America’s Black Sea Fleet

Afew months after the White Russians descended on Constantinople, Admiral Mark Bristol was taking a break from the various Russian difficulties and was attending a party arranged by the embassy at the resort island of Prinkipo. In the early afternoon, an American destroyer let down the hook off the island after a high-speed run from Samsun, and the destroyer’s captain sought the admiral with an urgent message. Bristol’s ships had already told the admiral of the reported destruction of dozens of Greek villages in and near Samsun.¹ Now, with the arrival of a leading cutthroat band at that city, a massacre of the whole Greek population of the city itself seemed imminent. The captain thought that the admiral ought to know.²

From Roman times, the northern coast of Asia Minor has been known as the Pontus. Like the Aegean coast of Turkey, the Pontus historically had included a very substantial Christian population, predominantly ethnic Greeks but with a number of Armenians mixed in. As was the case in most of Anatolia, the Turkish majority ruled, but almost all the commerce was in Greek and Armenian hands. Usually the Christians were either forbidden military service in the Turkish army or were forced into labor battalions rather than combat units. So it had been in the Great War, with some additional complications in the Black Sea region.

Map 4. The Pontus and Central Turkey

Back in 1915 Heizer had looked into this story personally, and after the war he hoped that this Turkish “monster” would be condemned by the anticipated allied tribunal.3 Heizer’s 1915 reports had outlined the whole sequence of Trebizond deportations and the utter despair of those affected.⁴ As we have noted, Admiral Bristol himself looked into reports of the killings of Armenians in the territory around the Pontic port of Samsun in 1919 and found the reports horrifying. The admiral sent officers to all the Pontic ports where he did not go himself, and they authored similar chilling accounts. To be sure, one of those who spent eight days in Trebizond in September of 1919 (he traveled there on the cruiser Olympia) thought some reports of violence in the Pontus should be discounted because he had come across exaggerations, and he also pointed out that several Turkish officials had attempted to ignore the deportation orders. Still, even this officer acknowledged the great persecutions, massacres, and displacements that the Greeks and Armenians had suffered. He pointed out that the Armenians had suffered more than the Greeks because they were further from the coast and therefore more fully under Ottoman control.⁵

Of some five thousand ethnic Armenians originally living in Samsun (the most important port on the Black Sea between Constantinople and Batoum), there were fewer than 1,000 left, and about 10,000 ethnic Greeks remained of an original 15,000. During the war, many Greeks had escaped the deportations, massacres, and military draft by becoming bandits in the hills, while ethnic Turks avoiding the draft also formed bandit groups.⁶ Though some of the Greeks came down from the hills upon the Allied victory, others did not, and in any case, many Greeks kept their arms. Hence, under subsequent oppression or threat, hundreds of Greek males and some of their families took to the hills again, in part to commit raids or reprisals, and in part simply to try to survive.⁷

Meanwhile, those Greeks who returned home to the Pontic cities after the war naturally objected when they found Turks occupying their former homes who refused to get out, which often happened.⁸ Hence, resentment simmered among the Christian ethnic groups. This resentment was exacerbated both by Hellenic Greeks like Premier Eleutherios Venizelos, who before being deposed had dreamed of an empire stretching from Greece into Asia Minor (and therefore had willingly offered his army to the Allies at Smyrna), and by some local Greeks who promoted an independent “Republic of the Pontus.” Greek organizations outside of Turkey also promoted the latter, and much more openly than anybody in Turkey itself did.

Turks in the Pontus region were nervous anyway because of a population living among them that often did not speak their language and that excelled in business and trade when most of them did not.9 Especially anxious were those Turkish officials and civilians who had helped carry out the original deportations or had profited by them, and who were now watching their backs. Upon the Hellenic Greek army’s occupation of Smyrna and nearby regions, and with that army’s subsequent heavy reinforcement and advance eastward, fears grew among ethnic Turks of a rumored “Pontus plot” that might attempt to overthrow Turkish rule.

To what degree the Greek army or others actually coordinated efforts with local Greek officials with the specific aim of a revolt is contested, though there certainly was some machination toward this end.¹⁰ However, that fear and rumor by themselves could have enormous effects can be demonstrated by narrating how they destroyed a longstanding American institution in the Pontus region, the American mission college at the city of Marsovan, one of the first of several significant events observed by Americans in the Pontus in the years 1921–22. These events would eventually become the subject of great contention between Admiral Bristol in Constantinople and the American relief workers and missionaries who had witnessed them. As we will see, Bristol would attempt to hush up the renewed death marches and massacres that the Turkish Nationalists had begun to carry out, despite having received admonitions from some of his own destroyer captains as to the hideousness of what was going on.

Marsovan, which lies fifty miles southwest of Samsun, had hosted “Anatolia College” since 1886. By the beginning of the Great War, the college had graduated over two thousand students.¹¹ In 1915 the Turks began deporting the Armenians, who composed almost half of the city’s population of 30,000, and as a further sign of their intentions, they plowed the Armenian cemetery there and sowed it with seed. Although for a while the mission at Marsovan was unaffected, on August 19, 1915, the college gates were forced open and Turkish officials demanded that all Armenian students, teachers, and families climb into some sixty oxcarts and come with them. Although President George White argued with the officials, he failed to change their plans, and after he conducted a brief prayer service, the Armenians were taken off, the men to be shot nearby and the women sent on east, never to return.¹²

Two days later, sixty-three women students in a distant college building who had apparently been overlooked were carried out in another group of oxcarts. However, in one of the legends of the Anatolian mission, two veteran American teachers there did not just pray with these students, but also took action. Charlotte Willard and Frances Gage cabled urgently to Ambassador Henry Morgenthau, who sent back a message demanding these students’ release. Armed with this document, the two teachers chased after the students on horseback. Willard and Gage had little success in pleading with the Turkish officials along the track, but they did better when they turned to Turkish women. By enlisting the help of one official’s sympathetic wife and another’s kind daughter, the teachers not only got official approval to pursue their students, but once they found the girls, got permission to take them home.

Although the young students had had to fight off filthy men trying to seize them, had seen bodies pushed under bushes and bridges, had recognized with horror the unkempt wives of their murdered professors trudging along hopelessly, and had withstood pressure to convert to Islam, the two college teachers got to Sivas before most of the girls had actually been harmed. A few days later the teachers were able to escort forty-eight of sixty-three young women back through the college gates at Marsovan, to great rejoicing.13

In 1916 the college was closed by the Turkish government. It reopened in October of 1919 with about two hundred students, mainly Greeks (and many very young). Thirty Turkish students were now enrolled, more than ever before. A “baby house” for rescued Armenian girls and their babies was also set up on campus (such houses were being established throughout Anatolia), as were facilities for six hundred Greek and Armenian war orphans. Things began to settle into old patterns. However, the peace conferees in Paris dithered, the Greeks were invited into Smyrna, and eventually, in February 1921, the college’s one Turkish professor (newly hired) was beaten to death just outside the campus. Turks accused the Greek students, but the Americans thought the professor was murdered because of his friendship with the Christians.¹⁴ A few days later, a disgruntled laundry worker who had been dismissed from the college told officials that “bombs” were being made in a college basement. She had heard strange noises there. Turkish search parties looked through the whole campus for munitions without finding anything. The college president, George White, took a Turkish investigator to a basement and demonstrated what happened when the generator started up. A strange sound indeed.¹⁵

Parenthetically, about this same time, Americans in the Anatolian missions of Talas and Caesarea (far inland) were being accused of manufacturing munitions and of rousing native feeling against the government. Those American compounds were repeatedly searched, and many suspicious items indeed had to be confiscated—bullet-shaped window springs, an electric door bell, apparatuses for physics experiments, and an expensive set of taps and dies, among them. The Americans there were eventually exonerated, and it might all have been laughable, except that coincidentally many native workers at those missions were imprisoned and beaten. One was blinded, and others died from their mistreatment.16

