America’s Black Sea Fleet

In the late summer of 1922, things were going along pretty much as usual. The Bristols entertained on Scorpion and the destroyers continued their rounds of Black Sea ports. The grain ship relief to Russia was winding down, and since most of the local Greeks had by now been deported from the Pontus or massacred outright, even that controversy had quieted somewhat.

However, on the evening of September 3, while Edsall was anchored off Samsun, the city suddenly erupted with fireworks, rifle shots, and cheering, after which hundreds of people paraded the length of the city by lantern. Edsall’s officers were told the next day of a great Turkish victory on a broad front, at Eskishehir. The Greek army was retreating in complete disorder; it appeared to be the decisive battle of the war. One Turkish column was said to have advanced as far as the Meander River, about a hundred miles from the site of the Greek army’s original incursion into Anatolia: the city of Smyrna.

Though Edsall’s commanding officer, Cdr. Halsey Powell, continued shooting pheasant, touring orphanages, and talking to local relief officials (the local Americans said they were not uneasy during the shooting, for by now very few Greeks were left in Samsun!),¹ decisive events had, in fact, occurred, and cataclysmic events would soon follow. The Greek army would leave Asia Minor entirely (except for thousands of soldiers captured by the Turks), the great city of Smyrna would burn, hundreds of thousands of ethnic Greeks and Armenians would be expelled from Turkey, and untold tens of thousands would ultimately lose their lives.

The standard work on the burning and evacuation of Smyrna is that of Marjorie Housepian Dobkin in her fine 1971 book, The Smyrna Affair (titled Smyrna 1922: The Destruction of a City when published in London in 1972), since reissued with a new introduction.2 Not only is that book the only comprehensive study of the burning of Smyrna, but also one of its exceptional features is the author’s thorough exploration of all the most important American naval documents. These are vital reports, because American naval officers and enlisted men were ashore in Smyrna virtually throughout the crisis, as was an American relief team sent by Admiral Bristol, and soon after the event both naval officers and civilian officials recorded in detail what they had seen and experienced. (One should also note, by the way, that Dobkin manifests a very good understanding of the American Navy, whereas other scholars who otherwise write very well about Smyrna—like Giles Milton, in his 2008 book Paradise Lost: Smyrna, 1922, written from the standpoint of the Levantines and other residents—betray a lack of understanding of such fundamental things as the difference between a sailor and a marine.)³ Beyond official reports and published accounts of all sorts, Dobkin unearthed many additional recollections of American naval officers and enlisted men who had been at Smyrna, studied letters and other memoirs from American civilians who had been on the ground there, and by interviews, searched into recollections of people of various other nationalities who had been at the city, including refugees.

However, several additional accounts have been published in the forty years since Dobkin’s book appeared, other firsthand documents have surfaced, and additional perspective and some corrections can be supplied.

I present below a new, continuous account of the Smyrna story, primarily from the American naval perspective, one that is necessarily much briefer than Dobkin’s book and much more heavily centered on the American Navy throughout. I base this narrative primarily on a fresh reading of firsthand documents in American archives and libraries, but I have also reexamined Dobkin’s own account and those of many others, and have considered books, articles, and some memoirs published since Dobkin’s book was prepared. Focusing particularly (although not exclusively) on reports by naval officers and other American officials, in the limited space of this chapter I will narrate the story chronologically, in the process sketching the roles American naval and civilian officials took on, discussing their key decisions, recording their overall views as to what had happened, and connecting all these events with what had occurred before and with the actions and opinions of Admiral Bristol back in Constantinople.

Meeting Hepburn in Smyrna were destroyer captains John Butler Rhodes (commanding officer of Litchfield) and Harry Knauss (CO of Simpson), along with Bristol’s current intelligence officer, Tip Merrill. Hepburn was briefed that much of the Greek army had been evacuating by troopship, but some Greeks were fighting a rearguard action nearby, an action that Lieutenant Commander Knauss and several others immediately went off to observe. Greek army troops were reportedly torching all the cities along the line of their retreat, committing a host of atrocities as they went. Also, ethnic Greek civilians from the interior were thronging the roads into the city, many of them reportedly furious that the Hellenic army had forced them to leave their homes behind and then burned those same homes, although some said these civilians were committing atrocities themselves.⁵ Throngs of pitiable refugees either walked along or rode wagons, donkeys, mules, even camels. Confusion was “indescribable.” Dead animals, sewing machines, and baby carriages lay alongside the road.⁶

Knauss sighted the maneuvers of the opposing forces, ducked a few bullets, and quickly returned to Smyrna. The town itself he found orderly, though refugees and soldiers were flooding the famous large quay and hurriedly boarding the few Greek ships still dockside. Several horses had been turned loose on the city’s streets, while pack saddles, trunks, and other debris cluttered the harbor’s waters.7 Residents mostly remained in their homes. More of those residents might have left Smyrna except for a Turkish rule whereby one’s property reverted to the government if one “abandoned” it.⁸ In the early hours of September 9, cafés and stores were well patronized. Older residents, however (who Hepburn thought would best have known what to expect), manifested a nervousness verging on panic.⁹

