For three or four years just after the Great War, many American naval officers and enlisted men would be ordered to duty at the famous oriental metropolis of Constantinople. Other Americans would come too. Typically, they would all be quite excited at the prospect.
When, in April of 1917, the United States declared war on Turkey’s ally, Germany, and Turkey broke diplomatic relations with the United States, all of the ranking American Navy people had to leave, along with the entire embassy staff. Most of the other three or four hundred American residents also departed Constantinople or mainland Turkey and traveled back to the States.
Noteworthy among the few Americans who remained in Constantinople were a few dozen naval enlisted men and three officers. These men were interned in the famous crowded harbor called the Golden Horn on the steam yacht USS Scorpion, which had been America’s station ship (ambassador’s yacht) in Constantinople since 1908.1 Although Turkish wartime regulations restricted these men to their ship, it appears that all the Navy people regularly got ashore anyway, while their officers maintained very good relations with the local authorities. Also manifesting the good feelings many Turks had for Americans, although British and French schools had been closed and turned into Turkish army barracks, the two fine American colleges in the city were permitted to continue operating.2
Upon the impending armistice of the Allied powers with Germany a year later, President Caleb Frank Gates of Robert College (the leader of the remaining Americans) cautioned his staff to be respectful of their defeated hosts and not to rejoice too openly.3 Following Gates’ lead, unlike other foreigners in the city who overnight began to fly their national flags and rejoice with abandon, most Americans waited to celebrate. However, when a fleet of a hundred British, French, Italian, and Greek warships steamed into the Bosporus Strait on November 13, 1918, Americans joined the cheering people who lined the hills on both sides, even though no American naval vessels were a part of this armada.4
As the Allies began dividing the city of Constantinople among them—the United States, having never declared war on Turkey, was allowed no part in the supervisory commission—some of the Americans who had fled the country came back. However, other Americans who had remained in Turkey went home, including all those interned sailors (some fifty of whom were said to have taken home wives acquired in the city during or before Scorpion’s internment!5). Before long, a few additional ships and officers began to arrive. Almost all of these Navy people and diplomats as well as most of the businessmen, educators, and other Americans who, at about this time, began traveling halfway around the world to this exotic city, were quite new to the place.
They came primarily by sea. Ordered to Constantinople from Norfolk in early 1920, the American destroyer Smith Thompson fell in behind Alden and Long. The three destroyers took ten days to reach Gibraltar, where they stopped to fuel and provision. A very new ship, Smith Thompson burned oil rather than coal, but it was oil of a different kind that interested Fireman First Class Bert Berthelsen and his mates, who, once overseas, felt they could freely thumb their noses at the 1919 Prohibition amendment. Back in Philadelphia in December, the crew had found the vessel’s torpedo alcohol tanks unlocked, so they drained the tanks dry and stowed bottles of firewater throughout the ship. Upon discovering the theft, the skipper ordered the crew members to stand watch over the empty tanks in the freezing weather. Once the ship sailed, he had seven marines (aboard for transportation to Turkey, probably to work at the embassy) stand guard over those same tanks, now once again filled with alcohol.
When Smith Thompson and its sister ships reached Gibraltar, each night the sailors tanked up with wine, whiskey, and cognac and then took their invigoration out on the “Limeys” to such a degree that the British governor-general invited the three destroyers to move on two days ahead of schedule. As the ships steamed eastward, some crew members sobered up enough to note that the Mediterranean was covered with ships’ lights.
