America’s Black Sea Fleet

America, as it happens, had held more than a passing interest in Turkey since the early nineteenth century. By the time the Navy and diplomatic people began to arrive in 1919, Americans had become passionately concerned with what was going on in these strange regions halfway around the world.

To explain this, and to provide context for understanding the naval and the diplomatic situation (Adm. Mark Bristol being both America’s naval and diplomatic head in these large regions for the four years right after World War I), we must describe the historical background at some length—perhaps unusual length, for a naval history. Partly this is so simply because that background is very complex, and partly it results from the fact that aspects of it (including whether there actually was an Armenian genocide at all, for instance) remain very much contested issues even to this day. An ability to understand Admiral Bristol’s point of view, those of his ship captains, and those of native Turks of several ethnicities and differing politics with which American officials (including destroyer captains) regularly had to deal requires an in-depth understanding of the historical situation.

In the 1830s Commo. David Porter would be appointed the first American diplomatic representative to the “Sublime Porte” (the name traditionally used for the Ottoman empire’s foreign ministry, located in Stamboul). Porter would stay on until his death in 1843, and so deeply interested would he become in the place that he would eventually publish a two-volume collection of letters describing Constantinople and the surrounding territory.² Later yet, in the late 1860s, Adm. David Farragut visited the city with America’s European Squadron. Cyrus Hamlin, the founder of America’s locally famous Robert College, would give Farragut credit for interceding with the Turkish government to allow Robert College to be built.³

Originally, the Americans had hoped to convert Muslims and Jews throughout the region. However, when they discovered that it was a capital offence to convert a Muslim (or sometimes to be converted from Islam), they decided to focus their evangelizing on the Armenian citizens of the Ottoman Empire. Most of the Armenians were already Christian—they were Armenian Orthodox—but the American Protestants typically did not think much of that faith. The American missionaries considered that since the Armenians were locals, once the Armenians saw the light of protestant Christianity, they might more easily convert the Turks.⁷

That was a very unlikely prospect, however. In the 1894–96 period, partly to make sure the native Christians knew their place (as subordinate both to Islam and to the Ottoman government), Sultan Abdul Hamid II ordered the massacres of tens of thousands of Armenians in Turkey. Many American missionaries went through great ordeals alongside their flocks, and afterward, at the risk of their lives, helped to provide relief to the massacre survivors. Of course, the Americans also wrote home about their experiences, and their accounts were read by churchgoers and got into the American press.

For a couple of years after the overthrow of the sultan, the Turkish Christian minorities in Constantinople had breathed the air of freedom, establishing clubs, joining unions, exploring their ethnic literatures, and embracing their novel right to send members to a Turkish parliament. There were warning signs, however. Some 15,000 to 20,000 Armenians (including two American missionaries and twenty evangelical Armenian pastors) were massacred at Adana in 1909.⁹ Most ominously for the Turkish minorities, and actually for the ethnic Turkish majority, too, at the outbreak of the Great War in 1914, the Young Turk leaders were drawn by various unfortunate events and by their imperialist, pan-Turkish ambitions to align Turkey on the side of the Germans and against the Russians.¹⁰

Two great events in Turkey succeeded early in World War I that became widely known in the Western world. One of them, already mentioned, was the defeat of a large Allied force by the Turkish army at Gallipoli in 1915 under the leadership of the German general Liman von Sanders. A Turkish colonel also played a vital part in the Gallipoli defense: indeed, Mustapha Kemal became the Turkish hero of the war.¹¹

Although this great Turkish victory effectively denied the Allies use of the Dardanelles, unfortunately for Turkey, the wartime leadership at the very top of the government (that is, in contrast to the leadership of the military colonel Kemal) was neither effective nor heroic. Among other things, the Young Turk government and its military establishment allowed an estimated one and one-half to three million ethnic Turks to die of nonmilitary casualties during the war, mainly of diseases and malnutrition.¹² Moreover, in 1915 the Turkish leaders initiated another campaign against that same, allegedly seditious Turkish minority population that American missionaries had long befriended—the Armenians.