Besides the American consulate, a stone’s throw from the waterfront, and the YMCA, a couple of blocks away, American institutions in Smyrna included the YWCA buildings and courtyard several blocks into the city; a girl’s school called the American Collegiate Institute, which was located in the heart of the Armenian district; the International College, a ten-acre campus three miles south of Smyrna, located in the suburb of Paradise; and the Standard Oil tanks and storehouses on the north side of the bay. It was to these several sites that Hepburn parceled out his meager shore patrol forces, somewhere between hundred and a hundred and fifty men in all, and maybe fewer; he had to leave smaller sites unguarded.¹⁰ Consul Horton had directed Americans (including naturalized Americans—at the time, a great distinction was regularly made between American-born citizens and naturalized ones) who felt endangered to come to the Smyrna Theater, which was right on the quay near the consulate; for several days, this theater became American naval headquarters in the city. So far, only a few had come.

About 11:30 a.m. on the 9th, however, Hepburn heard shots and watched a stampede of refugees. A Turkish cavalry column had arrived. While marching down the quay with banners flying, this column was assaulted by an individual (some said it was an Armenian) launching a bomb or grenade. Return fire from the Turkish military downed six or eight people and cleared the street.¹¹ More and more Turkish army units entered the city as the day wore on.

Though storefronts soon shut up, Hepburn thought the initial panic had subsided quickly. Late that afternoon, he sought out the senior Turkish officer, who assured him order would be established as soon as possible. Coincidentally, a handbill was passed out promising execution for anybody killing a Christian.¹² However, Harry Knauss, now heading up the shore patrol, found that the Armenian quarter had quickly become infested with “shooting parties,” Turkish civilians armed with rifles and shotguns. There, according to the destroyer captain, “the real killing” had already begun. “On nearly every street were lying bodies of men of all ages and conditions, most of [whose] wounds were from rifles and close ranged shots as they were invariably shot in the face or in the back.” Knauss personally witnessed three executions that day.¹³

Map 7. Smyrna, including the American Institutions

Spurred by such activities, mobs of refugees began to push their way into every building that flew an American flag. By nightfall a thousand people had forced their way into the American Collegiate Institute, and five hundred were at the YWCA (with its large courtyard). The sailors guarding these places had their hands full just keeping additional refugees out. Although wholesale massacres were rumored, Hepburn found nothing that justified that description. Overnight, he heard occasional gunfire from his ship.14 Myrtle Nolan at the YWCA said gunfire was “incessant” during the day but also reported the night was quiet until about midnight. Then heavy rifle fire broke out nearby, followed by doors being broken down and buildings being looted, activities which continued for two hours. But she thought the days were worse than the nights.¹⁵

By the next day (the 10th), the Smyrna Theater was crowded with naturalized Americans, and Captain Hepburn began considering their evacuation. Rumors confused the situation. A hysterical Armenian priest reported the impending massacre of six thousand refugees in a churchyard, but American journalists who eagerly rushed to the scene returned “visibly disappointed”: the churchyard was all quiet.¹⁶ Lieutenant Merrill visited the Americans throughout the city and found them in good spirits, although he considered the “chicken-livered” refugees were all in a “blue funk.”¹⁷ That day Hepburn surveyed his officers and found that they had counted altogether only fifty-eight dead, and he projected estimates based on these figures.¹⁸ Apparently he did not talk to Knauss, who personally had counted over a hundred dead on that day and had watched four more people killed in cold blood.¹⁹

By now many more regular Turkish troops had arrived, and Vice Consul Maynard Barnes reported that both regular soldiers and officers were looting and killing. A reliable American had reported asking of a Turk whether there was security in the Armenian quarter. The Turk had responded, “Not for the Armenian.”²⁰ From the nearby Collegiate Institute on one of these early days, several people witnessed a woman who lived in a building across the street being surrounded by Turkish soldiers. The soldiers robbed her and tore her rings from her fingers. When they finished, one of the Turks stepped back and cut off one of her hands with his sword. She was never seen again.²¹

That night, fewer shots were heard, and Americans who gathered at the consulate the next morning thought that order had been reestablished, but an investigation discovered that bayonets and knives had simply supplanted guns. By day, looting and killing continued, and now Americans reported that Greeks and Armenians were being collected in groups by military authorities and being marched out of the city to face firing squads.²² Barnes wrote in his diary that Turks had taken all the bodies away from the important streets of the Armenian quarter, but then fifty more suddenly appeared. He also reported an estimate that, by nightfall, seven of ten houses in that part of the city had been looted, and many of their inhabitants had been killed.23 A sailor named Cahall told Knauss about watching over the wall of the American Collegiate Institute and seeing a family detained. A girl of fifteen was taken from her parents into an alley, after which her shrieks were clearly audible. The Turks returned, and before leading the parents away, one of them wiped a bloody knife on the mother’s forearm.²⁴

In the Greek quarter, Major Davis found several hundred Turkish troops looting the houses. However, they acted quite courteously to the Americans, even politely pushing their loot wagons aside so the Americans could pass by.²⁵

Although Hepburn’s estimates for the 11th do not reflect the severity of the situation manifested in the reports of Barnes and Knauss, the captain still found the continuing disorder ominous; troubling too was the decision of the British, Italians, and French to evacuate their nationals. What should the Americans do? Hepburn had asked Merrill to arrange a meeting with the Turkish military governor so he could learn the attitude of the Turkish authorities.²⁶ The new governor was the same man, it turned out, who had orchestrated the widespread Pontus massacres and deportations: Noureddin Pasha.