A couple of days later, after passing through the Straits of Messina, Long turned north for duty in the Adriatic, while Alden and Smith Thompson continued east through the Ionian Sea. There, heavy squalls sent waves as high as the bridge and stove in watertight doors. The two ships suffered a bit more heavy weather in the Aegean before reaching Cape Helles, the famous rocky cape commanding the entrance to the Dardanelles. When Berthelsen’s destroyer eventually reached Constantinople and moored alongside a tanker to fuel, crew members bought so much liquor from clustering bumboats that there were not enough sober men aboard to shift the ship to the buoy! (Or so Berthelsen reports, at least.) The skipper had to crack down again.6
Naval officers came to Turkey by different routes and with a variety of outlooks. Adm. Mark Bristol took on his assignment as the senior naval officer at Constantinople with mixed feelings, but he would come to thrive in the position; shortly he would become America’s senior diplomat in the region in addition to being America’s naval head. Upon receiving orders to Turkey in January 1919, Bristol was helping to supervise the surrender of German naval forces in Belgium. Quickly, though, he traveled by train to the Italian naval base of Taranto, and then ordered the USS Schley to give him a ride via the Corinth Canal through the Dardanelles and on to the old Ottoman capital. This duty did not include the “division of armored cruisers or battleships” he had fantasized having upon making admiral, and Bristol was further chagrined that the destroyer he was riding had but one working screw. However, at least he could steam into Constantinople on a warship.7
A younger officer was also less than happy about his assignment. In 1920 Lt. (jg) Charles Olsen tried to swap his orders for a European cruise on St. Louis with a fellow officer so he could stay home near his new bride, but failed. Although he liked hiking about when the ship docked at the Azores and Cherbourg, he cared little for flirting and drinking while ashore, and he lightened his low spirits over the succeeding months by writing long letters to his wife, Edna. He did feel privileged to be the officer of the deck as the American cruiser steamed through the Straits of Gibraltar, and on coming off watch, he pounded the ship’s piano a bit as the ship left the famous Rock on its port side and steamed east.8
In contrast, naval officers Julian Wheeler and Glen Howell had been living it up as the passenger liner they were riding docked at Constantinople. The two were coming from naval duty in the Philippines and had traveled via the Indian Ocean and Suez Canal. From Port Said their vessel docked briefly at Athens and Smyrna before steaming up the ancient Hellespont. With their uniforms packed at the bottom of their trunks, the two were posing as rich world travelers and having great fun with the girls they met along the way.
Both officers were heading home. Wheeler intended but a brief visit to Constantinople, but upon making a courtesy call on the admiral, Wheeler was persuaded to take a six-month stint on the admiral’s staff. He ended up staying three years.9
Not every traveler reached his destination. At the armistice, Constantine Brown was working in Europe as a journalist for an American paper and could not quickly maneuver his way up the long waiting lists for passage home. Offered a four-month newspaper assignment to Turkey and the Balkans, he got a place on the old French steamer Chaonia. He boarded it in Marseilles along with several hundred other passengers, most of them Catholic priests or nuns returning to their war-interrupted work as teachers or missionaries in Syria and Lebanon. Brown shared his cabin with a just-retired British colonel who was on his way to represent a London syndicate in the Levant. Though it was winter, the weather was calm as the ship entered the Straits of Messina. The two men began flirting with a young Romanian woman, suggesting they could show her the sights in Athens if she could ditch her husband for a few hours.
Suddenly there was a loud report, which frightened everybody except the colonel. He announced that the ship had just hit a mine, and he calmly helped Brown into a life jacket before heading below to get a whiskey flask. “It will be a good half hour before this old tub goes down,” he predicted. Before the colonel could return, though, the ship had begun to founder, the Romanian woman had jumped screaming over the stern, and Brown found himself stepping into the sea. The young journalist frantically swam from the suction of the ship, looked fearfully for sharks, worried about the well-being of his wife and baby, and thought conscientiously of his tailor in London, for he had not yet paid for the suit he was wearing, nor for two other suits in his luggage. Then he blacked out. He came to among several inert forms on the deck of a British collier, one of them the headless corpse of the Romanian woman, apparently decapitated by the ship’s screw. Brown and eighteen others were all the passengers (of five hundred or so) who had been rescued alive, although the ship’s captain and crew had saved themselves by abandoning the passengers, jumping into lifeboats, and rowing away.