In Marsovan, the Turkish investigator pursued his task single-mindedly despite the American explanations, and in the president’s office found some incriminating maps inscribed with the word “Pontus”—maps printed in Chicago to indicate the Roman provinces (including Pontus) that existed in the time of St. Paul.¹⁷ Despite White’s protests, not only were these maps taken as evidence but so was the seal of a student group that before the war had been known as the Pontus Society. This was a literary, debating, musical, and athletic society for Greek students. Sometime prior to the Turkish search, White had convinced a Turkish official who inquired that this was a completely innocent student group. Now, the investigator reported discovering some Greek flags and a few student essays about Pontus autonomy and concluded that the campus group harbored revolutionaries. One of White’s letters was also reportedly found to be incriminating, both because it expressed hope for eventual conversion of Turks and Kurds and because it indicated that larger funds had been spent on relief for Armenians and Greeks than on Turks.¹⁸

Whatever the cause, the officials connected with the student organization—three teachers, an alum, and two student leaders, all of them ethnic Greeks—were arrested “just for questioning.” They never came back. Before long they were all executed, as were at least five hundred other Pontic Greeks, similarly condemned of sedition before a kangaroo court.¹⁹ As a Turkish scholar familiar with Turkish sources put it recently, “It seems that many of those sentenced in Samsun were leaders or assumed leaders of Greek or Armenian irregulars. . . .” It seems . . . many of those . . . leaders or assumed leaders. Andrew Mango’s qualifications are actually rather spectacular.²⁰ In other words, of those executed, a few might, in fact, have been revolutionaries.

At any rate, within a month of their investigation, officials told White that his college was now closed. White and other officials had to leave within a few days and students were required to return home. Only two young teachers could stay, not to teach, but to feed the orphans.²¹ Carl Compton with his wife, Ruth, and Donald Hosford remained at the college. In late March, President White and some of his staff arrived in Constantinople from Marsovan and complained to Bristol, who in his diaries and correspondence blamed White for the imprudence of having a Greek “debating society” at all, especially one headed up by a Greek who, of course, “being a native . . . could not be trusted.”²²

The college having been closed because of its reputed connection with the Pontus plot, Hosford later explained to Bristol in person that he knew the students and their leaders and had attended some of the society’s meetings and found them all innocuous. Nevertheless, to Hosford’s considerable frustration, despite having “absolutely no proof,” Bristol stubbornly insisted that revolutionary activity had indeed been taking place at the American college.23 To the secretary of state, however, the admiral was a bit more circumspect, admitting that while Emin Bey had promised to show embassy officials the relevant documents, Bristol had never received evidence to substantiate the Nationalist claim.²⁴

From the later testimony of all the principal Americans on the scene, it appears that the whole episode was the effect of one Turkish official’s personal spite against the Americans, this along with general ignorance and widespread hysteria. As Lt. Robbie Dunn put it, “the Turks are now spy and sedition mad.”²⁵ Nevertheless, not only did Turkish propaganda at the time credit Anatolia College for centrally directing all revolutionary activities in the Pontus region,²⁶ but as late as the summer of 2001, the Marsovan incident also was cited to the author by a Turkish scholar in Istanbul as evidence of the existence of a Pontus plot.

Two American relief workers who had been sent out of Marsovan, nurse Sara Corning and relief worker Gertrude Anthony (the latter a niece of women’s rights champion Susan B. Anthony), decided to stay in Samsun at a Near Eastern Relief (NER) orphanage while seeking permission to return to Marsovan. Several events were then transpiring in the coastal region. For one thing, Greek warships bombarded Pontic cities on several occasions, starting with a shelling of Inebolu on June 9, 1921.²⁷ Such foolish actions on the part of the Hellenic Greeks (which had little military effect) no doubt played a part in furthering deportations by the Turks. Six months even before the shelling began, however, back in December of 1920, a brutal Turkish general named Noureddin Pasha had been sent to the Pontus to clamp down on any revolutionary activity along this supposedly vulnerable homefront.²⁸

Clamp down he certainly did, acting chiefly by means of local Turkish bandit groups. As early as March of 1921, American missionaries in the Pontus and naval officers on destroyers visiting Trebizond and Samsun began to hear reports of Greek villages up and down Turkey’s northern coast being destroyed and their inhabitants massacred. An influx of Greek children at the American orphanages seemed to verify these stories.²⁹ Such reports continued for months. About the last week of May, Osman Agha’s “Laz” bandits swarmed into Samsun itself. Although not allowed out of Samsun, Americans like Gertrude Anthony observed the nearby village of KadiKeuy being systematically looted, while its residents and those from other villages fled to Samsun for refuge. Before long, most of these frantic people were forcibly sent back out (deported) by the Turks. According to Anthony, no one in Samsun doubted they were being sent to their deaths.30

Later, from seeing one of Osman’s men with impunity commit murder on the city streets and from watching other bandits carefully case the Christian residences, Anthony became convinced that much more was in store, in fact, the ravaging of Samsun itself. She pleaded with Cdr. C. S. Joyce of the Fox to inform Admiral Bristol of the apparent Turkish plans.³¹ With Joyce in command, the Fox immediately steamed to Constantinople and then further to Prinkipo, where the commander interrupted the admiral at the luncheon party mentioned above. Joyce passed on to the admiral the widespread reports of perhaps a hundred Greek villages destroyed, the inhabitants killed, the priests crucified. Small Greek children, most from outlying villages, were flooding the NER orphanage at Samsun, some ninety within the past few days, the ship’s captain reported. Anthony had listened to one child’s story. Soldiers had come to her house and had been friendly at first, but then they had killed the men and begun struggling with the women. Not knowing what to do, this child had crawled into the oven, and thereby escaped. Then she made her way to the American orphanage at Samsun. Joyce concluded his report (all of it found in his ship’s war diary) by stating that a large number of Greek women had been warned by Turkish friends that they were in imminent danger.³²

Admiral Bristol immediately wrote a protest to the Turkish officials at Samsun and handed it to Joyce to be carried back to the city—but later, for unknown reasons, ordered the two destroyer captains there not to deliver it. (They had already done so.)³³ At about the same time, Lieutenant Dunn drafted a message to the secretary of state informing him of the reported destruction of villages and this threatened “extermination.” However, he also partly excused these actions: “If this occurs it will have some explanation according to [the] well known custom of this country.” Dunn cited as possible justification some recent atrocities by Greeks against Turks in Marmara regions under Greek control, for which the Samsun actions might have been viewed as reprisals.³⁴

But Dunn failed to tell the whole story of the latter events. Significant Greek atrocities toward Muslims certainly had occurred recently at Guemlek and Yalova, cities near the Sea of Marmara, not far from Constantinople. Massacres of Turks had reportedly taken place there (Dunn put the figure at two thousand killed), along with much looting, systematic burning of many Muslim villages, and general uprooting of the Muslim population. Greek army commanders responsible for the region seem to have countenanced or even encouraged the depredations of Greek, Armenian, and Circassian bands, and some regular Greek troops may also have participated. Whether for the military purpose of protecting the Greek army’s flanks, or for simple revenge, a “systematic plan” for getting rid of the Muslim population there seemed to be in the process of execution.

Arnold Toynbee personally witnessed Greek soldiers fire a village during a troop evacuation at Ismid, watched Muslim corpses being unearthed from freshly dug large graves there, and interviewed many Turkish survivors throughout the area. “For about the first time in history the Turk is quite undoubtedly the injured party,” he would write Admiral Bristol.35

Terrible as such actions were, however, there was much more to the story of Greek atrocities in the Gulf of Ismid region than either Toynbee’s letter or Dunn’s draft message suggested. Not only had the 1915 deportations of Armenians and Greeks been very severe in the Marmara region, with associated great brutality, suffering, and loss of life, but Dunn also had to know what the report of the official Allied investigation pointed out repeatedly, that Greek actions like those noted above were not only reprisals for general Turkish oppression in the past, but specifically were payback for atrocities committed just the year before, that is, in 1920, when many Greek villages had been burned at the hands of Turkish irregulars and reportedly thousands of Greeks had been massacred. Even now, as Turks were lamenting Greek attacks upon Turks, thousands of Greek refugees were complaining of massive recent attacks by Turkish bands at nearby Ismid, including 12,000 Greeks massacred and thirty Greek villages destroyed, the latter facts being accepted as “fundamentally true” by Allied investigators, “not-withstanding a certain amount of exaggeration in the figures.”

