At the age of 13, Reed began working as an office boy, and at 19, a bank clerk. At the outbreak of
World War I he enlisted in the
British Army. He transferred to the
Royal Flying Corps, gaining a single kill in aerial combat and severely burning his face in a flying accident (
Insanity Fair, 1938). Around 1921, he began working as a telephonist and
clerk for
The Times. At the age of 30, he became a sub-editor. In 1927, he became assistant correspondent in
Berlin, later transferring to
Vienna as chief central European correspondent. He went on to report from European centres including
Warsaw, Moscow,
Prague, Athens,
Sofia,
Bucharest and
Budapest. According to Reed, he resigned his job in protest against the
appeasement of Hitler after the
Munich Agreement of 1938. In
Somewhere South of Suez: a further survey of the grand design of the Twentieth Century (1949), Reed wrote that his resignation came in response to press censorship which prevented him from fully reporting "the facts about Hitler and National Socialism." He believed that by becoming a "journalist without a newspaper," he would be free to write as he chose. His 1938 book
Insanity Fair analysing the situation in pre-war Europe brought him worldwide fame. His next few books were also bestsellers. Reed spent the duration of the Second World War in England; in 1948, he moved to
Durban, South Africa. In his 1951 book
Far and Wide he wrote: "During the Second World War I noticed that the figures of Jewish losses, in places where war made verification impossible, were being irresponsibly inflated, and said so in a book. The process continued until the war's end when the figure of six millions was produced… No proof can be given". Reed was subsequently banned by established publishers and booksellers, and his previous titles were often removed from library shelves. His career as a published author effectively over, Reed nevertheless spent several years, including in New York and Montreal, working on his magnum opus
The Controversy of Zion. Despite some initial discussions with a publisher, the manuscript was never submitted. In the 1960s Reed opposed the
decolonization of Africa. In his
The Battle for Rhodesia (1966) he explicitly compared decolonization to the appeasement of Hitler; he supported
Ian Smith's
unilateral declaration of independence from the United Kingdom, arguing that Smith's
Rhodesia had to be defended as "the last bulwark against the Third World War", just as
Czechoslovakia should have been defended against Hitler in 1938. Reed died in Durban in 1976. Two years later
The Controversy of Zion was finally brought to print, the manuscript having lain on top of a wardrobe in Reed's home for over two decades. ==Criticism==