these symptoms. He was very emaciated when I saw him. Vitamin B1 deficiency over a long time can cause a lot of damage to the neurological system. I thought it was beriberi, and unless the vitamin B1 administrations they were giving him would help, I hadn’t anything to offer. I can see him still in my mind’s eye. I was shocked at how thin he was.2
At the end of October, Reid travelled to Ottawa to be debriefed on his experiences as an interned medical officer and prison camp commander. While there, Reid reconnected with Major John Crawford, his former commanding officer, who on return from Hong Kong had been promoted to assistant director of medical services at Ottawa Army Headquarters.
Reid’s debriefing, conducted by Lieutenant-Colonel C.A.R. Gordon, the Department of National Defence official medical historian, took several days to complete and ran to nearly 200 pages once it was transcribed. The case histories of Reid’s prison camp patients and other medical records he had kept secret from the Japanese helped guide the narrative.
Captain Reid, Ottawa debriefing, October/November 1945.
Back in Toronto, Jack and Jean remained temporarily at 5 Scholfield. Reid was finding his feet, seeing old friends, considering the future. But throughout these early days, the person he kept talking about, says Jean, was George Pollak. Repatriated in October from the prison camp at Ohashi and now living at his mother’s apartment in New York City, Pollak was in the same frame of mind:
Shortly after I got back I managed to get in touch with Jack and heard that he was well. Officially, I was attached to the Brooklyn Naval Hospital for three months as an outpatient and I was free to do pretty much as I pleased. Somehow Jack and I agreed on his and Jean’s visit to New York, and in December they appeared for a week. It was a truly marvellous week for me, and I think they enjoyed it also.
They were a strikingly handsome couple. Usually we would meet in the afternoon and cram as much as possible into the short time available. It was a rather euphoric time anyway, and the gay atmosphere of the city enhanced everyone’s spirits. I recall that on several occasions we ended up in their hotel room in the wee hours, reviewing the day and planning for the next over glasses of milk and sandwiches. Jack seemed relaxed and happy, and I suppose it was a process of recourting Jean all over again.3
Jean remembered this week in New York as a perfect dream come true. Here she was, the agony of the war years behind her, gadding about the city where she and Jack had spent their honeymoon, a handsome officer in uniform on each arm, getting to know George, Jack’s comrade-in-arms, and meeting Marianne Pollak, George’s mother, whose unexpected letter a year and half earlier had reassured Jean that Jack was still alive.
Jean Reid soon after Jack’s return.
Alfred Pollak, George’s father, the clever Austrian chemist who made good in America with his patents and food consulting, had died in the summer of 1943, still wondering if his son was alive. After his death, Marianne continued to reside in the family’s four-bedroom apartment (plus maid’s quarters) at 895 West End Avenue in Manhattan’s Upper West Side. It was a grand establishment entered via a gracious wood-panelled and book-lined foyer leading to a spacious salon and a separate dining room that easily accommodated the baby grand piano that Marianne played beautifully. Jean found her utterly charming and described Marianne as “transfixed with happiness that everything was ‘right’ again against all odds,” now that George was safely home.4
Jack, Jean, and George Pollak, Copacabana nightclub, New York City, December 1945.
Forty years later, Pollak recalled this time with Jack and Jean in the festive, postwar New York of December 1945 as one of the best weeks of his life:
The week ended all too soon. We were both returning into our own little worlds and an era was ending. Concern and affection from afar can remain, but one ceases to be a direct and daily influence on the other person, and vice versa. Accepting that, I still found great satisfaction in seeing Jack in gay and buoyant spirits and apparent excellent health. Moreover, after meeting and observing the lovely Jean during that week, I felt most reassured and confident that they would work out something good. Up to that time, to me Jack was a singular individual, with Jean’s face as an unknown hazy apparition in the background. After that visit, I found that I thought of Jack and Jean as an indivisible unit. Inasmuch as she seemed to be part of Jack, she entered into our friendship as a most delightful partner.5
Early in 1946, the Reids moved into a duplex apartment at 25 Rose Park Drive in Moore Park. Welcomed back into the Toronto medical fold by admiring mentors and colleagues, Reid accepted a position as consultant in medicine at the Toronto Military Hospital on Christie Street and set to work on his fellowship in cardiology, which in keeping with his brilliant medical school performance, he would receive in record time later that year. He also began a medical study with John Crawford, funded by the National Research Council, examining the effects of prolonged nutritional deprivation on the Canadians held in Hong Kong and Japan.