Indeed, at one port where a party of Allied investigators put in, they found a group of Greek refugees “raving with anger.” A guide to the Allied commission was a leading Turkish figure from a neighboring village. On his debarking, several Greek refugees denounced him as having been responsible for several massacres in the neighborhood. It was all the commissioners could do to distract the refugees, push the Turk on a boat, and beat a quick retreat, the boat being “pursued by a howling crowd” that rushed into the water after it.³⁶

Admiral Bristol loved to argue that every atrocity in Turkey was just a reprisal following another reprisal ad infinitum (all races being equally atrocious), and certainly there was much mutual racial hatred in Turkey—some of it being evident in the Greek actions near the Sea of Marmara. However, in Dunn’s draft of the particular message mentioned above (the gist of which the admiral soon signed and sent off), he conveniently failed to mention any reasons that the Marmara Greeks might have had to be upset at the local Turks in the first place.37

About this time (in July of 1921), the young writer John Dos Passos visited Constantinople on a tour of the Near East and made a call on the admiral. When the writer informed Bristol that he represented the New York Tribune and Metropolitan Magazine (Dos Passos would send off a few articles during his trip), Bristol invited him to join some other correspondents on a visit one of his destroyers was about to make. At some nearby ports, the admiral said, desperate Greek peasants were fleeing the Turks (who had burned their villages), but at others, Turkish villagers were said to be frantic to get away from raping and murdering Greeks. The admiral said he was hoping to get the truth about the Near East situation published in American newspapers, so somebody might stop the senseless war being waged on the mainland between Nationalist Turks and Hellenic Greeks.³⁸

Dos Passos accepted the admiral’s invitation. When the destroyer arrived at the small ports the admiral had spoken of (which lay near Ismid), the correspondents found the Turkish and Greek refugees hard to tell apart but equally pathetic and desperate. All of them begged to be taken aboard. However, while the destroyer could have accommodated several hundred on its weather decks, once the correspondents returned from their interviews, the ship quickly took in its brow and sped right back to the old Ottoman capital.³⁹ Dos Passos does not say so, but it appears the admiral was more intent on furthering his own views than on helping to solve the actual problems of the refugees. Indeed, when Dos Passos met with Bristol, the admiral had explicitly fed the writer his storyline: “I suggested that he might then write one story bringing out the savagery of both the Greeks and Turks against each other.”⁴⁰

Just before Dos Passos’ visit, Lieutenant Dunn had left Constantinople for Angora (later renamed Ankara) to interview the Nationalist leaders there. On his way through Samsun, the American naval officer listened to some Greek women in the city talking about purchasing poisons like strychnine or corrosive sublimate, saying they were determined not to leave themselves at the mercy of the Turks. (In the Pontus in 1915, many women had purchased poison for the same purpose.)⁴¹ After listening a while, Dunn pointed out that corrosive sublimate was a bad thing to take, for it worked so slowly that the Turks would be able to accomplish their purpose on the young ladies before it became effective. An American destroyer captain was standing by, and it is clear from his report that he found Dunn’s comment hilarious.⁴²

When he got to Angora, Dunn talked twice with the Nationalist foreign minister, Youssouf Kemal, and once with Mustapha Kemal himself. Among a large number of topics (one should remember that the Turkish Nationalists were fighting a war and had many things on their minds; indeed, they were about to be sent reeling by another Greek offensive), Dunn brought up the deportations from Samsun that had begun to take place, including the threatened deportation of innocent women and children there, and also the deportations of the Greek tobacco sorters who were working for the American tobacco in or near that city. Didn’t the Turkish leaders understand the need for American business? In response, Youssouf argued that there had been no deportations until the Greeks had bombarded Inebolu, an action that had taken place on June 9. He also brought up the alleged Pontus sedition and some reported burnings of Turkish villages on the Pontus by Greek bandits. Youssouf claimed that the local Turkish officials who had threatened the deportations of the Greek women at Samsun were now under a tribunal for doing so.

Although Youssouf further admitted that, both in principle and in detail (as to the character, ages of deportees, and so on), all deportation orders were issued from Angora, he also claimed “it had never been and was not now, the intention of the Angora government to deport any women—only men between the ages of 18 and 50.”43 Dunn left Angora convinced that local officials rather than the Nationalist government were responsible for any excesses, and that any atrocities were pretty much confined to the Samsun region.⁴⁴

As Dunn was interviewing the Nationalists, a Near East Relief official named McDowell brought permission from Angora for relief workers Anthony and Corning to return to Marsovan. In Samsun, McDowell called on many influential Turks to try to convince them that the Nationalist government had not issued any deportation orders. The town became quieter as an apparent consequence, but shortly afterward, two hundred more men were deported to join the thousands that had been sent before them. In her November report, after noting this timeline, Anthony pointed out two other discrepancies. The local head of the Near East Relief had gotten the local Mutasarriff (governor) to agree that no NER employees would be taken, and the American tobacco officials had convinced him to promise the same concerning their employees. Yet, said Anthony, “Neither promise was kept.”⁴⁵

Anthony and Corning would soon travel on to Marsovan, but in later weeks the threats to the Greeks in Samsun grew worse. Cdr. G. L. Bristol of the Overton (no relation to the admiral) had served more than one stint of duty at Samsun and, unlike some destroyer skippers fresh from the States, knew something about Turkish officialdom. On July 18 he was moved to write yet one additional plea to the admiral and send it by another fast ship. The night before he had heard of an order for the deportation of all remaining local Greeks (mostly old men, women, and children), something that he reported was “naturally regarded as the end by everybody.” The next morning, along with Capt. Victor Stuart Houston of the Brooks, he went to visit the Samsun Mutasarriff.

The Mutasarriff said the order was indeed in effect, and that all the Greeks had been notified. They soon would be sent out. He admitted that many of the Greek men who had been deported earlier had, in fact, been killed, though he claimed the government had tried to protect them, with the fortunate result that at least half of them had reached their destinations. (He blamed local Greek and Turkish brigands for the killings.) Commander Bristol asked how one was to consider this new action, pointing out that the Mutasarriff’s assurances to him regarding the past deportation had not been adhered to in any particulars.

When the Mutasarriff responded that women and children would be sent out in small, well-guarded parties and all in conveyances—no one would have to walk—Bristol answered that they both knew this was impossible. Bristol went on to say that “he knew as well as I” that large numbers of the deportees would not survive. Commander Bristol then protested in the name of humanity as strongly as he felt he could, but (being the pretty low-ranking figure he was) he was convinced it wasn’t strong enough, and later a Turkish official who had been present at the meeting privately confirmed that it was, in fact, too weak. The Mutasarriff had been expecting Bristol to say, “You must stop it.” The Mutasarriff’s answer was that he would proceed anyway, that his orders had originated from Angora, and that they were quite positive.

After describing all this, Commander Bristol wrote the admiral of his conviction that the deportations would be carried out quickly, and that the death of large numbers of deportees would be the natural consequence. To his hand-penned missive, he added this conclusion:

American prestige is now at a low ebb here. We have the only war vessels present in the harbor, and whether true or not are being put in the position of passively standing by and watching what everyone, including Turks[,] considers a massacre. The officials representing the Government know that we don’t believe what they say to us and they also know that we are fully convinced that few deportees will reach [their] destination alive. If this goes through it will at later date . . . be classed with the Armenian affair, and we will occupy in the public mind very much the position of the Germans. Time will impute to us not only doing little to prevent it but actually the attitude of complacency if not concurrence.