Once they reached port, through the intercession of an Italian admiral, Brown got passage on the royal Italian yacht Trinacria, sailing from Taranto. It reached Constantinople without further incident. Brown would be a strong supporter of Admiral Bristol over the next several years.10
Almost all the Americans received their first impression of Constantinople in the “famous approach from the sea.”11 As writer George Young romantically pointed out, the typical liner route from Athens northeast between various Greek islands into and through the Homeric Dardanelles, and then across the Sea of Marmara, was “the high road to the Golden City. Along this road you approach her, as an Empress of the East should be approached, by the front gate and step by step through each successive court until you come to where she sits enthroned.”12
The Dardanelles, or Hellespont, was renowned both from ancient legend and from very recent history, as almost all travelers remarked on it in letters home. When approaching Cape Helles from the south, to starboard was the low-lying Troad. Fewer than fifty years before, archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann had excavated many layers of Troy’s citadel, which lay just three miles from the coast, and he had publicized his excavations and theories in several books. Of course, even from their schoolwork, children and sailors in those days knew the Trojan story. The supposed tombs of Achilles and Ajax were pointed out to Near East Relief recruit Stanley Kerr as his steamer ran by.13 And the famed river once known as Scamander (flowing down from the storied slopes of Mount Ida) could be seen entering the Dardanelles from within the strait itself, even if it did remind naval officer Robbie Dunn of a salmon stream rather than a site of heroic contest (or so he would write, tongue in cheek).14
Map 1. The Dardanelles, or Hellespont
On the port side as vessels entered the Dardanelles lay the Gallipoli Peninsula, in 1915 the site of a disastrous Allied campaign that had provided the burial grounds for thousands of Allied and Turkish troops and the proving ground for a certain Turkish infantry colonel who began, just after World War I, to begin a revolution that would ultimately result in a new Turkish state. But to enter the strait a vessel first had to find it. Junior officer Olsen was chagrined that his cruiser’s captain mistook the unlighted entrance just before dark and St. Louis almost went aground. Even at daybreak, the navigation watch mistook two sets of wrecks as marking the two sides of the channel, and St. Louis almost found itself on the beach once again.15
Vessels had other worries, too—those pesky mines, again. During the war, the Turks had laid vast sets of minefields across the throat of the strait (with devastating effect on several Allied ships), and for a time after the war a small British vessel was stationed to warn approaching ships of continuing danger. The captain of the Italian tramp steamer in which journalist Alexander Powell was traveling tried to reassure the writer by showing him the charts. All sorts of little red arrows pointed the way between the minefields’ diagonal shadings, but to Powell those channels seemed “as narrow and devious as a forest trail.” To Powell’s distress, even though the captain had never navigated the strait before, he refused to take on an expensive pilot. The journalist translated for the Italian captain a British officer’s angry insistence that Padova lay up till the morning. As the anchor rumbled down off Cape Helles, the relieved Powell noticed what seemed to be a patch of driven snow up on the hillside. Looking through glasses, he saw instead a field “planted thickly with small white wooden crosses, standing row on row.” He recalled that it was here, at the foot of these steep bluffs, that Allied troops had landed and soaked the land with blood.
The next morning Padova crept warily through the minefield.16 In their letters and journals, many Americans mentioned the “thrills” of seeing the shores of Gallipoli and nearby waters, which included the visible remains of many sunken wrecks, “the bleak masts and spars protruding from the water at grotesque angles.”17 After passing Cape Helles on the cruiser Pittsburgh, Ens. Dan Gallery would comment in his diary, “Saw the English hulks sunk in 1915 and the place where the landing party was mowed down. When you look at the place just passing casually as we were it seems like nothing but sheer folly to have tried to force a place like that.” The whole Allied campaign had been “magnificent but futile,” naval officer Dolly Fitzgerald would later reflect; he had first steamed by Gallipoli on the destroyer McCormick in 1922.18
Within the famous strait, the landscape was also impressive. As George Young remarked, “The great water-gate of the Dardanelles and the towering heights of Gallipoli put even a Transatlantic liner in its place.”19 At the narrows opposite Chanak, travelers could gaze up on the left at Kalid Bahr, the strategic heights the Allies had held only briefly. All along the strait, Lieutenant Olsen noted gun emplacements.20 Not only wrecked forts from 1915, shell holes and Turkish trenches,21 but even ruins from earlier days were visible, including piles of stone cannon balls.22 At Chanak itself, the slopes were white with British tents, because, while the Gallipoli campaign had been unsuccessful, the Allies had eventually won the war, and in 1918 the British had occupied strategic points throughout Turkey.23
From the Dardanelles, one sailed further east through the very blue Sea of Marmara, about half the size of Lake Erie. Travel through this body of water was usually uneventful, but not for writer Charles Woods. He took passage to Constantinople from Mudania, the port of Brusa on the sea’s southeast shore. A storm that forced his vessel to shelter in a small bay compelled Woods to spend sixty hours among a hundred “sprawling, screaming, sea-sick people, who behaved as if their last hour had come.” They were also a very dirty and smelly lot, Woods discovered unhappily. The storm eventually subsided, and Woods was among the hungry and thirsty passengers very glad to feel their ship get under way again.24
Soon that vessel steamed by a small group of islands on the starboard side, among them one named Prinkipo (Princes Island), now a resort for the city, but once famous as a place of exile for Byzantine princes. Before long it would be a place of exile again, as Russian revolutionist Leon Trotsky took asylum there in the early 1930s.