Despite their subject status, since the Armenians and the ethnic Greeks living in Turkey were generally more industrious and commercially adept than the Turks (particularly outside of Constantinople, many ethnic Turks were notoriously indolent), the minorities even could be said to have prospered up to a point. This particularly was so in the nineteenth century, when the Armenian millet, in particular (and ethnic Greeks in Turkey, too, although that’s a somewhat different story), participated in a general cultural renaissance. This period saw the establishment of hundreds of schools, a flowering of Armenian literature, an enhanced success at commerce, and a new political assertiveness.¹⁶ Through the formation of three Armenian nationalist parties, some Armenians began to think about fighting back against oppression and to seek some degree of political autonomy.

From various sources, Europeans and Americans would learn a great deal about what happened next.¹⁹ For one thing, in 1916 a long-time proponent of the Armenians, Britain’s James Bryce, published, with the help of his young assistant (and later famous historian) Arnold Toynbee, a 684-page compilation of witness testimony called The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, 1915–16.²⁰ Excerpts from the Bryce report would fill three pages of the New York Times on October 8, 1916, and before long the book itself would not only find its way into the hands of the U.S. president, but to the desk of every American congressman.²¹ This tome indicated that, beginning in 1915, on orders from Constantinople, a campaign against the whole Armenian people had begun. First, in cities throughout Turkey, Armenian men were disarmed, imprisoned, and then killed. Afterward, the remaining older men and virtually all the Armenian women and children were sent to the east and south, the latter treks euphemistically termed “deportations to the interior,” but actually death marches through mountains and plains toward southern deserts.

Rather than the Bryce report, though, or another significant documentary written by the German pastor Johannes Lepsius,²³ probably the primary source for ordinary Americans’ understanding of what had gone on in Turkey was a book by Henry Morgenthau, who had been the American ambassador in Turkey from late 1913 to early 1916. In five chapters of a memoir about his experience in Turkey, the ambassador described the horrible suffering encountered by the Armenians throughout the country. He also attempted to demonstrate, in detailed accounts of his interviews with Turkish leaders Enver and Talaat, that these atrocities were the product of conscious decision at the very top of the government. Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story was not only widely read at home when it was published in 1918 (it was also serialized in the magazine The World’s Work and in several newspapers), but it also was often read on the boat by Americans on their way to Constantinople, including some naval officers.²⁴

Not too long ago, a scholar noted significant differences between the diaries Morgenthau wrote while he was ambassador and the portrait found in Morgenthau’s memoir. From these discrepancies and other circumstances, Heath Lowry charged that many details of those conversations with Turkish leaders were invented out of thin air and that Morgenthau’s book is mostly wartime propaganda.²⁵ Although one might argue that not every detail one recalls with accuracy will necessarily be recorded in a diary,²⁶ a careful weighing of Lowry’s challenge to the authenticity of Morgenthau’s account indicates there probably was some exaggeration in the ambassador’s book.

However, quotations from Morgenthau’s own wartime diary (on which Lowry depends heavily) indicate that the ambassador was enormously concerned about the Armenians and met with Talaat about those wretched people again and again. It also shows that both Talaat and Enver did admit to Morgenthau (as Enver also reportedly admitted to Johannes Lepsius) that they had already “disposed of three-fourths” of the Armenians, and that they intended to complete the job.27 Lowry argues that as late as September of 1915, the ambassador had not firmly concluded the Young Turk leadership was out to exterminate the Armenians. However, one can judge the date and degree of Morgenthau’s concern from the ambassador’s own cables to the State Department. Take this one, for example, from June of that same year:

Where was Morgenthau getting his information? Of the ambassador’s many sources, especially devastating were accounts from American consuls or consular agents throughout Turkey.