According to a French account, the day before he met Hepburn, Noureddin had released Greek archbishop Chrysostom to a mob and urged them to murder him. They had immediately complied, after first ripping out the archbishop’s beard, gouging out his eyes, and cutting off his ears and his nose. According to the Turkish biographer of Mustapha Kemal, Noureddin’s giving Chrysostom up to a mob was a virtual “invitation to mob rule.”²⁷ Now, at the beginning of his conversation with the Americans, Noureddin wanted to make sure they had brought no “priests” along. To the general, the real villains were the American missionaries. Noureddin explained that he had closed Marsovan College because of the political propaganda he had found in the president’s letters, and because the Americans there had favored Armenians and Greeks orphans over Turkish ones. Red Cross official Davis assured the general that the Americans in Smyrna would give relief to anybody who needed it (Noureddin doubted that), and then Davis put Admiral Bristol’s position before the general, the admiral’s naïve views that the refugees should be restored to their homes immediately “under full protection to life and property.”²⁸

The general was adamant. Because of the atrocities committed by the Greek army during its retreat, were the refugees to return home they would all be killed. They should be taken away, instead. “Bring ships and take them out of the country. It is the only solution.” He promised that the Turks would let all the refugees go, and without interference.29 When Davis asked what would become of the refugees if they could not be evacuated (means were quite uncertain), Noureddin said that he did not know, and that he did not care, either; the Turks certainly could not feed them.³⁰ The general and his officers seemed much more interested in things happening outside their window than in refugee problems. Six thousand Greek army prisoners marched past, for instance, each unit of them shouting a well-coached “Zito Mustapha Kemal” (“Long Live Mustapha Kemal”). This was in imitation of the “Zito Venizelos” that several groups of Turkish prisoners had been forced to shout to the Greeks during the Greek army’s occupation of Smyrna three years before.³¹ Also fascinating to Noureddin was the superb appearance of his own Turkish troops. The general pointed out in great pride that, over three years, they had never tasted wine and had prayed five times a day. They also had ridden twenty-five miles each of the past ten days and were still in splendid condition.³²

Major Davis cabled Bristol his belief that, in the general’s insistence for the refugees to leave the country, he had heard the Nationalists’ final decision.³³ And in fact, he had. However, it took almost two weeks for anybody to implement Noureddin’s solution, and by then not only had thousands more refugees lost their lives, but the Turks had appended some devastating conditions to Noureddin’s suggestion.

Bristol’s urgent insistence that the Christians not flee the country but stay under Turkish rule no doubt inhibited Hepburn from taking early action.³⁴ Such a directive was characteristic of Bristol’s positions in earlier episodes (when he resisted the Armenians evacuating Cilicia), but the order was to become more and more injurious in the face of the actions and intentions of the Turkish troops (including, more and more, Turkish irregulars or bandit groups) as time went on. Other circumstances also played a part. For instance, Hepburn was not quite sure about Noureddin’s attitude. For several minutes during the interview, his American translator (a former missionary) had argued in Turkish with the general about Marsovan, and otherwise he did not translate literally enough for the captain fully to understand their discussion. Hepburn began seeking more cooperative views from other Turkish officials.³⁵

However, if the captain had consulted George Horton, America’s consul in Smyrna, ironically he would have heard the very same advice as Noureddin’s: get ships and take the refugees away. On the 12th, Horton was cabling the State Department: “There is one point which I wish to make very plain and to vouch for on my absolute knowledge and authority. These people can never return to their homes.” Horton knew the racial antagonisms and the Turkish modus operandi far too well to have any doubts—but now in addition to Turkish history immediately prior to 1919, there had been the three-plus years of the Hellenic Greek occupation of much of western Turkey and the very recent burning of Turkish villages by retreating Greek troops. After pointing out the devastation perpetrated by the Greek army on its retreat and mentioning Noureddin’s position, Horton concluded, “Here is then the big humanitarian task in which there is no reason, political or otherwise, that America should not take a hand.” He went on to outline a specific plan for assembling the refugees fourteen miles outside of Smyrna as a staging place for their evacuation—a plan that had already been drawn up by American relief workers at Smyrna, who also seem to have manifested considerable prescience as well as human feeling, unlike either Hepburn or Bristol.36