Near Prinkipo and also sometimes visible from the decks of vessels as they neared Constantinople was the tiny island of Oxia, a frequent source of traveler conversation. Some years before the war, the Young Turk government in Constantinople had dealt with a messy civic problem in a curious way. Great packs of scavenger dogs were notorious in Constantinople; indeed, they had plagued the city since the sixteenth century.25 In 1910 the Young Turks determined to deal with them. However, as the rulers interpreted their Muslim religion, they could not directly harm the animals. So the government transported the dogs in barges to Oxia and other barren rocks and offloaded them there. The dogs first set up terrible howls, which were heard for days in Constantinople fifteen miles away. Then they fiercely turned on each other; eventually the survivors starved to death.26 Ensign Gallery and his mates (and no doubt many others) discussed the propriety of this Turkish action while en route to Turkey, for it had been widely reported.27
As a ship approached Constantinople, passengers and seamen alike anticipated their first views of the city by rising early and thronging the decks. What first caught most travelers’ eyes were the minarets, those slender pillars “set about everywhere like the little ivory men on a cribbage board,” as novelist and journalist John Dos Passos described them in 1921.28 The best Constantinople guidebook waxed romantic about these same architectural features: “When on a clear summer night the sun sinks into the sea of Marmora . . . then the minarets of [this] city of a thousand towers look like so many immense purple needles directing human thoughts and wishes, human longings and endeavours, to the Throne of God.”29
On his visit to the city upon the Smyrna and Chanak crises in late 1922, journalist Ernest Hemingway was considerably less impressed, regarding the minarets as “dirty, white candles sticking up,”30 but being both physically sick and assigned to report on some of the sicker sides of human nature, Hemingway wasn’t thrilled by any aspect of the city. More typical was tourist Frank Carpenter’s description of “hundreds of minarets cutting the sky and standing out like so many white pins on a huge cushion of green.”31 Lt. Julian Wheeler had a unique first view of Constantinople in which these slender towers figured prominently. His Italian steamer had anchored right off the suburb of Scutari near the little island called the Maiden’s Tower, or Leander’s Tower, during the night. When he looked out the porthole at first light, “Nothing was visible except the tops of the minarets of the hundreds of mosques which dot the area, as the surface of the city, the Bosporus, and the Golden Horn were covered with a thick blanket of fog.”32
Most travelers regarded the whole view as one of “unique magnificence,”33 as one description put it. According to another, this confluence of the Sea of Marmara with the Bosporus was a “meeting-place the picturesqueness of which is unsurpassed throughout the world.” In an oral history about his naval career, retired admiral Dolly Fitzgerald was to term the vista “Fairyland.”34 As a ship churned nearer and turned up into the Bosporus Strait, the great skyline unfolded before one’s eyes. To the left lay the ancient city of Stamboul, with its huge Roman walls near the water and its great religious buildings on the hills up above. First came the Sultan Ahmed mosque, with its six minarets; then followed the wonderful Byzantine church originally named Sancta Sophia, or Hagia Sophia, the Church of Holy Wisdom, “her great dome gleaming in the sunlight.”35 (Now it was also a mosque.) Closer down were Topkapi Palace (the historic palace of the Ottomans) and then Seraglio Point. with its “black pins of cypresses.”36 Just beyond Stamboul and to the left as one came abeam the Maiden’s Tower was the famous harbor called the Golden Horn, with its thick forest of masts.37 This narrow harbor was spanned by the fascinating Galata Bridge, a movable structure made entirely of boats, which was usually thronged by a colorful crowd of pedestrians and a variety of vehicles.
Directly ahead as one’s ship continued up the strait beyond the Golden Horn lay Dolmabagtche Palace, a huge rectangular edifice standing right at the water’s edge. This palace was variously described by American naval visitors as a “dazzling white” palace or as a “wedding cake gone moldy.”38 The European suburbs of Galata and Pera rose up to the left and behind this extensive building, and American destroyers usually anchored to the buoys just in front of it. Dolmabagtche Landing, the main landing for those U.S. naval vessels, lay at the palace’s southwestern tip.