There is a feeling among all (Turks included) that concrete action by the allies or strong action by America can stop it. This must be communicated to Angora. The local Turk will not feel when you are dealing only with him that you are serious in your intentions.46

Note the perceptions here, startling in their clear contrast not only to the regular evasions by Turkish officials in Angora but also to the regular excuses of the American admiral in Constantinople: Turkish officials never mean what they say; we all know they don’t mean it; most deportees are likely to die; the orders come from Angora . . . we’re ourselves responsible. The letter is all the more remarkable for its being originated by a commander whose career rides on his relationship with his superiors, in this case a superior who does not want to hear any of what Commander Bristol has to say.

Commander Houston of Brooks (for some reason, both Overton and Brooks were present simultaneously at Samsun) carried Commander Bristol’s message to Constantinople and urgently asked to speak to the admiral—but the chief of staff (it would have been Capt. Lyman Cotten) would not let him in. The admiral was busy, he said. A careful reading of an episode in Dos Passos’ 1927 travel book Orient Express, along with study of related documents, tells us what happened next.

In his book, the writer describes an extraordinary meeting in the Pera Palace Salon that took place between an American naval officer, the Greek Orthodox archbishop, an elaborately dressed Greek lady, a couple of other locals, and “a journalist,” obviously Dos Passos himself. Over coffee the group discussed the recent Turkish order to deport the remaining thousands of Greek women and children from the major Turkish Black Sea port of Samsun.

“Of course that means . . .”

“Massacre,” someone whispered.

The American officer reported that the Greek men had already been sent inland and that the Greek women were openly weeping in the city’s streets. The archbishop proposed sending a telegram to the American president.47

How Dos Passos got invited to this meeting is unknown (perhaps he just seemed a sympathetic writer), and anyway it is a much less important question than who the naval officer was, and what he thought he was doing meeting the Greek patriarch. From archival sources, it is clear that the American pictured as speaking out in the meeting was Commander Houston.⁴⁸ In his travel book, Dos Passos does not notice that by this ship’s captain reporting what he and his crew had seen going on in Samsun to a major non-American authority (a Greek dignitary for whom, by the way, Admiral Bristol cared very little) and to other individuals not at all connected with his military mission, Commander Houston was not only most likely violating naval protocol, but was also circumventing his admiral’s certain wishes.

Missionary L. P. Chambers would later complain in a letter that Admiral Bristol had sent home destroyer commanders who had been stationed at Samsun because of derogatory opinions they had expressed toward the Turks.49 Did Admiral Bristol learn of, and then take offense at Captain Houston’s outspokenness? And had the admiral in fact sent the offending officer home? Even more important, had Captain Houston carefully measured the possible personal consequences of his attending an uncleared meeting with a local “chief of state,” as it were? (In several respects, the Greek archbishop or “primate” acted as the head of all ethnic Greeks in Turkey.) That is, had this experienced American naval officer in frustration decided to brave any possible damage to his own career so as to trumpet the word of the impending massacres to somebody who might help?

Apparently he had. Bristol’s war diaries and other documents indicate that the Greek archbishop used Commander Houston’s name (with Houston’s permission) in pleading with Admiral Bristol for his fellow ethnic Greeks on the Pontus, and that the admiral took great offense at Houston’s having let the archbishop know what was going on in Samsun. Navy personnel files contain the original copy of the letter that Bristol appended to the commander’s next fitness report. In that letter, the admiral pointed to Houston’s violation of Bristol’s policy of neutrality between local contending forces, the commander’s certain knowledge of what that policy involved, and the overall lack of discretion in the commander’s actions.

In Houston’s required response to this decidedly “adverse” letter (which would have ended any chance of Houston’s being promoted to captain), rather than apologize or otherwise attempt to blunt the letter’s impact, to the admiral’s wonderment the ship’s captain dared to defend his actions. By implication, he was also putting Bristol down.

Houston explained that he had found his original report to headquarters about the Turkish orders to deport 15,000 Greek women and children from Samsun was not being taken seriously back at the American embassy, this despite the death of “thousands upon thousands of Armenian women and children” during the war by similar methods (in what we now call the Armenian genocide). He went on to remind Bristol (the “Detachment Commander”) that although he had asked to see the admiral personally, he had been turned down, and was informed that the admiral was too busy to talk to him. Houston’s letter displayed a sardonic tone: “I am aware that the Detachment Commander is more than busy. I am aware that my personal feelings are not to be considered; but in such a matter, affecting the lives of fifteen thousand odd women and children, not yet killed, the personal touch which a word from the Detachment Commander could have given, would have gone a long way toward relieving the tension of the situation as it appeared to me.”

Houston also suggested that, even though he had not been allowed to speak to the admiral, it was possibly because of the very vehemence of his pleas to the naval chief of staff that Bristol subsequently decided to send a protest to Mustapha Kemal. Commander Houston concluded his unrepentant missive by arguing that if he had erred and violated policy, “it was through zeal for the cause of humanity.”50

Maybe, despite appearances, Admiral Bristol had, in fact, been moved by Commander Bristol’s letter and by Commander Houston’s personal appeal to the chief of staff—or perhaps the admiral had become leery lest there be some fallout for him resulting from the two ship captains’ pleas, and particularly from Commander Houston’s apparent willingness to fall on his sword for the Samsun Greeks. Whatever the reason, the admiral again protested the deportations, this time to the Nationalist government at Angora.⁵¹ A day or two later, the Overton commander signaled from Samsun that he believed the order for deportations had been rescinded. Moreover, Osman Agha had suddenly left the city. (Reportedly he had been ordered to Angora.)⁵²

On July 23 Youssouf Kemal wrote Mark Bristol that the word of transportation of old men, women, and children from Samsun to the interior was completely in error. Only the inhabitants of some villages implicated in the Pontus Society had been so treated, and then only from military necessity.⁵³ No less prominent a figure than the American secretary of state would later credit Admiral Bristol with averting a Greek deportation from Samsun.⁵⁴

However, all this business about saving the Samsun Greeks was largely smokescreen, for whatever was happening in Samsun proper, the whole countryside was still being devastated. Village by village, Greeks everywhere in the Pontus were either being massacred or deported south. A few Americans would witness this. On the very same day that Youssouf Kemal penned his response to Bristol, Osman Agha’s men arrived at Marsovan.

From mid-June on, many desperate deportees from nearby villages had come to Marsovan with terrible tales, and some were admitted into the college compound.⁵⁵ With the arrival of Osman’s brigands, things became very uncertain. In the Comptons’ house at the mission, things more or less continued as before. After dinner on July 24, some of the older orphans, their Armenian supervisors, and the American teachers listened to the Victrola. Then they said a prayer and retired for the evening. They omitted the ordinary Sunday-night sing for fear of attracting attention. Shortly afterward they were awakened by glass shattering, doors crashing open, and screams piercing the night. Compton ran to the gate, and a crowd of crying women and children rushed in. After slamming the gate shut and slipping out a side door, he informed approaching Turkish soldiers that this was American property. Astonishingly, they responded that they had orders to stay out of American property and left.56

For the Americans, the next four days and nights—especially the nights—were ones of “constant fear.”⁵⁷ More than fear, however, confronted the city’s Greek and Armenian residents. Although, as at Samsun, some care had apparently been taken to inhibit Americans from making firsthand observations,⁵⁸ the facts were clear enough. On Sunday night, the mission leaders heard the crying and screaming, watched houses being sacked, and accepted refugees over the walls. Monday night the screaming was less prolonged, but there was some gunfire, and those who came in over the compound wall reported “much killing with knives.” On later nights, stories of rape (indeed, multiple rape) were added to the mix.⁵⁹ During these terrifying nights, groups of Armenian and Greek men and older boys were sometimes marched up the hill past the college, after which shots rang out. These people were never seen again. On such occasions, Compton opened the gate, hoping some prisoners might be able to slip inside, but those who did were seen by their guards and were quickly forced back up the hill.⁶⁰

The five American men and women organized a “big boy patrol” of orphans around the inside of the compound wall day and night, and spaced themselves between the boys. They got little sleep. Many refugee women and children climbed the walls into the compound, along with a few men. Turks sometimes followed them, but when informed they were on American soil, they invariably left.⁶¹ The Americans and their native helpers did what they could to comfort the hundreds of orphans in their midst. Steve Stephanides and another Armenian boy slept at the Comptons at night. Years later Stephanides recalled Ruth Compton coming into their room, pulling down the shades, and reading them stories, this to divert their attention from the terrible screaming⁶²—and from the fires.