The consul’s years of experience and intimate knowledge of Smyrna should have been decisive. But if Hepburn heard Horton’s position, he discounted it, and there were reasons for this. On the day the Navy captain came to Smyrna, he noted that Horton “had about reached the limit of his physical endurance.”³⁷ Besides writing cables and trying to organize to protect Americans, Horton had been besieged for days by residents wanting visas and telling horrible stories. One old woman, for instance, came screaming to Horton, crying, “‘My boy! My boy!’ The front of her dress was covered with blood. She did not say what had happened to her boy, but the copious blood told its own story.”³⁸ Although his strenuous efforts were credited with saving hundreds of lives,³⁹ by this time the consul was near breaking down. Moreover, at the very end of the cable mentioned above, Horton undermined his own credibility by urgently requesting reassignment to another diplomatic post. In conversations with American officers, his frustration was also evident: to Harry Knauss he confessed he was “fed up” with the country.⁴⁰ Hepburn decided to send the consul to Athens along with the first refugees. Horton kept cabling, though, and his later cables do not betray the same personal consternation.

Horton’s departure would put diplomatic affairs into the hands of Vice Consul Barnes, an official with much less experience in the region than Horton, and with a very different outlook. Horton acknowledged many faults among the local Greek people but also pointed to their great industry, and he admired the comparatively civilized and praiseworthy regime of the Greek governor of Smyrna, the stern Aristedes Sterghiades.⁴¹ Some at the time disputed the nature of this Greek administration,⁴² but since returning to Smyrna in May of 1919, Horton was in position to know.

As for the Turks, the consul had not forgotten the deportations and massacres for which they had been responsible during the Great War, which he pointed out were the responsibility both of the government that had issued the orders, and, often overlooked, the people who carried them out. Besides the persecution of Armenians (most of which persecution did not occur at Smyrna itself), Horton pointed specifically to the forcible wartime exile from the Asia Minor coasts of 450,000 resident Greeks and noted that the Greeks who had been exiled had been an intensive agricultural class that, over generations, had produced a flourishing community.43 During their absence, however, “their villages and houses were all torn down by the Turks and their vineyards largely dug up and the roots of the vines used as firewood.” Since then, those Greek farmers were rebuilding their property and planting their vineyards, only to find them again “doomed to destruction.”⁴⁴ From such firsthand witness, and moreover, from his thirty years of experience in the Middle East, the consul would not be easily convinced that the habits of the Turks had changed overnight, nor that the Middle Eastern races were all alike (Bristol’s position). However, Horton was on his way out.

On the 12th, the day after Hepburn’s meeting with Noureddin, the officers of the merchant ship Winona watched through glasses as a band of Turkish irregulars chased six Greeks or Armenians to the water, shooting as they ran: “In order to make death sure, the Turks repeatedly bayoneted the bodies.”⁴⁵ Hepburn thought order could have been established “within two hours” had the Turks wanted to,⁴⁶ but today the captain was told that chettes (again, chettes were irregulars; bandits) had severely beaten the president of the American university (a British subject named Alexander MacLachlan) and an American chief petty officer, Louis Crocker. These men had also been stripped of their clothing, and MacLachlan had lost consciousness. They were saved from death by Chief Crocker’s coolness, the pleas of a Turkish student from the college who stepped in to help save MacLachlan, and the fortuitous arrival of a responsible Turkish officer.⁴⁷

About the same time, Knauss found that, in the Armenian quarter, it had become “the day of greatest slaughter yet.” Noticing a Turkish officer manifest particular interest in the refugees taking shelter at the Collegiate Institute, Knauss took care to keep the officer out till the refugees could all be hidden.⁴⁸ Barnes himself reported, “All semblance of public safety and order seemed to disappear in certain sections of the city.” Astonishingly, however, the vice consul blamed the refugees for much of this: “Many of those who lost their lives . . . might be living today had they been more responsive to the desires of the Turks and less positive in their opposition.”⁴⁹

On the Smyrna quay a couple of days later, the vice consul himself would see how little an Armenian’s attitude might matter to his fate. Circulating among the terrorized refugees on the quay were four or five groups of Turkish civilians armed with clubs covered with blood: “I saw one of these groups fall upon an Armenian . . . and club him to death. The proceeding was brutal beyond belief. We were within ten feet of the assailants when the last blow was struck and I do not believe there was a bone unbroken in the body when it was drug to the edge of the quay and kicked into the sea. In this group were boys [of] no more than twelve or thirteen years of age, each with his club, participating in this horrible killing as heartily as did the more mature individuals.” Stunned by this, Barnes admitted in his report what he now found indisputable—that the Turk was capable of a “vandalism essentially medieval.” But he quickly added in his report that, of course, all Eastern races were capable of committing atrocities.50

On the 13th, fires began being set in the Armenian quarter, near the Collegiate Institute. American sailors at the place believed they had been set to drive the thousand refugees sheltering there into the streets, thus offering further victims for attack and plunder.⁵¹ With a strong wind blowing from the southeast toward the quay and the rich European areas (and away from the Turkish district), the fire grew quickly. By 5:00 p.m. the blaze had become such a holocaust that it was clearly destined to reach the foreign consulates at the water’s edge.⁵² Every living thing—Greek peasants from the interior, local Greek and Armenian merchants, European residents, frantic horses and mules, and herds of sheep—fled to the waterfront. From there the refugees began to plead with anyone in the consulates or with sailors out in the warship anchorage to save them from the fire. But each country was busy saving its own.