Personal developments were proceeding in tandem. When George Pollak visited Toronto in July 1946, Jean was expecting a baby, and Reid, still officially on active service, had been promoted to the rank of major as well as learning he was to become a Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (MBE) for his service in the Far East. Five years younger, still single, Pollak had now decided on a professional career in the U.S. Navy.
Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (MBE) awarded to Major John Reid, 1948.
I made a brief visit to Toronto in the summer of 1946. We had a fine few days, very relaxed. I remember that liquor rationing was still in effect and the first morning Jack took me down to the alcohol Board or whatever it was called and talked them into giving me an honorary temporary card so that we wouldn’t deplete the liquor locker too far. Jack seemed to be entering the mainstream of normal affairs, and although I don’t recall any specific plans, he seemed to be feeling his way with interest. It was a good and satisfactory visit.6
Reid’s postwar life seemed to be jelling. Tony, the son so resoundingly foretold in Reid’s shipboard letter to Doug Dadson the year before, was born in November 1946, with Pollak named as godfather. The household on Rose Park now revolved around the baby, with Jean in her glory and Reid the proud and smitten father. Early in 1947, he was offered a staff appointment as resident physician at the Wellesley Division of Toronto General Hospital. On the research side, “Nutritional Disease Affecting Canadian Troops Held Prisoner of War by the Japanese,” the scientific study co-authored with John Crawford, was published in the Canadian Journal of Research that April.
Yet the war continued to intrude. Reid’s letter of commendation, sent to Masao Uwamori from Sendai 1B in August 1945, hadn’t prevented the ex-commandant of Camp 3D from being arrested by the Allies as a possible war criminal in November 1945 — one of nearly 6,000 Japanese who would be tried in the War Crime Trials conducted in Japan by the Allies’ International Military Tribunal between May 1946 and November 1948.
Reid had been alerted to Uwamori’s arrest in June 1946 by a friend in the War Crimes Section of Canada’s Department of National Defence. Wanting justice done, he wrote letters in Uwamori’s favour and travelled to Ottawa to be interviewed and file an affidavit in Uwamori’s defence. Reid’s main argument was that, over time, Uwamori had responded to Reid’s persuasions and within the constraints of Japanese military hierarchy had done the best he could for the Canadian prisoners — so much so that in 1945 Uwamori had been relieved of his command for being too soft on POWs. Despite this testimony and unbeknownst to Reid, Uwamori was formally charged in December 1946 for mistreatment of Canadian prisoners, for permitting atrocities, and failing to provide prisoners with adequate food and shelter.
In April 1947, with Uwamori’s trial soon to begin before the U.S. Military Commission, Ira Kaye, his court-appointed American defence counsel, made a last-ditch effort to mitigate the charges. Having reviewed Reid’s letters and affidavit supporting Uwamori, Kaye contacted the Canadian War Crimes Section in Ottawa, hoping to solicit further testimony from Reid in favour of his client. When Reid heard that Uwamori was, indeed, standing trial as a war criminal, he was furious. He wrote a second affidavit in Uwamori’s defence and had it transmitted to the Military Commission in Yokohama where it arrived midtrial. In this second affidavit, Reid hammered home detail after detail of Uwamori’s positive behaviour before concluding:
I could go on recalling incidents for some time, but I feel that these will give you a skeleton picture of the man. Such a state of cooperation was of course not obtained overnight. It took several months of constant effort, largely on my part, to establish such a frame of mind in Lieutenant Uwamori. But several decades of such efforts would not have established it in other Japanese Commandants I have known.
One must also consider that Lieutenant Uwamori was a Japanese propagandized to feel that we were the bitter and treacherous enemies of Japan; that he had never been in a western civilization; that he was an officer in the Japanese Army, acting under orders that were certainly not favourable to us as prisoners, and that physical punishment, drumhead justice, semi-starvation, the inadequate care of the sick, and the lack of dignity and the value of the individual were not only part and parcel of his army’s organization and philosophy, but of the life of his whole country, in order to understand that he required personal qualities of fairness and consideration to be so far won over by any means.