During Wednesday fires had broken out simultaneously at several places in the Christian part of the city, which lay just outside the campus. The fires burned all night and destroyed some four hundred houses.⁶³ Ruth and Carl Compton sat on the steps of the girl’s dormitory with the mission’s meager fire-fighting equipment and watched the houses collapsing, one by one. Could this really be happening? Fortunately, the fires did not leap the compound wall.⁶⁴ Outside, though, terror and chaos ruled. Refugees reported several dead bodies and some live ones being tossed into the fire and people being shot as they tried to escape.65 A young Turkish officer, a former student at the college, discovered that thirty Christian women had been driven into a school building in the city, where they remained huddled. The building had just caught fire and the women had begun singing hymns. Recognizing that the women were giving up to the inevitable, the officer became furious, and the surrounding Turkish crowd gave way to his wrath. However, when he shouted to the women, insisting they all come out, they at first hesitated. Would it only prolong their agony? When he promised to lead to them to the college, though, they plucked up their courage and rushed out in a group, just before the building’s floors collapsed. Compton would find a place for all these women in one of the college buildings.⁶⁶

Toward the end of the week, the Turks began carrying out cartloads of dead to the Christian cemetery, to five large freshly dug pits in view of the Americans. Through binoculars, Gertrude Anthony sometimes watched the bodies being stripped before being dumped off the wagons and discovered that some were not yet dead. She estimated a thousand (or maybe half the postwar Christian population of Marsovan) might have been killed, though she admitted it was impossible to say. About the same time, for over a week “the roads were alive with villagers carrying off loot. Stoves, pots, windows, doors, tiles, and masses of bundles were carried by donkeys, carts, and men, women, and children. Cartload after cartload, for days, went up the hill past our house.” The Armenian women with whom she talked said the Turkish residents of the city had done more looting and killing than even the chettes themselves.⁶⁷

By the end of that fateful week, hundreds of refugees, mostly women and children, thronged the buildings of the American compound. Some Christian families escaped into the hills, passing the college on their way. In the mornings, outside the walls, the Americans would gather the babies who had been left there in blankets. Eventually they would collect twenty-five of them.⁶⁸ Though the Greek women remaining in the city were all deported,⁶⁹ some of the city’s remaining Armenians were allowed to take shelter at the college. Most of those already in the compound were Greeks who had come in not by the main gate, but surreptitiously. Sixty years later, a woman wrote Carl Compton from Canada after hearing of the death of Compton’s wife, Ruth. Compton’s name was treasured by the family, she said, because in those days, her mother, sister, aunt, and seven cousins had been taken over the college walls at night, and Compton had hidden them all until the trouble was over.⁷⁰

Knowing the Americans sheltered many refugees, Turkish authorities eventually insisted that Compton list the Greek and Armenian men who were sheltered there (apparently about two dozen). Compton gathered them together, and most agreed to be listed, but some decided to attempt to escape instead. Carl and some helpers provided a Greek and his two sons (the boys had been college students) with a blanket each and a little food and money, and then boosted them over a remote part of the wall. Many years later, one of them walked into Compton’s office in Thessaloniki. Somehow they had all survived and gotten out of Turkey; this man was living in Greece.71

The Americans were forced to send out some men and women, of whom some were killed. Even more might have died, except that there were more refugees in the compound than Carl Compton knew. Efthimios Couzinos was a student of twenty-two who Compton had kept to interpret for him after the college was closed, and as Turkish officials began to look at the campus for possible escapees, Couzinos began getting worried, particularly since he had been closely associated with the Greek student group. He was apprehensive that his name might be on a rumored list of subversives, as indeed it was. The college head nurse happened to be his sister, and she suggested he should hide in a small crevice under the kitchen floor in the infirmary, actually, under the vegetable box. So, without telling Compton, one day Couzinos simply disappeared. Resembling Jews who would hide away from the SS in cupboards, shelves, and tiny cellars through much of World War II, this young man would spend the next seventeen months in that hole in the floor, only arising in the middle of the night to stretch his legs.⁷²

At least one other person was also hidden away. Ruth Compton was searching through some supplies in an empty faculty house one day when she heard a door open upstairs followed by some quiet footsteps. Frightened, she kept absolutely still. Stealthily, a bearded face peered around the corner at the top of the stairs, then vanished. In that moment Ruth had recognized an Armenian teacher who had left the college when it had been closed in March. Upon conferring with Sara Corning, Ruth learned that this man had escaped a Turkish labor battalion into which he had been drafted, and then had returned to the campus. Sara had hidden him. They decided it was better that Carl Compton did not know.⁷³

Eventually, with the departure of Osman’s chettes and the infamous Osman himself (the Americans agreed to give him a ride toward Angora, as a way to get him out of town), with the glutting of the appetites of the local population, and perhaps also because of some pressure from the American high commissioner, the storm mostly blew over. The trades of the Christians were now more badly needed than ever in Marsovan itself. With some assurances from Turkish friends, the refugees on the campus petitioned Compton to let them move back to their homes, or to what was left of them. And so he did. The Comptons and the other Americans, the orphans, some native helpers, and the hidden ones remained.

After Marsovan and their many other such “victories,” Osman and his one to three thousand cutthroats were acclaimed in all the cities through which they passed. Osman himself would be called a patriot or hero in the Turkish press of Angora and Constantinople.74 Observing the group in Angora, where they were received with great ceremony,⁷⁵ one of Bristol’s representatives there, Florence Billings, happened to remark upon the picturesque quality of Osman’s men as they marched through the streets. Halide Edib responded that it was a pity to be compelled to use them, although they might have to continue doing so. Since they were “not amenable to discipline,” she said, the use of such “irregular forces . . . would make the situation worse regarding reprisals.” If Billings reported Halide’s statement correctly, Halide would seem to have meant that one massacre was likely to beget another—“but nevertheless, massacre we must.”⁷⁶ A year later Osman was featured on one of the new Nationalist stamps, and he is still occasionally memorialized in Turkey by statue and in travel literature today.⁷⁷

In contrast to Osman’s triumphal procession through cities of Anatolia, Donald Hosford’s reception in the American embassy at Constantinople in December of that year (1921, still) was less than satisfactory. Not only did Bristol arrive late and terminate their interview early, but despite Hosford’s protests, he stood by his conviction that the Marsovan Greeks were part of a seditious organization. Bristol also stated his current soapbox opinion that missionary work should be carried on with no religious tone whatsoever. Hosford forwarded the State Department an account of this interview.⁷⁸ He then immediately wrote up a further memo that called for the admiral’s replacement, arguing that Bristol was “so strongly pro-Turk” that he was not only unfair to the Christian minorities, but failed to give Americans in Anatolia the sympathy, support, and protection they warranted.⁷⁹

Hosford was not the only person to seek Admiral Bristol’s replacement, by the way. About this same time, no less dignified a trio than William Peet (the missionary head in Constantinople), James Barton (the national secretary of the American Board), and Charles Vickery (national secretary of the Near East Relief) sought to have Bristol removed from Constantinople. However, the admiral’s position was never seriously threatened.⁸⁰

In the detailed report Gertrude Anthony submitted at about the same time Hosford did, she did not criticize Bristol. Indeed, she partly credited one of the admiral’s protests with preventing a massacre at Samsun.⁸¹ Bristol, in turn, voiced some respect for this “level headed” woman, and on one occasion in 1922 he spent considerable time explaining to her the “complete picture of Turkey,” that is, what the Armenians and Greeks had done that had drawn down the Turkish wrath. Right after the Marsovan events, when former Marsovan physician Jesse Marden had called on him, Bristol had also explained the “causes that produce the effect” to him. The underlying causes Bristol named to this man were the policies of the Allies and of Greece.