On the early evening of the 13th, this was the spectacle as it appeared to Captain Hepburn on the stern of the Litchfield: “The broad waterfront street appeared to be one solidly packed mass of humanity, domestic animals, vehicles and luggage. Beyond, still separated from the crowd by a few short unburned blocks, the city was a mass of flame driving directly down upon the waterfront before a stiff breeze. Mingled with the noise of the wind and flames and the crash of falling buildings were the sounds of frequent sharp reports, such as might have been made either by rifle fire or the explosion of small-arms ammunition and bombs in the burning area. High above all other sounds was the continuous wail of terror from the multitude.”⁵³ The fire grew throughout the night. Lieutenant Merrill had taken a quick trip on a destroyer to Constantinople and back. The following scene presented itself to Merrill and the American Navy people as their ship entered the harbor an hour before dawn: “The entire city was ablaze and the harbor was light as day. Thousands of homeless were surging back and forth along the blistering quay—panic-stricken to the point of insanity. The heartrending shrieks of women and children were painful to [h]ear. . . . To attempt to land a boat would have been disastrous. Several boats tried it and were immediately swamped by the mad rush of a howling mob.”

Merrill thought those on the quay were lucky there was a sea breeze, or they would have been “roasted alive.” Four cars and two trucks parked at the doorway of the Smyrna Theater were burned to cinders. Packs belonging to refugees caught fire, “making a chain of bonfires the length of the street,” and if the pack on a horse’s back began to burn, the horse would stampede at top speed through the mass, flinging injury and death, and raising terror to yet another level.54 Barnes, who estimated there were two hundred thousand along the waterfront, found their shrieking and pleading unendurable. “Walled in by fire and water, [the refugees’] plight seemed hopeless,” he wrote. “Many threw themselves into the sea.”⁵⁵

A few of the latter were out of their wits, while others were forced off the quay by all the push and shove. Some plunged in on purpose to swim out to the ships, though apparently few actually reached them.⁵⁶ Those who swam to American and British warships on the 13th often found themselves unwelcome. The British actually poured hot water down upon many swimmers to discourage them.⁵⁷

Turkish soldiers shot others. Horrified American relief workers on board an American ship saw a man fling himself into the water and swim out toward them, only to have his head blown off by a Turkish soldier who had fired his rifle over the shoulder of a British “marine” (probably a sailor) standing on the pier.⁵⁸ Small watercraft of all descriptions attempted to load refugees and help them escape the fire, but many were capsized when a clot of panicked people jumped on board; one of these capsizings of a vessel the size of a large cabin cruiser took place right in front of an American destroyer, and existing photos show the capsizing in dreadful sequence (Those photos are framed in the foreground by an oblivious sailor working in a small ship’s boat flying the American flag.) Some peasants who had never been in the water before simply drowned when they fell into the sea.⁵⁹

On the 14th, Oran Raber (an American passenger on an Italian steamer, anchored out) saw his first floating body. He later pointed out it was an exaggeration to say (as some did) that there were so many bodies in the harbor that they blocked traffic. On the 16th, however, he counted ten bodies drifting by his ship in the space of a half hour. And “the ocean is big and human bodies are small.”

A large boat capsizes at the Smyrna quay from too many refugees rushing on board. In the foreground, an American seaman works on a ship’s boat belonging to Litchfield, from which this photo was taken. Thomas Kinkaid collection, The Naval History and Heritage Command

About this time, a Greek man who had left a hiding spot in a graveyard and made his way to the quay found so many bodies floating in the water that he thought if he fell in he wouldn’t sink, for the bodies would keep him from the water. He also noticed dozens of young Turkish boys swimming amongst the corpses, searching them for anything of value.⁶⁰

According to another report, several hundred refugees crowded onto a lighter alongside the quay, hoping somebody would tow them out into the harbor, only to have Turks cover them with oil or kerosene and burn them all to death. This event might seem incredible, yet separate reports about it came from several witnesses, including Emily McCallam, who saw some of the charred bodies; from a young Armenian woman who witnessed Turkish soldiers pouring the kerosene, after which the “raft” with its human cargo became a blazing torch;⁶¹ and from an Italian who told of witnessing the event in a letter he wrote the American secretary of state.