To sum up, I did not observe any actions under the circumstances for which I would feel Lieutenant Uwamori should be punished as a war criminal.7
The trial ended on April 28, but final determination of the sentence was postponed until September 8, 1947, when Ira Kaye presented the “Defense Motion for Modification of Sentence in the Case of United States of America vs. Masao Uwamori” to the Reviewing Authority of the U.S. War Crimes Defense Division. In his summation, Kaye gave Reid the last word: “The opinion of Major Reid is so superlative and lengthy that no quotation from his affidavits and letters is necessary. To him, Uwamori was an outstanding exponent of humanitarianism.”8
A year later, in a carefully handwritten letter, Uwamori describes the outcome in his own words:
1st December 1948
Major Reid
Dear Sir,
I have learned through your affidavit which was written by you at the City of Toronto on the 21st of April 1947 that you are well and are still very sympathetic and warm-hearted toward me. My lawyer Mr. Kaye has kindly offered to have this letter sent to you.
Right after the termination of the war, you were kind enough to send me a letter of bidding farewell, but I was very sorry that I could not see you before you left Japan. Neither could I write you until now. Therefore I think I had better write down the events in detail which happened to me so far.
On the 17th of November that year I was arrested and since then was being incarcerated in Sugamo prison as a war crime suspect. Around about the middle of December 1946, I was charged with violation of the Laws and Customs of War. The charges and specifications were the biggest ones which the defence section ever handled; the latter were more than eighty. At that time I was quite at a loss without knowing what to do.
However my lawyer did his utmost to defend me and also to obtain favourable evidences from the ex-prisoners of war. My serious concern then was how they felt toward me and how they knew my efforts during my service as camp commandant. The lawyer pried into all affidavits and concluded that you would be the life saver for me, because you were deemed the fairest and most humane person he ever came into contact with through all the documents gathered up at the Yokohama trials. Indeed I was in a firm belief that you would be the only one who would do me a great favour.
On 16th of April 1947, I was able to face the trial with a light spirit and an excellent health expecting your favoured statement. To my great joy, as was expected, you sent a wonderful disposition on my behalf just in due time during the trial. One thing that delighted me most was that you stated so many concrete evidences without any prejudice and with stepping over the colour line to enable the Commission to appreciate the estimate of me. One thing that impressed me very much was that you did mention them [in a] different way from the affidavits of other prisoners of war, for instance, analysing not only the Japanese Army’s organization and philosophy but also the life of my whole country.
Thus, to sum up you praised me by saying I had most un-Japanese personal qualities of fairness. It seemed to be overestimation of me indeed. As a matter of fact, during my duty I did my best to treat you and your men fairly and kindly. However, because of lack of my ability and intelligence I could not satisfy you to the full extent. And if there was anything entitled to receive your hearty appreciation, I believe it had been done only through your sincere co-operation and wise suggestion to me. Your letter and affidavits were introduced at the final argument by my lawyer and they put the court into a surprising move.
On April 28th, I was sentenced three years hard labour, but after having weighed the mitigating factors — my humane treatment of Allied prisoners of war through your and other personnel’s letters, the Commission made the recommendation for clemency to the Convening Authority. And at last, I was released from the prison and could be a free man under suspended sentence.
How I can express the greatest joy I ever felt in my life. Arrived home in the evening of the big day. I was welcomed by my family and could not help hugging each other and shedding tears. I think I could imagine your deep emotion which you might have felt when you came home after the war.
It was entirely of your favour to enable me to get rid of such a very hard case. I hereby explain my sincerest gratitude for your fairness and kindness to me during and after the war.
Now I am trying to find [a] new job without taking a rest, because during my absence my family has been making a from-hand-to-mouth living and been almost on the verge of starvation. However, the last two years’ imprisonment never let me feel any hard feeling to the Allies, because I could not have treated you and your men as I had expected and felt the utmost regret and remorse in this respect also because I have learned that a great many of the personnel in my camp still feel warmest friendship and sympathy toward me.
My eager hope now is that I could use my person and capabilities for the benefit of the Allies and Japan during the formative years that lie immediately ahead as the Military Commission recommended, and I believe it might be the best compensation for the hardships from which you and your men had suffered in my camp and also might be a small gift to you which would please you to a certain extent.
If you allow me, I wish to write you often and see you anytime after normal relationship revived between your country and Japan.
Never would I forget your efforts, kindness and fairness as long as I live.
May I extend a happy new year to you and your wife.
Yours respectfully,
Masao Uwamori
No. 481 Zaimokuza,
Kamakura City, Japan9
Months later, a long, battered parcel arrived on Reid’s doorstep in Toronto marked “Bunch of Canes” — the gift Uwamori had cobbled together as an offering of thanks. Inside was an assortment of second-hand canes in different coloured woods — malacca, bamboo, rosewood — and of different designs, uses, and states of repair. Some were slender, polished, and delicately carved, others were simple, utilitarian, somewhat battered walking sticks.
