The Good War of Consul Reeves by Peter Rose

Macao, a tiny Portuguese colony for over five centuries, has existed as an improbable

confection of fantastically elaborate baroque churches, fortresses, shaded arcades

around city squares, and houses with wrought-iron balconies, painted in every shade of

pastel. You can hear church bells many times during the day and evening. This

incongruous echo of a far-distant older Europe has clung for centuries to a small

isthmus on the southern coast of China, overshadowed by its larger, more prosperous,

and better-known neighbor 35 miles to the east, Hong Kong.

In December 1941, the Japanese, enlarging on their 10-year war in China, attacked

American, British, and Dutch territories in Asia and the Pacific. Within a short time, they

had conquered vast stretches of southeast Asia, from Burma to the west, and Hong

Kong, Singapore, Malaya, and the Dutch East Indies to the south— almost reaching the

coast of Australia. But Japanese soldiers arrived at the walls of Macao on its northern

border and made the unlikely decision to respect Portuguese neutrality and halt. From

1941 to 1945, Macau was a tiny island with a fragile peace, surrounded by thousands of

miles of hostile war-torn Japanese-occupied Asia. It was home to a Portuguese

governor living in an elaborate pink palace seemingly out of a fairy tale, a British and a

Japanese consul, thousands of desperate refugees, and innumerable spies and secret

agents. Macau was an Asian Casablanca.

The City of the Name of God is the story of Macau during the Second World War, told

through the eyes of the young British Consul, John Reeves. His career as a member of

the China Consular Service was already failing when he was sent to Macao the year

before the war broke out. Macao was a backwater where Reeves, often drunk and

estranged from his wife and child, could do no harm. As the Japanese cut their swath

through Asia, Reeves was shocked to find himself the only representative of the Allies in

a territory stretching thousands of miles on all sides. He rose to the occasion mightily.

As thousands of British refugees fled to Macau, Reeves took care of them - protected,

housed and fed them, and saved them from imprisonment, starvation, and possible

death. He ran spy rings. He rescued downed American airmen. He arranged for

refugees to be smuggled to safety through hundreds of miles of Japanese-occupied and

bandit-infested China. He was the target of assassins. And he was almost killed when

the Americans accidentally bombed Macao.

John Reeves became a hero to the Portuguese, Chinese, and British people trapped in

Macao.

Yet not long after the war was over, this lonely and tragic man was cruelly forced out of

the Consular Service. He never returned to China or Macau, and in 1978, he died in

obscurity in South Africa.

The Good War of Consul Reeves is a work of historical fiction based on four years of

intensive research that I conducted in archives and libraries in New York, Washington,

Miami, Canberra, Hong Kong, and Macao.

This is a fresh take on a fascinating story that has gotten surprisingly little attention.

There is very little written about this almost forgotten part of WWII history, and nothing

for a broad general audience. There is one collection of academic essays (Wartime

Macau, Hong Kong University Press, 2016), and Reeves’ draft account of his time in

Macau was found among his papers after he died. The Royal Asiatic Society published

an edited version of his account, The Lone Flag, in 2014. Both books are intended for

professional historians. They are dry, and they require a certain amount of dedication to

read.