Bristol’s complaint about both Anthony and Marden was their insularity, that they did not see beyond the local conditions, but were being governed solely by their knowledge of the small locality they knew.82 In this connection, when Carl Compton called on Bristol in Constantinople in July of 1922 (he and Ruth had stayed with their orphans for a whole year), he was astonished to find that, despite hearing from both Hosford and Anthony, Bristol was skeptical that there had been a massacre at all: “Did you, with your own eyes, see anyone being killed?” Here (as elsewhere, with Bristol) it seems that screams, gunshots, crying, despair, disappearances, mass looting, tales of rape and killing, multiple fires, and sights of wagonloads of hundreds of bodies (dead or alive) being dumped in mass graves counted for virtually nothing.

Bristol was no doubt right to beware of exaggeration, of course (he had certainly heard plenty of it in his three years in Turkey), but he seemed chronically unable or unwilling to recognize the real thing. In a memoir written sixty years later, Carl Compton pointed out dryly, “The High Commissioner and some other Americans who had never been outside Constantinople or Smyrna had great sympathy for the Turks.”⁸³ Compton thereby implied that it was Bristol in his comfortable diplomatic and pleasant social life on the beautiful Bosporus, rather than the relief workers and missionaries daily facing the terror and tragedy of emergent Anatolia, who suffered from insularity.

From September of 1921 on, Admiral Bristol had to confront many even more ominous reports, especially from his destroyer captains at Samsun. In early September, a destroyer commander reported in his war diary that fifteen hundred women and children who were from nearby Greek villages and had recently been living in the city were now being deported. He also said that he had heard reports (which he believed) from the American tobacco men that deportation of some six thousand women and children from the Baffra district was well under way. To be sure, at about the same time, a Greek band of nearly a hundred had attacked a Turkish village eight miles away, killed some villagers, and burned their houses. A similar Greek raid seems to have taken place in early October.⁸⁴

At one point, Admiral Bristol sent the cruiser St. Louis to Samsun, apparently as a show of concern for the Black Sea Greeks. In command was Captain Bill Leahy, later a famous admiral. The Naval History and Heritage Command

U.S. Naval Institute Photo Archive

A couple of weeks later, Bristol sent Capt. Bill Leahy and the cruiser St. Louis to the Pontic coast, perhaps as a brief show of American concern. (It was very unusual for Bristol’s one assigned cruiser to leave Constantinople.) Leahy reported that the ethnic Greek males from the Samsun tobacco warehouses were all gone, that their wives and daughters were in constant terror of being sent out too, and that the foreigners there believed the Turks intended to eliminate the Greeks entirely. At the end of his paragraph, Leahy commented, “I could take and hold the city indefinitely with the force and guns available on the St. Louis.” As an exception worth noting (particularly in light of the terrible events in Smyrna later, but also in reference to the events that had occurred over months in Samsun and elsewhere in the Pontus) here was one senior American officer willing to contemplate military action to set things right.85

In mid-November, Cdr. Webb Trammell of the destroyer Fox (he had recently relieved Commander Joyce as the ship’s captain) told Bristol that seven hundred women and children who had earlier fled to the hills had just returned to the city (from fear of the approaching winter). Now they were being fed by the Near East Relief before their own deportation. The NER head asked the Turkish governor to let them keep the two to three hundred children among the seven hundred, but he refused. After this group was sent out, Trammell found that five hundred more ethnic minorities were being held in prison prior to being deported, too. Their crime? Some member of each of their families had escaped a deportation convoy.⁸⁶

Fox then spent considerable time in Russian waters, but when his ship returned to the Pontus in April 1922, Trammell reported yet another thirteen hundred Greeks being sent out from Samsun, mostly women and children, but also a few old men. The Near East Relief issued these people rations for the road. Some of these deportees were “so weak they could not walk out to the truck for their bread.” Somebody found some carts, and they were sent out, too, except for twenty-seven orphans that the NER took in.⁸⁷ And so on. (In May, Harry Pence, captaining McFarland, found deportations of fifty males occurring from Trebizond twice a week; only five hundred minority males were left there. No women and children had been deported so far.⁸⁸)

As for events anywhere inland, even American authorities did not always have immediate, firsthand knowledge. Back on November 7, 1921, the State Department had to ask other agencies what they knew about the reported massacres in Marsovan, over three months after the events themselves. Though he knew nothing of Marsovan, Near East Relief foreign secretary Charles Fowle passed on to Allen Dulles several reports about the Samsun atrocities, including one from transportation worker Stanley Hopkins, who three times from September to October had traveled the several hundred miles between Harput and Samsun by automobile. (Hopkins had been on relief or mission work.) On the first trip he had seen an estimated 12,000 deportees on the road, consisting (it appeared) of entire families and villages; the people were regularly being robbed and mistreated, he reported, and moving so slowly they would probably not reach safe harbor before the winter snows. On the second trip he passed groups of feeble old men from Samsun being pressed to march thirty miles a day. Many corpses of both sexes were lying on the roadside.

On the third journey Hopkins passed several other groups, one of them composed of women alone, most of them shoeless, many carrying babies. “A driving cold rain was falling . . . they had no protection whatsoever and their only place to sleep was the wet ground.” He estimated that on this last trip he had passed ten thousand Greek deportees and pointed out that the deportation was a general one, and was not limited to the Black Sea coast. Also in Hopkins’ report and in another attachment to Fowle’s letter were reports of earlier massacres of Greek males near Kavak, a village just inland from Samsun. An American destroyer captain reported 550 Greek men had been shot near there on June 26. (Some had escaped.) Hopkins had also heard a report of thirteen hundred Greeks near that village on August 15th having been “shot down by fire of Turkish troops.”89

And, in fact, despite some limitations to his knowledge, Admiral Bristol was able to draw very strong conclusions. In January 1922 he wrote Henry King (the former cohead of the King-Crane Commission) that the Turks had “killed people indiscriminately” and generally persecuted the Christians throughout the Pontus. “I don’t think there is any doubt that the Greeks have been pretty well cleared out of the whole region and deported to the interior and the villages wiped out.” He cited as justifying causes the Pontus society, the many Greek bands in the area, and (again) various Greek atrocities for which these Turkish actions could be understood as reprisals.

However, in this letter to King (as seldom elsewhere) he did admit that “horrible massacres” were being committed throughout Turkey.⁹⁰ In other letters, however, Bristol showed himself very much out of touch. For instance, he informed relief worker Stanley Kerr there was some measure of military justification for the deportations (possibly true), “especially if they are carried out without committing atrocities or submitting the deportees to unnecessary hardships”⁹¹—as if there were no precedents indicating what habitually happened when Christian minorities were “sent into the interior” in Turkey. Bristol here was also belying his own oft-repeated statements about the “well-known character of the Turks,” that is, how “the Turks will rob, pillage, deport and murder Christians whenever the opportunity is favorable,” or about the “horrible atrocities committed by the Turks,” a picture of which “is as horrible as you desire it painted,”92 and so on and on. Like many others, the admiral had originally thought an American mandate was the answer. After those hopes evaporated, Bristol constantly preached that Americans (such as himself) should attempt to influence Turkish (and Christian minority) behavior by moral suasion. Thereby he manifested a great naiveté of his own.

And at the same time he was writing King about the “horrible massacres,” the admiral was sending his commercial attaché to Angora, seeking various concessions. On separate occasions, Bristol and Commercial Attaché Julian Gillespie told the Nationalist foreign minister that they knew that subordinate officials sometimes failed to carry out wishes of the local government, or that troops simply got out of control.⁹³ Thus, by attributing excesses to the actions of subordinates, the American officials essentially gave the responsible authorities in Angora a free pass.