On taking over as the American port officer in the city, Lt. Cdr. Webb Trammell’s first duty was to respond to a unique request. The sultan’s wives who lived in this palace complained that the USS Trinity was moored so close as to allow its crew to peer into the sultan’s harem, which meant the sultan’s wives could not look out of the palace windows. Trammell ordered the offending ship to shift to a buoy further off.39 Earlier, just after the Great War, the new sultan had been so offended by all the Allied warships, especially a Greek naval vessel that impudently moored right outboard this great palace,40 that, leaving those wives behind, he moved permanently to Yildiz Kiosk, a smaller palace up the hill.
From Dolmabagtche, the Bosporus Strait trended away toward the northeast, its hillsides studded with kiosks and castles and a few modern buildings. High on the left some four or five miles up the strait were those two American college campuses (Constantinople Women’s College first, and then a bit further north, the more prestigious, older, and larger Robert College for men), institutions unique both in their character and in their stunning hillside settings. Robert College’s modern buildings were situated just next to and above the medieval Turkish castle Rumeli Hissar, the ramparts of which were climbed by many a naval officer among other college visitors.
On the other side of the strait, to the starboard or generally east throughout a ship’s transit upstream, the sun (or “Extraordinarily swollen moons red as wardrums”) rose out of Asia, behind the Asiatic section of the city known as Scutari.41 A major feature of the latter suburb, quite imposing from the water, was the huge Selimieh Barracks. This barracks, which lay right at the entrance to the Bosporus, had been made famous by celebrated English nurse Florence Nightingale as a hospital for British and French soldiers during the Crimean War.
In 1920 journalist Powell remarked that even though he had seen it many times and in better days, he was still very much moved by the whole scene. In 1922, Ensign Gallery was similarly affected. Having come on deck just as his cruiser was passing St. Sophia and seeing in turn “The mosques, built in some cases by the Roman emperors, the walls, the Golden Horn, and the Bosphorus,” he confessed he simply “stood there almost with my mouth open looking at the famous city.”42
Nevertheless, there were major flaws with this idyllic portrait. Although merchantmen of every description could be seen throughout the panorama and some were quite picturesque, from 1919 to 1923 an armada of Allied warships interrupted the view. When Fireman Berthelsen arrived in 1920 aboard his destroyer, for instance, he identified the French battleships Provence and Lorraine along with the British battleships Revenge, Royal Oak, Royal Sovereign, Resolution, and another dreadnought, the name of which he could not make out. Accompanying these huge vessels were all manner of cruisers and destroyers and gunboats, some of them American, Italian, and even Greek, though most of them British and French ships.43 (No wonder the sultan had moved up the hill.)
To add to the darker tones of the picture, visible on hillsides above the harbor were scars from hundreds of acres of fires that in recent years had incinerated as much as a fourth of the city.44 Within one week in the summer of 1918, for example, two great fires had destroyed over 20,000 houses. With “vast areas of tinder-box houses built one against another” and an absurdly inefficient Turkish fire control system, such conflagrations were still occurring.45 Beyond that, much of the city could seem very dirty even seen from a distance, for most buildings were unpainted and weather stained.46 As for the odors, reeking as they did from a city with little acquaintance with modern sanitation and detectable on an approaching ship’s decks (as Berthelsen pointed out),47 they were unwelcome in the extreme.
Hence, opposed to the wide admiration of the mosques and minarets was an equally striking unanimity of a different nature. As the 1922 National Geographic noted, while admiring the approaching skyline, a liner traveler “becomes suddenly disenchanted, as if a once beautiful woman had dropped her veil and revealed the ravages of time.”48 A 1921 issue of Travel asserted that “one never can forget the magnificence of its distant view, nor . . . the sordid terribleness of a nearer inspection.”49 Few writers went so far as to “execrate” the city, as had Mark Twain half a century earlier, but most agreed with Twain about the terrible contrast between the “noble picture” they had seen from a mile away and the literal monstrosities they found underfoot. As a wide-traveled British journalist averred, of all the world’s great cities, this was “the most beautiful in the mass and the most squalid in detail.”50
The ugliness was multifaceted. To mention just one example, although Peking was renowned for its raucousness, the Chinese metropolis was said to be a “deaf-and-dumb asylum” alongside Constantinople.51 Rather than any romantic sensation, it was primarily this frightful clamor that afflicted Americans who journeyed to Constantinople by train. In contrast to the magnificent sea approach, a visitor’s approach by rail to Sirkedji station in Stamboul was “about the most ghastly experience possible,” according to a contemporary guidebook.52 Most Americans who traveled by the “Simplon Orient Express,” the expensive trans-European train already made famous by the novels of British writer E. Phillips Oppenheim (Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express didn’t come out until 1934) suffered this experience.