The latter individual was Theodore Bartoli, a businessman from Smyrna. In his letter, besides describing the lighter’s burning, Bartoli also expressed his gratitude to Secretary Charles Evans Hughes for the efforts of two American sailors who had helped him bury both his mother (who had been hit by a stray bullet while embarking on an Italian merchant ship), and his two sisters, who had committed suicide when Turks broke into their house, rather than be raped and killed. “What I saw, what I lived through during 25 days is horrible,” he wrote, “I saw young girls of 15 years to 20, have their throats cut at the seashore. I saw innocent adolescents have their eyes put out. I saw hundreds of refugees throw themselves into the sea, while they fled from the conflagration, finding a worse death. All this was accomplished before the eyes of the powers represented by officers [and] marines of the battleships anchored close by.” Equally bitter in later recollection was the young Armenian woman mentioned above who had seen the blazing raft. Not only did she notice the British pouring boiling water down on swimmers (she and her companions could see the steam rising), but, in addition, she saw that “the Americans were lined up on their [destroyer] decks, their movie cameras turning.” She was not the only person to react in disbelief at the latter sight.62

As the flames first started eating up the city blocks, officials at the threatened American institutions had collected American staff members and driven them to the consulate in trucks, leaving most native faculty and students behind. Dean Minnie Mills of the Collegiate Institute refused to leave her students, but sailors bundled her into a truck anyway. One American petty officer at the Institute played pied piper, with hundreds of native staff, students, and refugees attempting to stay behind him as he tried to find his way to the quayside consulate, which was, however, all the way across town. The way was blocked much of the time, and many of his followers lost their way.⁶³

By now, Hepburn had decided to evacuate naturalized Americans to Athens. Bound by Bristol’s orders to be neutral, “restricting naval activity to the protection of American lives and property,” he was holding the line there: only citizens. An American teacher named John Kingsley Birge reached Simpson by boat and Hepburn invited him on board, but finding the man had brought along some female Armenian students and teachers, the captain ordered all the latter sent back. A subordinate officer insisted that he would be sending these women to their deaths, and Hepburn finally gave in. He had the women sent below.⁶⁴

A bit later, ashore at the theater, Hepburn personally stood in the way of Birge’s wife Anna, who had brought along with her eight male Greek and Armenian students from the American college south of the city. When Captain Hepburn argued that these boys could not all be her children and insisted that only American families could be evacuated, Anna Birge convinced eight families standing nearby to “adopt” one lad apiece. With such a determined challenge to the captain, she managed to get her boys out to the Simpson and to collect them there.⁶⁵ About 7:45 p.m. on the 13th, just after Consul Horton joined the vessel, Captain Knauss ordered the Simpson under way toward Athens.⁶⁶

Also that evening, “on the score of humanity,” Hepburn put another two hundred American “retainers” on board the Winona, an American merchant ship still in the harbor. Having done so, Hepburn believed he had carried out his orders. The Navy men and the other Americans remaining on board the destroyers now had leisure to gaze at (and photograph) the terrible sight in front of them.67

To observers, the fire imposed itself frightfully on virtually every sense, and at almost any distance. The heat, for instance, could be felt on the destroyers though they had moved two hundred yards away from the pier to escape it. The screams of the frantic mob were oppressive at least a mile away.⁶⁸ To the naked eye, “an unbroken wall of fire, two miles long” was presented, one in which “twenty distinct volcanoes of raging flame are throwing up jagged, writhing tongues to a height of a hundred feet”—this according to British writer G. Ward Price, looking on from the quarterdeck of the British battleship Iron Duke.⁶⁹ The purser of the Winona would write that “the blaze was reflected bloodred on the calm surface of the water for more than two miles out,” and while his destroyer steamed toward Athens, Harry Knauss reported that the flames and the glow of the burning city were visible for over fifty miles.⁷⁰ Several days after the fire, ship passengers on the Sea of Marmara would mistake the huge clouds of smoke for a great range of mountains.⁷¹ They were 140 miles from Smyrna.

Of course the fire and the refugees’ terror were most horrific at close range. The terrible screams, in particular, made you want to do something, anything to help. Before the fire, American relief officials led by Jaquith and Davis had been doing their best to feed several groups of thousands of refugees. Now, watching in anguish from the decks of a destroyer, Major Davis and Mark Prentiss, a commercial attaché from Constantinople who had been sent to Smyrna as Bristol’s special Near East Relief representative, asked Hepburn to let them take a boat in. Perhaps they might move a large lighter over to the pier, put refugees on it, and tow a group to safety. Hepburn demurred; the Litchfield’s one motor sailor could hardly handle that lighter, and to put the small powerboat itself along the quay would merely invite disaster. Well, Davis continued, maybe Hepburn could get the French or British to send their many large boats to the rescue. (Again, those countries both had battleships present, not just dinky destroyers!) Not unwilling, but no doubt keeping in mind Bristol’s desire that the Americans go their own course and not cooperate with the Allies (nor displease the Turks), Hepburn sent Davis to offer the British this “delicate proposition.”⁷² Davis had no luck with the French, and at first the British admiral Osmand Brock also refused to do anything. He had assured Noureddin of Britain’s absolute neutrality, Brock replied. “He could not—and would not—allow his men to take part in the rescue of Greek and Armenian civilians.” However, the British chief of staff argued with such vehemence that Admiral Brock eventually changed his mind.⁷³