Over the winter, few Americans traveled far in interior Anatolia, limited as much by Nationalist travel prohibitions as by the weather itself. Sometimes they heard little from Americans there. Moreover, Bristol and the State Department—and the Near East Relief, too—had a policy of keeping private any embarrassing or damaging reports they did receive. That any adverse publicity might offend the Nationalists and interfere with future diplomatic and especially commercial relations was no doubt one motive. On their part, relief authorities worried that such negative publicity might incline Turkish officials to interfere with their relief operations.

What kinds of things were being hushed up? At the personnel house in Trebizond, relief director J. H. Crutcher heard a terrifying report from two Greek women who were begging food. Turkish officers and soldiers had entered the village where these women lived, packed up all their belongings, and marched them to the central village of Jevislik.⁹⁴ The men and boys from eleven up were then marched off and were not heard from again. However, the women personally witnessed seventeen men decapitated, and their heads strung on a long stick. Three children about ten were also killed before their eyes, and four young girls were taken to be raped and eventually put to death. This story was corroborated by other refugee accounts, and Crutcher had heard other similar stories from the surrounding villages.⁹⁵

The Jevislik incident had occurred around February of 1922, but Crutcher did not pass this information on to Constantinople (via Commander Trammell) until July, and even then he asked that it be treated “confidentially.” (Bristol of course would make sure it never saw the light of day.) Meanwhile, in May, on the occasion of an American writer visiting the area and threatening to report what he knew, Crutcher reassured local Turkish authorities that “conditions were excellent and there was not the slightest ground for any articles being written on Turkish atrocities.”96 And so the cover-up—and complicity—proceeded.

In late March F. D. Yowell and physician Mark Ward, the directors of Near East Relief at Harput (in the deep interior of Anatolia) reached Beirut, having been expelled from Harput under police guard. In a brief report, they explained to Consul Jesse B. Jackson at Aleppo that they had been in the center of the deportation miseries and had seen terrible things. Some twenty thousand Greeks had come through Harput, they said, two thirds of whom were women and children. Yowell and Ward had carefully estimated that some 14,000 people had died somewhere along the deportation routes, primarily from starvation, exposure, typhus, or dysentery. Of course, these poor people had also suffered many atrocities en route. Turkish authorities in Harput had been frank about their intention to have all the Greeks die. Consequently, they not only failed to supply any food or clothing themselves, but strongly opposed (though they did not always prohibit) the Near East Relief’s attempts to feed and shelter the suffering.⁹⁷ From reports that reached him from elsewhere in Anatolia, Ward would later conservatively estimate that a hundred thousand Greeks had been driven out of their villages toward the south or east.⁹⁸

When Ward and Yowell traveled on to Constantinople in early May of 1922, they met with Admiral Bristol and let him know they intended to speak out about what they had seen. Back in mid-1921, Arnold Toynbee had visited the Yalova district and then come to Admiral Bristol to tell him how “wrought up” he had been over the Greek persecution of Turks that was happening there. The admiral had assured the British writer he would have the American press representatives in Constantinople contact him to make sure his information was made public.⁹⁹ Now, however, Bristol advised the Americans, Ward and Yowell, against their publishing anything. Not only would their information just be used as “propaganda,” but in his opinion such reports were the cause of the Christian subjugation in Turkey in the first place. Yowell responded that he felt himself under a necessity to state the facts just as he saw them, and to make them widely known.¹⁰⁰

Actually, the day before Yowell’s meeting with Bristol, an extraordinary action had already occurred among some of the Americans in the city. As has been noted, the Constantinople office of the Near East Relief had thus far kept such stories under wraps, for otherwise (it was feared) Turkish authorities might interfere with their orphanage work. However, the information provided by Ward and Yowell made it clear that “conditions have existed in Harput which are similar to the conditions that existed in the interior in 1915”—in modern terms, we would say that what the admiral and others were hushing up was, in fact, genocide. Having come to some such opinion (though not using that term), Harold C. Jaquith, the Constantinople NER director, decided not only to allow Ward and Yowell to place their reports in government files (giving copies to Bristol and the State Department), but he also officially consented to the publication of “such news material as may possibly awaken the conscience of the American people.” After all, he seems to have thought, what was the Near East Relief trying to do but to aid the suffering . . . but if the suffering were mostly dying by Turkish design or (in the case of the men, especially) being killed outright, what was the point?

By whatever logic he came to his decision, on May 2 Jaquith convened a meeting of the local NER administrative committee (which included Professor George Huntingdon of Robert College, a Mr. MacCallum who I believe was a local relief worker, William Peet, and the regional relief official, E. A. Yarrow, just in from the Caucasus) and found they were all in agreement on such publicity. Jaquith wrote his NER boss, Charles Vickery, in New York that by the time Vickery received his letter, the Ward and Yowell articles would probably already be published (by British papers). Jaquith told Vickery that he was destroying all reference to his letter in the Constantinople Near East Relief files and was also scrubbing the minutes there.101

Ward and Yowell might have published their reports anyway, but this endorsement by Jaquith and the other chief NER authorities in Constantinople was strong support indeed, and a courageous divergence from the obvious wishes of the dominating, often scowling American high commissioner. The reason the two NER workers went to the British to get publicity was Bristol’s cover-up policy that he announced to them on May 3; Ward said as much to Bristol a few weeks later.¹⁰² A report of Yowell’s story was printed in the London Times on May 6, 1922. This publication provoked alarm and dismay in both America and Britain.

Furious, Bristol branded it all variously as propaganda or old news or the fruit of personal spite,¹⁰³ and he had lots of sychophantic help. Chicago Tribune reporter Larry Rue (working in Constantinople) assured Bristol he had already resisted pressure to get the Yowell reports in print and instead would do what he could to get the “true facts” in the papers at home. Constantine Brown of the Chicago Daily News assured his eminent friend that, if called for, he would argue that the London Times material was propaganda, and he would also make sure to send his own paper the “news” coming out of Angora (that is, one guesses, the Nationalist propaganda).¹⁰⁴ Meanwhile, in Angora Turkish papers eagerly cited the refusal of these two reporters to take the stories (and another reported refusal of the Associated Press representative in Constantinople) as evidence that the material was wholly without foundation. The Turks had other help, too, or at least said they did. They quoted Bristol’s commercial attaché Julian Gillespie as saying that Yowell’s statement was “nothing but a repetition of old lies,” and they also cited Florence Billings, relief representative in Angora, who chipped in her bit. Billings telegraphed Bristol on May 22 that there were no massacres in Harput, this despite the fact that no massacres per se had been alleged in the Ward and Yowell reports.105

The Nationalist minister of the interior did even better in terms of propaganda than representatives of the American press. Along with several other absurdities, he contended that while, of necessity, some Christians had been sent into the interior, it had all been done in a very orderly way and the Christians had been set free there. Indeed, the sick and feeble among the deportees had been taken care of by the government and were even now sending money to their families.¹⁰⁶

Despite such denials, and notwithstanding the kindred success of the U.S. State Department in keeping Yowell’s statements mostly out of the American press (their statements did eventually get into the Christian Science Monitor), Ward and Yowell’s accusations were painstakingly accurate.¹⁰⁷ Ward’s diaries listed the numbers in each group that came through Mezerah (neighboring Harput) from May through December of 1921, along with their origin and destination and the treatment each group received. In all, there had been over twenty thousand refugees who came through the city, in groups of hundreds or a few thousand, spoken of in diary entries like this one:

Dec. 13.

Fourteen hundred deportees arrived today. They originally came from Ordou, Kirasoon, Amalia, Sparta, Mordour, and Endenish. . . . They were more than 2500 when they left Cesarea but many died on the way from starvation and cold. They were all robbed on the journey so they were in terrible condition.

Later: In spite of their condition they were sent on three days later in the midst of a heavy snow storm.¹⁰⁸

Ward’s diary reported that some refugees were in relatively good condition for a while, but most were “half dead” or “very poor and needy” or “pitiable” before they were forced over the next mountain. The reliefers at Harput or Mezerah were sometimes allowed to give bread to refugee groups that would last as much as a day or two days, or even three or four (the Turks never gave them anything). But the refugees were usually weeks on the road.