As just one example among dozens, consular agent W. Peter at the Turkish Black Sea port city of Samsun reported in August of 1915 that great numbers of Armenians had been sent inland from that Black Sea port city. Of these, most of the men had been murdered somewhere beyond Amasia, while many women and children had been taken to Malatia and ultimately thrown into the Euphrates. Forced conversion of Christian minorities to Islam (regularly attempted) did not always save the Armenians from deportation, the official reported, nor did lack of transportation. Specifically, Consular Agent Peter regarded the situation of women and children who had been put into carts and sent to a probable death from hunger, thirst, and despair as a “horrible slaughter” reminiscent of the time the dogs of Constantinople had been gathered up and sent off to die on that island in the Sea of Marmara.²⁹

Such reports came not only from Peter in Samsun and Consul Oscar Heizer in Trebizond but also from consuls at Aleppo, Mersina, and Beirut in the south and from American officials at interior cities. Some officials who could not get material to the embassy in Constantinople at the time and who were later forced to destroy their records when America entered the war would eventually write summary reports of their experiences. A treatise of the latter kind was written by Leslie Davis, who had been the American consul in the city of Harput, deep in the interior of Anatolia. In this document, he reported that in 1915 thousands of Armenians had been herded through his city. Such mass deportations, with associated starvation, abuse, robbery, and rape, had resulted in widespread emaciation, disease, nakedness, brutalization, and much death.

Although Morgenthau could not have seen this particular document (it was written long after the ambassador left Turkey), the reports he did see were just as damning. He was not just reading, of course, but also listening, to American, Canadian, and even German missionaries, for example, who would sit in his office in Constantinople with tears streaming down their faces as they recollected the horrors through which they had passed.³¹ From all he heard and read, the ambassador decided that the world was seeing something unique.

So, at the same time he and others were attempting, unsuccessfully, to get the Turkish leaders to change their policies, in September of 1915 Morgenthau cabled Secretary of State Robert Lansing to request that his friend, philanthropist Cleveland H. Dodge, and others begin to raise funds to help relieve the great suffering. On its organizational meeting, Dodge’s committee received pledges of $50,000. By the time America entered the war in 1917, they had raised over $2 million. This same group, incorporated shortly after the war ended as an official government agency and eventually titled the “Near East Relief” (the name we’ll know it by here), would raise more than a hundred million dollars over the next fifteen years.³²

Such astonishingly successful fund-raising was made possible by a huge publicity campaign throughout America. It was, in fact, as a modern scholar has pointed out, “a twentieth century public awareness bureaucracy.”³³ Everybody helped, from the organizers of the Harvard-Yale football game of 1916, who sent the game’s proceeds to the relief committee, down to thousands of ordinary citizens, these helped along by influential groups like the Rockefeller Foundation and the American Red Cross.34

To aid in publicity, not only did the State Department open its files to the relief committee (which thus could make use of all those consular reports), but sometimes the State Department also sent information to the relief and missionary leadership by cable. Hence the relief committee could get material in prominent American newspapers within days. On their part, American newspapers often donated space.³⁵

Consequently, before long not only ordinary book-reading adults but virtually every God-fearing schoolchild in the United States knew of the Armenians’ woeful circumstances. Children heard sermons on the Armenians’ plight, they were urged by their parents to eat their suppers because the “starving Armenians” could not, they stared at photographs and watched heartrending films in schools and churches (even in movie theaters) they acted out the Armenians’ prostration under the “Terrible Turk” in school and church dramas, and they and their parents contributed their pennies for help.

This great relief campaign, amounting almost to a “national crusade,”³⁶ naturally led to a somewhat simplistic view of the situation, especially as it pertained to the far eastern provinces of Turkey. Those areas had long a seen a rising Armenian ethnic consciousness, successive massacres of Armenians, the flight of many Armenians to Russia, Armenians volunteering for duty in Russian armies, and military campaigns between Russia and Turkey surging back and forth, which were accompanied by atrocities on both sides. The PR plot being good versus evil, underdog versus oppressor, and innocent Christian saints versus barbaric Muslim villains,³⁷ American investigators would be surprised when they encountered greed and vice among the victims, as they very frequently did. Surprise grew to bewilderment when Americans found that where Armenians had gained power, they had sometimes been guilty of retaliatory massacres and scorched-earth policies equal in ferocity to that of their oppressors.³⁸

Yet even if the portrait was simplistic in some respects and propagandistic in others, the great need was obvious.³⁹ The American outpouring was correspondingly great. Because of Morgenthau’s foresight and the immediate response of influential American citizens, upon the war’s end the Near East Relief was poised to help.