One stood out as belonging to a Westerner — an officer’s swagger stick. This octagon-shaped cane had been personalized by its owner. Into the top of the pommel, a rudimentary British crown and laurel wreath in brass had been pressed. Affixed in one of the pommel’s eight facings was a tiny Hong Kong five-cent piece. Encircling the pommel’s crown and wreath, roughly carved, was the owner’s name: “CSM E.C. Todd R.R.C.” In assembling his “bunch of canes,” Uwamori had found in some little shop or street vendor’s cart in postwar Yokohama the swagger stick of one of Reid’s own men — Sergeant Major Earl Todd, the popular Royal Rifles NCO who was crushed to death under a load of falling wood at Nippon Kokan Shipyard in November 1944.
Whether or not Uwamori tried to contact Reid again is moot. Reid’s postwar aversion to anything that brought back memories of his experience meant he avoided or cut off any contact from that time, including involvement in the Hong Kong Veterans Association, founded in 1947, many of whose members had been the men in his camps.
Receiving Uwamori’s “bunch of canes” is the last known connection that Reid had with his former commandant.
In the summer of 1947, George Pollak returned to Toronto to see Jack and Jean and to meet Tony, his infant godson. Pollak’s career was progressing. He was now a lieutenant commander stationed in Washington, D.C., soon to be posted to the U.S. naval base in San Diego. He wanted to see Reid before distance became an impediment:
Another short visit in 1947 was not quite the same. It may be at that time that Jack first mentioned the possibility of the [medical] practice in Vancouver. There was nothing obvious or specific, but I felt somewhat of a restlessness or dissatisfaction in Jack. Jean was as gracious and friendly as ever. Since it wasn’t any of my business I didn’t try to delve into the situation any further. Jack seemed to be sorting things out quite methodically and I didn’t think much more about it.10
Some of Reid’s Toronto friends met Pollak during his summer visits in 1946 and 1947. Doug Dadson said the gatherings were often full of fun, with Reid and Pollak recalling the ludicrous absurdities of prison camp life under the Japanese — the time, for instance, a guard delivered a ration bag to the prisoners’ cookhouse containing nothing but four horses’ hooves, or the time Reid was called into the camp office to help the Japanese puzzle over an order from Tokyo Area Headquarters: “Take one shirt and give it to each prisoner and take one shirt from each prisoner.” What to do? Gales of laughter at 25 Rose Park Drive followed as these and other lunacies were recounted.
But, like Pollak, Reid’s Toronto friends sensed his discontent. Some sort of disaffection with the Toronto scene had set in, increasing the lure of returning to Vancouver, where he had been happy in 1940–41. Since the end of the war, Lyall Hodgins and other Vancouver colleagues had been badgering him to return to The Clinic on Seymour Street where his name was still on the letterhead. In the spring of 1948, after vacillating about the staff appointment at Wellesley Hospital, Reid decided to go. Life in the west would provide the fresh start his restlessness craved.
Reid’s long-time friend Frank Woods recounts:
I didn’t think he should go to Vancouver. But Jack said he didn’t want to stay in the medical rat race. While other doctors [back from the war] were diving into practice and moving up fast, Jack was more spread out in his interests, not interested in money particularly. He liked his comforts, but they weren’t all-important.11
According to Woods, Reid said he wanted — in symbolic terms — to get as far away as he could from the Medical Arts Building in Toronto, the Georgian-style palace at the corner of Bloor and St. George Streets that since 1929 had housed the offices of much of Toronto’s medical establishment. For someone whose career before and during the war seemed to have destined him to have an office there himself, this rejection of the beaten path was characteristic of Reid’s eccentric postwar persona.
Jean was now expecting their second child, so plans were laid to make the move to Vancouver in the fall of 1948 after the baby’s arrival. At the beginning of October, two weeks after Jon was born, Reid set off alone to drive to the coast. Jean was to follow six weeks later by train, with a nurse to help with two-year-old Tony and the baby. But before she left Toronto, something she’d been missing — a clearer picture of her husband’s war experience — came by roundabout means.