For instance, writer Constantine Brown had gone home after a few weeks in Constantinople in 1919, but he returned on the Orient Express in 1920, having been hired by the Chicago Daily News to replace another reporter who had run afoul of Admiral Bristol. At the station he and his wife, Ethel, were greeted by “a mob of native ruffians, who at once began screaming and fighting over our luggage while the Turkish police looked on impassively.” A dragoman from the Pera Palace Hotel strode into the mob and began to lay about him with a heavy metal-tipped walking stick in order to rescue the pair. He told them they had been waylaid by “hamals,” or members of the city’s ancient guild of porters, fighting for business. Most other startled train travelers met the same assault.53
Although the train approach to Constantinople was unimpressive, up to this point most passengers had been relatively comfortable. To be sure, on the four-day trip from Paris, you had to pay for your meal in a great variety of currencies, and sometimes your trip was interrupted by customs agents searching for interlopers, or by some national upheaval. Cdr. Harry Pence’s train from Marseilles was delayed for six hours when it ran over three Bulgarians sleeping on the track.54 Other travelers complained that their “wagon lits” (sleeping cars) were “already inhabited” with bedbugs, or that their cars had boards nailed up in place of windows.55 But this was not the common experience, especially as the deprivations of the Great War receded. Although Capt. Bill Leahy (on his way in late May of 1921 to take command of the cruiser St. Louis, then stationed at Constantinople) regarded the train as slow and “lacking in creature comforts” by American standards,56 in general travelers reported satisfaction, and even found deep interest in the journey.
Allen and Clover Dulles had just gotten married before sailing to Europe on the liner Olympic in late 1920; they visited with diplomatic officials in the capitals of Western Europe before entraining for Constantinople (Allen was taking a diplomatic post under Admiral Bristol). Allen wrote his mother that he and Clover had spent five very leisurely days on the train, which “ambled” through Switzerland and northern Italy and then “crawled” through Serbia and Bulgaria before arriving at its destination.57 Supplied with books and a private compartment beautifully upholstered in deep blue brocade, they enjoyed watching the varied people and the interesting countryside, even if they did have to peer through unwashed windows. The meals were usually good, although Clover mentioned in her letters having to drown with wine the “illusive slavic flavor” she detected in the food once the French diner had been left behind.58 Since Allen was taking that diplomatic position, the two were met at Sirkedji station with a Cadillac at two in the morning driven by the American foreign secretary F. L. Belin, who knew how to avoid the onslaught of Turkish porters.59
So that Allen could confer with embassy officials, the Dulleses had spent about a week each in London, Berlin, and Paris before boarding. A year and a half later, Lt. Cdr. Thomas Kinkaid and his wife, Helen, also saw a bit of Europe on their way to Turkey, where Kinkaid was to be Admiral Bristol’s assistant chief of staff. After a ten-day Atlantic crossing on an army transport, they got a quick tour of Antwerp and then took a train to Paris for ten days of leave. In the French capital, “their dollars went a long way. During their stay they took sightseeing trips; visited Navy and civilian friends; took in the Follies Bergere; ate in the best restaurants; visited the Louvre, the Pantheon de la Guerre, and the races at Auteil; and had tea daily with new or old friends, often at the Hotel Ritz.” Finally, they boarded the Orient Express for Constantinople and had a quick trip of three days.60
We will have occasion as we go to describe a bit more of the perennial sweat and clamor of Constantinople’s streets, the stinking beggars and vendors who assaulted every visitor, the hopeless refugees in the gutters, and of course all the bars and prostitutes and drunks, for there was a great deal to offend the eyes and turn one’s stomach. However, to many Americans (including many Navy people), much more important offenses were the enormous assaults upon the human spirit, those almost unimaginably infamous assaults that, under the cover of war, had been inflicted on tens of thousands of helpless human beings. The latter offenses included the attacks, massacres, and death marches since become known to history as the “Armenian Genocide” that had taken place in Turkey during the Great War (though there had been similar events before the war, and, as we will see, American destroyer captains would report the recurrence of such activities on a large scale during the first years of the postwar period). In addition to these terrible events in Turkey, huge continuing armed conflicts and follow-on humanitarian crises in Russia that had begun with the Russian Revolution would also impose themselves upon the collective American conscience, and on America’s pocketbook.