Another group traveling to and beyond Turkey was the King-Crane Commission. It was headed by the president of Oberlin College, Henry King, along with a wealthy industrialist named Charles Crane, and was charged with investigating some of the political problems of the Near East. In July these men would travel to parts of southern Turkey and then head further south into Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine, transported part of the way down and back by an American destroyer. Yet a third team, which was also to look into political issues, got under way a bit later. It was called the “American Military Mission to Armenia” and was headed by Maj. Gen. James Harbord. As mentioned above, Harbord had served as Pershing’s chief of staff in Europe (and commanded troops in very important battles of the Great War). He was also an amateur student of history.

Both of the latter groups were very late in being commissioned, included only Americans, and perhaps were being used by politicians as a cloak for their own delay. Indeed, these two American commissions would later be criticized famously by Winston Churchill as composing “a roving progress in search of truth through all the powder magazines of the Middle East with a notebook in one hand and a lighted cigarette in another.”⁴¹ No doubt, by inquiring as rigorously as they did into all local parties’ conditions, attitudes, and requests, the commissioners raised hopes that never could have been realized. Still, most commission members were responsible men trying to assess difficult situations.

For our purposes, it makes sense to follow General Harbord’s group most closely through the remainder of this chapter. Not only did his group travel from one end of Turkey to the other, even into that part of eastern Turkey known as Armenia, but it also was, in many ways, the most adventurous and probing of the American commissions. For example, both Harbord’s team and the King-Crane Commission used automobiles (offloaded from the train, which took them part way), but Harbord’s party, in addition, was lightly armed and thoroughly equipped for a trek across desolate and hostile country. Harbord’s men donned military uniforms rather than the business suits those of the King-Crane Commission usually wore, and they carried fuel, water, and other provisions with them. Following cart paths and sheep trails as they traveled east through half a subcontinent, they often had to haul their Fords across rivers or up mountain slopes, or build the roads ahead of them. Rather than check into tourist hotels, they camped by clear-running streams “under the full splendor of an Eastern moon,” and were occasionally disturbed by passing caravans. Twice they faced the muskets of local brigands, some of whom ran off with a couple of cars at one point, but then decided better of it. A King-Crane commissioner delighted to dabble a hand in the Jordan River, but Harbord one day invited his men to swim with him in the remote, icy headwaters of the Euphrates.⁴²

Map 3. Journeys of the Major American Commissions

The two commissions, of course, interviewed many of the same people and considered some of the same problems. Among the main issues the political commissions were charged with were, first, what to do with “suffering Armenia” (in whatever way “Armenia” was to be defined geographically, a greatly vexed issue), and second, whether to recommend that America take on a “mandate” or not: that is, whether the United States should commit, for a considerable period, to govern the affairs of Armenia, or Turkey, or both. Most Americans in Turkey (including Admiral Bristol) thought America should take on a mandate of some sort, and friends of the Armenians thought the country should take on a mandate for Armenia only. One important pronouncement to the contrary was made by Robert College president, Caleb Frank Gates.

Gates made his own relief investigation into southern Turkey by train, traveling along with James Barton, head of the organization that would become known as the Near East Relief, and Gates’ son, Moore. On his return to Constantinople, Gates dismayed many friends by saying that the Armenians were asking too much. Referring to a pamphlet that included demands for an independent Armenia made up of no less than half of Asiatic Turkey, Gates argued that the Armenians not only risked not getting their own nation, but also invited further depredations, especially since there was insufficient Allied power to protect them. Instead of America taking a mandate for Armenia, he thought the country should take a mandate for all of Anatolia, Constantinople and Armenia included.43

Gates considered that to create an Armenia out of a part of Turkey and leave in existence a Turkey governed just like the one that had gone before would be catastrophic. The idea that Turks would become subject to armed Armenians, already suggested by talk of an independent Armenia and by the French bringing some Armenian legionnaires into Cilicia, was creating defiance. Gates argued further that “a malefactor who is afraid for his life, is always the most dangerous kind of criminal.” Hence, if the Armenians were to be given rule of Turks in any provinces where the Armenians were in the minority (which, especially after 1915, was virtually everywhere in Turkey), the Turks could and probably would “butcher the Armenians” yet again.⁴⁴