Until now, Jean’s glimpses of what Reid had gone through overseas had been limited to anecdotes and isolated details he mentioned if the mood struck him. Most of the time he was silent on the subject. Jean didn’t ask for more than he was willing to reveal: the cries in the night caused by nightmarish dreams of being back in prison camp were warning enough not to probe too deeply. Thus, it was a kind of serendipity that his war decoration — the MBE — arrived by registered mail a week before Jean departed for Vancouver. The MBE citation, which encapsulated the 44 months of Reid’s experience in Hong Kong and Japan, was an objective account based on military records and the testimony of the men he had served with or commanded. In the heartbreaking times to come, it was something Jean would later read and reread, trying to understand what had happened to the man she once knew so intimately, trying to fathom how the war had changed his way of being:
Award of Member of the Order of the British Empire to Major John Anthony Gibson Reid
The Royal Canadian Army Medical Corps
Major Reid was medical officer to the Winnipeg Grenadiers when he was taken prisoner of war at Hong Kong in December 1941. The problems that arose following the capitulation were mainly those of care for the sick and wounded and the large task of ensuring a high standard of sanitation and hygiene in the prisoner of war camps.
Being an area in which tropical diseases and diseases of filth thrived, a very real problem confronted the medical officers, and, judging by the universal acclaim granted to these self-sacrificing men, they rose fully to the occasion regardless of the consequences to themselves. The fact that the conditions were made worse through inadequate rations and disinterest and interference from the Japanese authorities seemed only to spur the medical officers to greater efforts.
Major Reid threw himself whole-heartedly into the difficult task ahead of him and shortly was confronted by epidemics of diphtheria, dysentery and malaria which had to be treated without medicines and at the gravest risk of personal infection. In the early stages, anti-toxin was not available and the possibility of getting diphtheria was great and carried with it the strong likelihood of death.
As time went on, due to a shortage of rations, lack of vitamins caused diseases such as beriberi, pellagra, etc., which continued to ravage the prisoners of war throughout the period of captivity.
In January 1943 a draft of six hundred and sixty-three Canadian prisoners of war was sent to Japan as labourers, and Major Reid was the only Canadian officer to accompany them. Here he was met with the most discouraging conditions; no medicine, short rations, an ever-present doubt as to what the unpredictable Japanese might do, and besides his medical duties, many responsibilities that devolved naturally on him which would ordinarily have been handled by a combatant officer.
Such was the character of the man that he not only overcame the difficulties as they arose, but eventually won the respect, confidence and admiration of the Japanese themselves. Throughout the entire period of his captivity Major Reid spent almost all his money on medical supplies for the benefit of his patients. In Japan, he arranged through black market sources a small supply of medicines. He took an active hand in controlling the prisoners of war, and on many occasions interceded for them with the Japanese, ensuring as fair treatment as was possible, particularly in regard to punishments which might have been visited on them by the camp authorities and in excluding the sicker men from working parties.
On one occasion when two Canadians were being beaten by Japanese guards, Major Reid elbowed them aside, picked one of the men off the ground and carried him to hospital where he found him to be injured severely.
Major Reid was able to maintain case histories of his patients, contrary to the orders of the Japanese authorities, and his records are now proving of considerable value to Canadian medical authorities both from the standpoint of the welfare of the individuals concerned and for their value in research in a field heretofore unexplored in this country where similar conditions and diseases do not obtain.
Possibly because of his continually firm stand with the Japanese, but undoubtedly because of his qualities as a man and a medical doctor, the Japanese themselves came to look on him with an attitude almost of worship. A Japanese doctor named Iino thought so much of him that he made a practice of bringing him gifts. Major Reid also won the complete confidence of the camp staff, and by doing so, was able to help the lot of his men immeasurably.
Despite the fact that his health suffered from the excesses of work and consideration for his men, Major Reid continued to display the highest qualities of humanity, skill and devotion to duty throughout his entire period as a prisoner of war.
The opinions of his men under his care are the final test in this case, and, although there were many outstanding deeds performed by many of the men who had the misfortune to become prisoners of war of the Japanese, there is no individual to whom so much gratitude has been expressed. In no single instance has anything but the highest praise been heard of this officer, and considering the unusual difficulties, depression, near starvation and disease experienced continuously for such a long period, there is no doubt that he deserved the highest possible recognition.12
Jean and her children departed for the West in mid-November 1948. When she stepped off the train at Pacific Central Station in Vancouver three days later, the husband waiting on the platform — in good spirits when he departed six weeks before — was strangely subdued, matter-of-fact, distant. The reason would take time to come out, but its effect Reid couldn’t hide: he had met someone, been thunderstruck, fallen head over heels.