Such pictures as Ward and Yowell painted were so fully corroborated by the Americans who had been in or near Harput, or Sivas, or Malatia, or Arabkir, and who chose to speak out (usually to government officials, less often to reporters) that it would be possible to compose a long descriptive litany of this “road to Calvary” of the Pontic Greeks, composed of reports from relief workers or missionaries such as the following from Bessie Murdoch and Edith Wood. Bessie Murdoch, writing of a group of a thousand near Arabkir in the late fall, 1921, who she saw being herded toward Harput: “It was a sight that one can never forget to see middle-aged and old women and men, to say nothing of the younger women and children, carrying on their backs large loads of bedding, food and fagots, and in their hands pots and kettles and perched upon their load a child . . . the storm which was brewing in the early morning on the mountains, soon developed into a blizzard . . . the roads were left strewn with their dead bodies the next day.”109 Or the following from Edith Wood, on the road from Samsun to Harput: “It took me fourteen days’ constant travel to get from Malatia to Samsun. . . . Bodies lay along the roadside and in the fields everywhere. There was no hope for the Greeks from Malatia to Samsun, and the most fortunate were those who perished at the start.”¹¹⁰

Some of these same missionaries or relief workers got ill with typhus themselves, as they dressed frozen hands or handed out bread to the deportees.

Several relief workers went out of their way to visit Allen Dulles or other officials at the State Department when they came to the United States. Gertrude Anthony, for example, handed her highly specific, fifteen-page report about the massacres at Marsovan directly to officials at State in case Admiral Bristol had not forwarded it, and the admiral apparently had not.¹¹¹ As a result, Dulles got a strong sense of the real state of things. As he wrote Bristol,

If we could state that the stories of Turkish atrocities were unfounded or even grossly exaggerated, it would make our position easier, but unfortunately the evidence, even though it be from prejudiced witnesses, has not been refuted, and I am afraid it cannot be. It is not a satisfactory answer to the Christians in this country that the Greeks and Armenians have also been guilty. They ask whether the Christians can be blamed after what they have suffered at the hands of the Turks. I write you this so that you can fully appreciate our position here.¹¹²

Still, the State Department followed Bristol’s lead in resisting any formal investigation, and, in fact, though the various foreign powers negotiated about an investigation for some time, none ever took place.

Not every American reporter toed the Bristol line, and some news did get printed in the United States. Just after the Yowell story was published, Henry Gibbons, visiting Trebizond reportedly on his way to visit Yowell in Tiflis,¹¹³ apparently got news about that terrible refugee cauldron at the village named Jevislik from the aged Trebizond missionary, Mrs. Crawford. Mrs. Crawford had become particularly distraught, for not only had thousands of Greek adult males been “deported” from the city (probably all shot), but authorities had just rounded up the boys from eleven to fourteen. Included was a Greek lad who had been in her household since childhood. To Mrs. Crawford, Gibbons seemed a heaven-sent messenger.

The local NER director (and longtime American missionary) Crutcher failed to convince Gibbons to drop his story. (Crutcher complained that it would cause complications with the local Turks.) Gibbons, who had written a book on the 1915 deportations, had already heard far too much, and he was out of anyone’s control. On return to Constantinople he also was to bypass Bristol and file his story through the British. In that story, he not only told of the thousands of Greek men being sent forever into the “Moloch jaws” of Jevislik, but also spoke of several Turks protesting this inhuman action. One Turkish hodja, for example, was reportedly so moved by the plight of the Greek boys that he went to the director of the area’s schools, suggesting that, as he knew Greek, he could open a school for these boys. According to Gibbons, the director became furious: “What, when we are working to destroy these people, would you keep them alive?”114

This story appeared in the Christian Science Monitor on May 31, 1922. Sometime later Gibbons met nurse Edith Wood and filed her story, too. Wood had been in Malatia, where the Americans had been allowed to take in and care for the Greek orphans over the winter (something she said had not been authorized in Harput). The children came to Edith in the very last stages of exposure and starvation, however. Even of those who passed the simple test for admission—to be able to stand food and washing—from four to seven children died each day. “The children would often be gone before I had taken their names,” Wood reported. Dozens of Greek women passed away each day, as well. Meanwhile, according to Wood, the Turks were doing nothing at all for the deportees. In Malatia, bodies lay all about in the streets and fields, and no attempt was made to bury them. “And they receive us coldly in Constantinople when we want to tell what we know . . . and let it appear very clearly that my story is unwelcome and that I am a hysterical woman, exaggerating or falsifying—that is the way it is.”¹¹⁵

Finally, reporter John Clayton (representing the Chicago Tribune) would take a different tack. He would attempt to prove Yowell right or wrong by traveling into the interior himself. In early summer of 1922, Clayton traveled from Samsun toward Harput, and as he traveled via American missions like the one at Malatia, he heard tales of terrible cruelty. As it was summer, though, he found himself “almost persuaded that this smiling country with its wonderful views and broad vistas cannot be wicked.” However, with Harput almost in sight, Clayton glimpsed a large trench that had not been dug deeply enough to obscure the stench of decomposed flesh.

At Harput, the American relief workers he visited could not speak freely, apparently coerced by local threat. Too, like other reliefers, they had signed an agreement to say nothing of the deportations until out of service with the Near East Relief. By chance, however, Clayton discovered the location of a diary of a relief worker named Applegate, who had been in charge of food distribution at this mission. One night Clayton surreptitiously copied the diary, a catalogue of fifty-three refugee groups that had traveled through Harput from June 1921 to late May 1922. The diary fully verified the Ward-Yowell summations. (Indeed, the numbers of the different groups closely match extracts from Mark Ward’s diary, which Clayton apparently had not seen. Applegate’s diary did differ in that it continued on for the three months after Ward and Yowell had been expelled, for the deportations continued for months after the two men left.)116

Clayton then traveled on to Diarbekir. Somehow not under the restraint of Harput, the relief workers there freely described the terrible conditions of the camps in their area, details of which the reporter found absolutely unprintable. These Americans also praised their vali, or local governor, however, the “one humane figure” of all this story, said Clayton. According to a report that one of these Americans wrote, when the vali of Diarbekir saw the pitiable condition of the deportees, not only did he refuse to allow them to be herded further, but he called on the Americans to help. Even the Turkish gendarmes were subject to the Near East Relief in Diarbekir. When they were guilty of cruelty or extortion (as several were), a mere word to the vali caused their removal. Moreover, when Yowell had arrived from Harput, ignominiously under police escort, the vali immediately had him released and asked him to consider himself a guest of the city. Indeed, the vali went so far as to request (unsuccessfully) that Angora give Yowell an audience.¹¹⁷

When Clayton’s report reached Constantinople, although Admiral Bristol would argue (predictably) that the events could only be understood by those acquainted with the complicated background of the Near East, even he acknowledged the report’s accuracy. Besides the transcription of Applegate’s diary, Clayton’s report included poignant descriptions of the suffering of the refugees and of their captors’ inhumanity (apparently drawn from interviews), an excoriation of those responsible, and some estimates of the numbers of the dead. As just one indication of the terrible toll, Clayton found that only 10,000 refugees reached Diarbekir from the 17,000 that were driven on from Harput. (And of course many thousands of refugees had never got so far as Harput.) A reading of both diaries also indicates, by the way, that it was not just from the Pontus that the death marches had proceeded, but that they had also come from many other areas also under Turkish control.¹¹⁸

Clayton’s report also failed of publication, probably not so much because of Bristol’s predictable complaints, but because it was swallowed up in subsequent events. Worth noting, though, is Clayton’s assertion of an enormous irony. He pointed out that the Pontic Greeks had not suffered and died in the famine-afflicted areas of Russia. Instead, these refugees had starved and frozen to death not far from “the mythical location of the garden of Eden.”

CHAPTER 5

DEATH IN THE PONTUS