Gates possessed great credibility, partly because of his long experience in Turkey and his dedication to Turkish people of all ethnicities, and hence his opinion was considered seriously. King and Crane had spoken to Gates at Paris before embarking on their journey. Although Gates had left for America before Harbord’s group was organized, the general would have heard Gates’ position cited at every hand, and no doubt had read the educator’s statements as well. However, in contrast to Gates’ call for a universal mandate, at least one voice of equally great credibility cried for a sharp separation of the Armenians from the Turks. Like Walter George Smith before them,⁴⁵ both the King-Crane and Harbord commissions were most impressed by Mary Louise Graffam, the indomitable American missionary who had remained at Sivas throughout the war (deep in Turkey’s interior), who not only had witnessed 25,000 Armenians “walk over the bridge” at Sivas in deportation, but who also had accompanied her beloved students for over a hundred miles of their journey until forcibly turned back by Turkish authorities. Then she insisted on staying in Sivas despite Turkish threats on her life and the deaths of three of her companions from typhus.⁴⁶ Eventually, she earned even the local Turks’ great respect.

Graffam had earlier declared to Smith that the Turks should be allowed no political domination, or the massacres would recur.⁴⁷ She was just as frank in her comments to the King-Crane Commission, for which she briefly recounted her own experience: “I went out with a party of three thousand. After one day the men were all gathered out, shut into a stable for the night, and killed the next morning. The despair and horrors were hard to imagine. The younger boys were massacred later. Women were stripped and searched for money, practically all disappeared.” Now maybe some 10,000 or 20,000 Armenians out of an original 80,000 through the entire Sivas region had drifted back.

Graffam acknowledged some arguments on the side of keeping Turkey together, but she was most fervent that the Armenians had suffered too much at the hands of the Turks for this to be a solution. The prospect of having a nation of their own was offering the Armenians some fragile hope; without that, she feared the Armenians would lose their faith. Graffam quickly dismissed the facile arguments being put out, some of them apparently being made by the American admiral: “Admiral Bristol speaks of [the] establishment of justice. How can you have this? An Armenian comes back, his women are in one Turkish house, his rugs are in another, and the Turks hold his lands. Give them some kind of an Armenia and then say let bygones be bygones. Otherwise the Armenians will drift into brigandage and I will too. It is past human imagination to leave them together.”48

Such statements were striking. However, General Harbord preferred to test character and assertions by personal observation, and this was made possible to an extent by his mission’s penetration into the heart of eastern Turkey and Armenia. Harbord said later that many documents he had read were so lurid that “in another cause [they] might have been classed as propaganda,” but he found the witnesses unimpeachable when he met them “on the ground.”⁴⁹ The character of the American missionaries (like Graffam) he had met particularly impressed him, especially those who had endured the great Armenian trials: “Their experiences and devotion in the massacres of 1915 and those that periodically preceded them, are quite beyond any words of mine. There is nothing in my knowledge of history that quite corresponds to them.”⁵⁰

Not only the heroism of the recent past but also the daring of the present caught his eye, such as that of the young Near East Relief worker he personally noticed “up in the hills, away from every Occidental sign . . . a laconic American youth maneuvering an unwieldy truck over roads built only for camels and donkeys.” Similarly, when he came across two Smith College graduates in Malatia, miles from any foreigners, running an orphanage for seven hundred children despite not speaking Turkish, he marveled to see the young women’s confidence and unconcern.⁵¹

Of course, the general also formed his own opinions of the condition of the distraught locals he met and talked with in camps and in “rescue homes for women” (which had been set up by the British in many cities when they occupied Anatolia) and later of the actual “starving Armenians” he witnessed lying by the roadside in Armenia, too weak even to stand. Members of the King-Crane Commission had visited Armenian refugees in a camp in Aleppo—“an unpromising lot of seed corn for the future Armenian nation,” Albert Lybyer reported, “ugly, stupid, diseased, lazy, ragged and wretched—many of these qualities are not their fault—but at the best the outlook is discouraging.”⁵² Harbord, however, was able to make a comprehensive judgment as to the Armenian character and the impression it made upon others.