Accordingly, before we can consider in detail the special parts that the American Navy was to play in this area right after the war, we must consider in detail what had happened to draw so much American interest, money, and personal dedication to so remote and unfamiliar a region. We’ll do that in the second chapter, and, necessarily, we must discuss those events at some length because of their complexity and also because of continuing modern controversies surrounding them. However, before turning to that historical survey, let’s conclude our account of the typical postwar arrival of American naval personnel to this ancient city by recounting briefly the advent of senior naval captain Pratt Mannix.
Hearing of troubles in the Near East and seeing the opportunity for an interesting assignment, Mannix got the Navy’s Bureau of Personnel to agree to give him command of the large destroyer tender Denebola.61 In late 1922 this vessel would be sent to Turkey to help support the twelve American destroyers that were being sent to Admiral Bristol to join the eight destroyers already serving in Turkish waters. Denebola raised the Azores on November 12, and once those islands dropped astern, the large repair ship rounded the southern end of Portugal, entered the Mediterranean, and stopped briefly at Gibraltar. The next morning Denebola sailed for Constantinople, a trip of a little over a week, given this ship’s relatively slow cruising speed of ten knots.
Mannix had been told that a British navy tanker had been fired on by a French battery two weeks before as that tanker was passing through the Dardanelles at night (the French had thought the tanker was a Turkish ship), and so he determined to enter the famous strait in full daylight and to have Denebola fly its large American battle flag. While en route he had also heard a rumor that the Turks had captured the strait and were forbidding all foreign passage. This moved the captain to make small arms ready topside (the ship’s only weapons), and to order that fire hoses be charged with maximum pressure from the fire main and be laid out near all the gangways so as to help the crew oppose any party that might attempt to board.
As Denebola entered the strait itself, Mannix noticed all those wrecks of ships from the Gallipoli campaign and, further on, saw some ruins up on the hillside. “Among them, perched on top of a hill, was the fort of an old Turkish corsair. From this vantage point the pirate could see approaching ships a long distance away and decide which ones he wanted to plunder. It was hard to believe that here in the twentieth century we were making preparations to repel boarders much as other vessels had done since time out of mind.”62 The American ship suffered neither signal challenges nor any other martial interference as it proceeded. Shortly, though, just as Denebola was approaching the narrowest part of the strait at Chanak, where several British battleships, cruisers, and merchant ships were anchored, a gale blew up and it started to snow. Complicating matters further, after the ship left the Hellespont and entered the Sea of Marmara, evening approached, and with the darkness and the bad weather, navigation became very uncertain.
Neither Mannix nor his navigator had ever been to Turkey. Moreover, for some reason, few of the charted lights that the navigation team looked for were burning, so the best specific course to take from the Sea of Marmara into the Bosporus (and thereby into the port of Constantinople itself) became a matter of debate on the ship’s bridge. As Denebola neared the glowing city, the ship’s navigator identified three dark blotches looming right ahead as three anchored ships, and he also cited the twenty-fathom sounding that the navigation team had just taken as evidence that the ship was well within the channel. He advised that Denebola continue right on, following a course close by those three anchored ships. The ship’s captain demurred, however, and ordered that they lay up till morning. Sure enough, “When the sun rose, we found that we were cozily nestling against three rocky little islands,” Mannix would comment later.
What Mannix said to the navigator that morning is not recorded. But the captain saw to it that those rocks were given a wide berth as he ordered the ship under way to enter the Bosporus.63
Upon rounding Stamboul and turning into the latter great strait, Denebola would exchange bugle salutes with four British battleships, two French cruisers, a Spanish cruiser, several Italian warships, and a flotilla of British destroyers. (All of them were apparently moored just within the Bosporus, right off the city.) Then it sighted five American destroyers moored at a buoy. Upon identifying the destroyer tender, the American naval vessels started signaling about expected spare parts, and so on—and Denebola’s year of naval service in Constantinople had begun.
However, before getting even that far, Mannix himself (like so many before him) found himself gazing with admiration at the fabulous display. The weather had cleared up, and so they were entering the strait with the city’s “mass of towers, mosques, and minarets brilliantly colored and all sparkling in the sun.” This was like something out of a dream, Mannix found himself thinking, or rather like an image out of the Arabian Nights. Although the captain had traveled the world in his nearly three decades of naval service, he considered that this city was like nothing in Europe, or America, or anywhere else he had been.
Indeed, Captain Mannix concluded that the city of Constantinople was the most beautiful sight he had ever seen.64