When he did, there was nothing half-hearted about the British response. Navy man Hepburn found the subsequent action quite moving: “It was evidently a squadron signal for ‘Away all boats,’ and the manner in which it was performed made a stirring spectacle. In spite of the lateness of the hour—well past midnight—it was only a few minutes after Major Davis’ return on board that the first boats came sweeping in, all pulling boats large enough to be of service as well as power launches, crews in uniform, and boat officers of all ranks from Captain to Midshipman.”74 The British “pulling boats” (oared launches) and powerboats began making a regular run between the ships in the harbor and the pier. Throughout the night and far into the morning, exhausted oarsmen would stop by Litchfield for rest and coffee before resuming their ferry work. They would put almost seven hundred refugees on Litchfield itself and others on the American merchant Winona, but they would load many more thousands on board European ships in the harbor till the latter could literally take no more. Together, they saved thousands; Dobkin estimates twenty thousand.⁷⁵

It had taken a while to get about it. After listening to all the screaming and watching people push themselves into the sea, Oran Raber judged it a lasting shame to all the nations present that they had not begun rescuing people during the afternoon, when the danger was already evident.⁷⁶ Even with the British effort, the rescue had barely dented the black mass of refugees ashore.

The next day, as the fire continued to rage, Hepburn transferred his seven hundred refugees to Edsall (just arrived from Constantinople with thirty tons of flour) and sent them on to Salonika, hoping they would find a welcome there. At the plea of reliefer Jaquith (note again the initiative being taken by American reliefers rather than Navy officials), Hepburn agreed to a further deviation from strict neutrality and put hundreds of orphans and various other refugees who had been under the protection of American agencies on board Winona, whose captain had signaled that his ship could take even more.⁷⁷ This vessel would eventually sail for Piraeus with almost two thousand refugees.

The same day, through glasses, Hepburn himself saw a man in civilian clothes apprehended by a squad of Turkish soldiers, handled brutally, searched, bound, thrown over the seawall, and shot. The impression of Americans ashore who talked to the captain was that every “able-bodied” Armenian man was being hunted down and killed.⁷⁸ On the other hand, some rumors were exploded. Two sailors contradicted accounts about Turks using machine guns to drive the refugees toward the flames. They had been surprised to see some Turkish soldiers leading refugees to safety on the “Konak grounds,” bringing them water and treating them kindly.⁷⁹

In their official reports and discussions with the news media (both at the time and later), Americans attempted to assess the cause of the fire. Several noted then or later that ethnic Greeks or Armenians had beforehand threatened to burn the city, were the Turks ever to take it,80 but no American seems to have witnessed the Christians acting on such threats. Several Americans (and several locals) did report seeing Turkish incendiaries. About noon on the 13th, a bluejacket at the Collegiate Institute drew Minnie Mills to the window to watch Turks setting fires in nearby houses. Together they watched regular Turkish soldiers in sharp uniforms carrying tins of petroleum into house after house. Soon after they left each building it would burst into flames.⁸¹ That night, two American sailors stationed in the Armenian quarter (they were serving as chauffeurs) witnessed Turks running down the street throwing oil-soaked rags in windows.⁸²

With the fire approaching the quay, Major Davis was standing in the doorway of the American consulate with the naval guard. He saw a Turkish soldier pouring a liquid in a long stream from the quay toward the fire. Davis tasted the liquid, and found it either gasoline or kerosene.⁸³ Barnes reported this same or a similar act near the consulate, and the next night he and Jaquith from the deck of a destroyer anchored not far off from the quay watched somebody take twenty minutes to fire the passport control office.⁸⁴ Though they could not identify the man, Turkish soldiers were stationed at the place and many were passing right by. Both Americans were convinced that whoever carried this out had to be in sympathy with the Turkish authorities.⁸⁵

Despite the witness of his own eyes, Vice Consul Barnes thought it illogical to conclude that Smyrna was destroyed by the Turks. And even if individual soldiers had contributed, “surely it was not fired by the order of the authorities or with their cognizance,” he would argue.⁸⁶ In a message to Bristol a month after the fire in which the possibilities of future commercial relations with the Turks figured prominently, Barnes claimed that the majority of the Americans in Smyrna believed the city had been torched by the Armenians. However, by the time he wrote that letter, almost all the Americans who had actually been at Smyrna during or just before the fire had long since left the place.⁸⁷

Bristol’s intelligence officer, Tip Merrill, radioed to Bristol on September 14 his belief that the Turks had burned the city to get rid of the Christian minorities.⁸⁸ Others thought the Turks’ motive was to hide evidence of looting and murders.⁸⁹ An American who was convinced the Turks had burned the city was Major Davis, the Constantinople Red Cross chief, who had been in Smyrna from the moment the Turks arrived. He reported that there was only one authentic case of an Armenian using a bomb on Turkish troops (probably he was referring to that initial attack), and he said the looting only began when the Turks were well established. Back in Constantinople, Davis also described the “vigilance” committee of Turks with red armbands pillaging madly and shooting right and left, and the marching of gangs of civilians into the interior. Davis reported he had been refused Turkish permission to visit outlying Greek villages (apparently also consumed by fire) to see if help was needed. Therefore he refused to believe that the Greeks had burned them up.90

Despite such American witness, officials like Captain Hepburn and Vice Consul Barnes remained convinced that the Armenians had probably set the fire. Hepburn based his conviction partly on the denial of responsibility on the part of Turkish authorities in Smyrna (denials that he and others somehow found credible), and partly on the great savagery the Turks had manifested toward the Armenians afterward—as if Turks had never savaged the Armenians without specific provocation before.