The general admired the achievements their history manifested: “They were translators, bankers, scholars, artisans, artists, and traders,” and he marveled at the willing martyrdom of many whom a conversion to Islam would have spared. Despite the fact that, as a race, under the Ottomans they had been “forbidden military service, taxed to poverty, their property confiscated at pleasure, and their women forced into the harems of the conqueror,” they nevertheless had preserved their religion, language, and even their racial purity. Persecution had brought cohesion rather than disintegration.53

Yet he recognized that the race did not always endear itself to others. Even American missionaries, he noted, did not personally like the industrious Armenians as much as they did the “the more genial but indolent and pleasure-loving Turk.”⁵⁴ And although most American missionaries loved the people they worked with, it is simply true that derogatory comments about the Armenians (and Greeks) can be found in many an American diary or missive. As Russian relief worker Anna Mitchell commented in a letter home, “I do think the Turks are savages, in their treatment of minority populations and perhaps as bad rulers as one can find, but one cannot help being continually impressed by what unattractive people they massacre!”⁵⁵ Harbord himself remained unsure whether the Armenians were ready for self-governance, especially since so many of the best of the race had perished.⁵⁶

Besides that, there was also blood on Armenian hands. “Where Armenians advanced and retired with the Russians, their retaliatory cruelties unquestionably rivaled the Turks in their inhumanity.”⁵⁷ Harbord had not just talked to Armenians. “Kurds appealed to this Mission with tears in their eyes to protect them from Armenians who had driven them from their villages,”⁵⁸ and the Turkish general Kiazim Karabekir pointed out to Harbord the rubble of two houses in Erzerum in which he said Armenians had burned a thousand Turks during the Russian occupation.⁵⁹

Whatever he thought of the truth of the latter claims, in Harbord’s eyes the basic fact of the horrendous Armenian massacres and deportations certainly remained unaltered. As the general put it, “Mutilation, violation, torture and death have left their haunting memories in a hundred beautiful Armenian valleys; and the traveler in that region is seldom free from the evidence of this most colossal crime of all the ages.”⁶⁰ Harbord had personally passed through some of those valleys and obviously had been moved by the terrible things he recognized must have happened, based on what he saw and heard. Yet when one was recommending policy, one had to view the entire situation as realistically as possible.

In yet one other way Harbord’s method enabled him to go deeper than the other commission’s investigators (to be fair, the King-Crane group had a larger tasking and a much smaller staff). In Constantinople, King and Crane listened to several representative Greek, Armenian, and Turkish groups, including a deputation from the Turkish Nationalists. Most of the Turks spoken with were Westernized ex-government officials, journalists, or professors.61 On his interior journey, Harbord tended to visit with the leaders themselves: Armenian politicians, Kurdish chieftains, Turkish generals. Most important, at Sivas for two and a half hours Harbord interviewed the man soon to become the most important Turkish leader of the century.

When he met Harbord on September 20, 1919, Mustapha Kemal (later, Atatürk) had more potential than actual power. Still, Harbord, as a military man, was most interested in meeting the man, in part because of the personal example Kemal had set in battle at Gallipoli by his notorious disregard of danger.⁶² Here is the gist of Harbord’s description: “Mustapha Kemal Pasha is a slight, erect, soldierly looking young man of thirty-eight, with cropped brown mustache, cold gray eyes, light brown hair brushed straight back. . . . His marshaling of his facts through the interpreter was orderly and logical. . . . His personality easily dominated his associates of the committee.”⁶³ Kemal discussed the origin of his movement, his respect for the sultan, but also his insistence on the integrity of the Ottoman empire. The possibility of an American mandate over Turkey being brought up, Kemal said the Nationalists liked the idea of a “disinterested great power, preferably America” taking a mandate. However, Harbord rightly discerned what some later historians also recognize, that Kemal had no interest in any real foreign supervision, no matter whose: “Their idea of a mandate differs from ours, however, in that they conceive it as advice and assistance from a big brother, with such slight exercise of authority as not to interfere with their interior government or their foreign relations.”⁶⁴ Harbord replied by saying no self-respecting government would take a mandate without complete authority.

Then the general raised the Armenian issue. When Kemal replied that people of other nations also had committed crimes, Harbord said pointedly that “no nation but the Turks stood accused of the murder of eight hundred thousand of its own citizens.”⁶⁵ So confronted, Kemal countered by discussing the very recent Hellenic Greek occupation of Smyrna.

Back in May 1919, when Walter George Smith and Howard Heinz had just returned to Constantinople from Armenia and before King and Crane had even set out, an event was taking place in the city of Smyrna on the Ionian Sea, Turkey’s largest Anatolian city and a major Near Eastern center of commercial activity. This action would have historic results far out of proportion to the actual events.

The Nationalist leader Mustapha Kemal. He would become known as Atatürk, or “Father of the Turks.” Thomas Kinkaid collection, The Naval History and Heritage Command

Italian troops had landed in Adalia and were advancing west and north around the Mediterranean coast of Anatolia, apparently bent on occupying areas that they had been promised during the war but had not yet been allotted by the Allies. And so the bosses in Paris, including Britain’s prime minister, David Lloyd George; France’s prime minister, Georges Clemenceau; and the U.S. president, Woodrow Wilson, decided to ask the Greeks (who were nearby with a military force, and whose premier, Eleutherios Venizelos, was quite willing) to occupy the city and adjacent region for them, thereby forestalling the Italians. When informed of the decision, British field marshal Sir Henry Wilson asked Lloyd George “if he realized that this was starting another war”—but Lloyd George brushed him off.66 Even at the last minute, the captain of the USS Arizona—which, along with major vessels from other Allied nations, had been sent to Smyrna as a show of force to help deal with the Italian-provoked crisis—asked the British general on the spot at least to allow a combined American, British, French, and Italian force to do the initial occupation before turning Smyrna over to the Greeks. However, the British admiral Somerset Calthorpe insisted on the original plans.⁶⁷

The Greeks occupied Smyrna and the surrounding regions beginning on May 15. It was a huge mistake, not only because the historic antagonism between Ottoman Turk and Hellenic Greek would make this action an enormous insult to virtually all ethnic Turks,⁶⁸ but also because the action would abet Greek designs to build a greater Greece stretching into the ethnically Greek populations in Ionia (western Anatolia). It would allow the Greeks a foot into the door of their imperial ambition, so to speak.

In the landing itself, things got out of hand, so that several dozen Turks were killed by Greeks near the docks, and things escalated from there. Capt. J. H. Dayton of the Arizona personally noted “promiscuous firing” on the part of the Greek troops, and later reported the ransacking of large quantities of paper money, gold coins, jewels, and watches by Greek soldiers and civilians alike.⁶⁹ Things got worse the further you got into the city. Scholars have since estimated that somewhere between two hundred and three hundred Turks were killed both in and right outside Smyrna, along with maybe a hundred Greeks. Many more were killed in outlying regions, some by ethnic Greek civilians, particularly in locations where Turkish oppression had been very brutal.⁷⁰ Though the Greek authorities within a couple of weeks exacted harsh punishments upon soldiers convicted of killing or of committing brutalities, news of the Greek occupation and associated bloodshed spread like wildfire throughout Turkey, being fanned by newspapers, nationalist speakers, even clerics,71 with associated huge inflation in the number of casualties.⁷²

Hence, the recent event enabled Kemal to present Harbord a ready rhetorical response to his posing of the Armenian issue. As Harbord put it, Kemal “deprecated the Armenian massacres but was inclined to balance against them the murders and other atrocities committed by the Greeks at Smyrna.”⁷³

Of course the notion that there really was any balance between the several hundred Turks who were killed in the brief chaos in and around Smyrna and the many hundreds of thousands of Armenians who had died in the wartime months of organized deportations and massacres through all of Turkey would have been ludicrous. (Nor was there a balance between the respective numbers of guilty, either, the deportations having been “a gigantic plundering scheme” as well as a method of race extinction, as Consul Jesse B. Jackson of Aleppo, Syria, had once written Morgenthau, and hence directly involving a significant segment of the population.⁷⁴) However, in his article describing this interview, rather than point out the disparity of Kemal’s rhetoric, Harbord chose instead to comment on how the occupation of Smyrna by the Greeks had awakened the Turks and made for great potential danger. As Harbord put it, the Smyrna occupation had “cheapened every Christian life in the Turkish Empire.”⁷⁵ In this, the general was unquestionably correct.

Harbord walked away from the interview recognizing some bluff in the Nationalists but also perceiving “a sincere patriotism” in its leader and certainly a power to be reckoned with. He warned specifically that Mustapha Kemal was “no cheap political adventurer.”⁷⁶ On his part, Kemal would remember General Harbord with respect. Harbord’s was the first official interview of the Nationalist leader by an American since Kemal began to make noises in Anatolia,⁷⁷ and the general could offer this valuable glimpse of a key personality precisely because he had put himself physically so deeply into Anatolia.

Once the American commissions had heard the depositions, taken all the statements, and finished their interviews, they drafted their reports. In the end, though the specifics and reasonings differed (King-Crane endorsed a separate Armenia), both of these political commissions recommended that America take a mandate. However, Harbord’s way of listing fourteen reasons for a mandate versus thirteen against—the thirteenth negative point being an estimate of the anticipated monetary cost, some $756 million over five years, hardly small change⁷⁸—confused many readers as to what Harbord was actually recommending.⁷⁹ From one point of view it doesn’t matter much, as both reports were shelved (partly because of President Wilson’s sudden illness), and Harbord’s was brought out again only when there was little chance of the mandate’s passing.

However, particularly in view of twenty-first-century adventures of America into the Middle East, it is important to know what Harbord was actually about. Reading his conclusion carefully and his articles as well, there’s no question Harbord was recommending a mandate, but the general also wanted to make sure the American people knew the costs, including the moral ones. He pointed out that there was one great “faith” in the Near East, which only someone who had been there could fully appreciate. The faith “held alike by Christian and Moslem, by Jew and Gentile, by prince and peasant in the Near East” was faith in and respect for the United States.80

It was true. In contrast to the “ugly American” image so widespread half a century later (which dogs America even to this day, especially in the Middle East), almost every visitor from the States after World War I was struck by the admiration shown widely by Turkish and other Near Eastern people for Americans. No doubt this partly resulted from the work of the missionaries and relief workers, including (especially) the evenhanded relief they offered during famine and other catastrophes. Harbord thought this admiration was very gratifying. But should America take a mandate, the general pointed out, the burden “would have to be carried for not less than a generation under circumstances so trying that we might easily forfeit the faith of the world.”⁸¹ In other words, taking up the mandate would mean a major commitment, and a commitment of the heart.

Despite this warning, Harbord’s unopposed fourteenth point is the critical one, and the fact that his fourteen points for the mandate correlated to President Wilson’s fourteen points is seldom remarked. That last point reads like this: “Here is a man’s job that the world says can be better done by America than by any other. America can afford the money; she has the men; no duty to her own people would suffer; her traditional policy of isolation did not keep her from successful participation in the Great War. Shall it be said that our country lacks the courage to take up new and difficult duties?”⁸² From another perspective, the general thought the key issue was very simple. His thirteenth point for the mandate was the question of Cain, which the Christian Harbord (no doubt like many a missionary) thought was the major question to be asked: “Am I my brother’s keeper?”⁸³

Thus, the general’s principled idealism, though balanced against a frank assessment of costs, resembled the idealism and Christian charity of Smith and Heinz, Gates, and the young relief worker with his truck on that mountain; of the two Smith College girls off alone with their orphans; and of Dr. Charles King, too, the principal author of the other report. It was also characteristic of the Americans who had just won the war; who were a generally moral and relatively religious but also grandly optimistic people; who, like the world, were under the great influence of Woodrow Wilson; and who were all filled with hope that a new era was beginning. This committed idealism was not fated to be realized in Turkey or anywhere else in the Near East. And no doubt, like the views of American authorities in our time recommending (indeed, successfully recommending!) American incursions into the always-simmering powder keg of the Middle East, the American idealism of that day was in many respects naïve.

But as the Armenian genocide of 1915–16 had shown already, and as similar terrible events of the postwar period chronicled later in this book will also indicate, if any region on earth needed a far-seeing and committed tutelage in justice and love, or merely in basic humanity, it was the Turkey of 1919.

CHAPTER 2

TURKEY IN 1919 AND THE AMERICAN COMMISSIONS