Hepburn thought Merrill’s notion, that the Turks might have fired the city so as to rid the country of non-Muslims, was far-fetched.⁹¹ However, the latter motive—like the plowing of the Christian graveyards at Marsovan—could have been, by now, simple habit. In 1919 at Samsun, an American naval officer had reported seeing the Greek and Armenian villages practically wiped out there, the villagers having all been driven into the interior by ethnic Turks during the Great War. Not only were their houses burned and leveled, this officer had reported, but “even in some cases the trees were cut down so as to make the destruction of the villages more complete.”

Who had reported such thorough attempts permanently to rid the area of the Christian minorities? Hepburn’s boss: Mark Bristol.

That the motive behind the Turkish destruction of Smyrna by fire was to rid the country of the minorities for good has recently been argued by a Turkish scholar, who takes an unusual slant on the vexed issue.⁹² Really, though, in the face of the Turks’ overwhelming power in Smyrna, especially after several days of brutal Turkish occupation, the notion that an organized body of Greeks or Armenians could have found the freedom to start, restart, and spread the fires (still sometimes argued in print and often on the Internet) seems simply absurd. As Consul Horton pointed out, “the Turks had been in full, complete and undisputed possession of the city for five days before the fire broke out.”⁹³ Even Barnes and Hepburn (who argued that minorities had set the fires) admitted that the Turks were culpable in the end, for they certainly could have kept order had they so desired—they had all the power. As Barnes put it, “the blame must ultimately rest upon the Turks.”⁹⁴

While the fire burned itself out, Hepburn once again began to walk the fine line of neutrality, though now for a different reason. He had increasingly (though very belatedly) come around to Horton’s and the relief workers’ initial opinion, that a massive international evacuation was the only answer to this awesome humanitarian tragedy. He wanted to get the Allies to endorse the idea and to help execute it. (Bristol was always insisting that the Allies take the lead.) Also, Hepburn thought the goodwill of the Turks essential to perform such an evacuation (by then it certainly was), and he feared to offend them.95 On Friday the 15th, Hepburn sent an officer south to the International College at Paradise (far from the fire) both to check on conditions there and to let the remaining Americans know that the naval guard would soon have to leave. Any Americans wanting to leave Smyrna would be taken away by destroyer. Once again, even though he had allowed exceptions before, Hepburn was insisting that only American citizens could be evacuated. Hence it happened that when a truckload of male Armenian students from the college was also brought along (the officials at the college believing that no one would have the heart to leave these young men behind), an angry Hepburn had them all sent back on the same truck.⁹⁶

Yet even as these students returned to Turkish control, which in the event meant death for most of them, as interviews with survivors were to indicate,⁹⁷ the number of refugees within sight of the ships had begun to dwindle dramatically, a phenomenon that had baleful implications not only for ethnic males, but also for young women of possible interest to the Turks. Although some of the refugees were being taken to camps a few miles inland, others were obviously being “conducted into the interior.” Merrill radioed Admiral Bristol on the 14th that, the way things were going, within a week there would be no relief problem, a chilling conclusion widely agreed upon by relief officials.⁹⁸ On the 15th, Barnes reported that maybe 40,000 had already begun “their grim march” inland.⁹⁹ Davis recognized that the new Turkish proclamation that all male Greeks and Armenians between the ages of eighteen and forty-five would be held as “prisoners of war” not only meant that combatants and noncombatants were to be treated alike, but since the Turks were judging ages, many males between fifteen and sixty would be seized as well.¹⁰⁰ The announced deadline for the evacuation itself produced great panic among the refugees, for posters proclaimed that, regardless of sex or age, anyone who was left after September 30 would also be deported.¹⁰¹

Despite reporting all this at a local Allied conference, Hepburn found he was getting no real cooperation. Frustrated, on the 16th Hepburn left for Constantinople to lay the great evacuation needs before Admiral Bristol.

The destroyer ride from Constantinople to Smyrna took about fifteen hours. At the embassy the next afternoon, Bristol talked with Hepburn and a few other eyewitnesses just returned from Smyrna. Each of them apparently had not only been greatly moved by the suffering, but also had been greatly offended by the atrocities he had seen the Turks mete out. European Standard Oil official L. I. “Irving” Thomas, for example, one of Mark Bristol’s closest friends, was to complain later that he had always been pro-Turk; now, however, after seeing the killing and brutality against the refugees on the Smyrna quay, he had no use for the Turks at all.102 Despite several such “indignant” reports,¹⁰³ Bristol remained unmoved. In December Henry King (of the 1919 King-Crane Commission) was to write Bristol and express sympathy. He supposed that Bristol’s involvement with Smyrna and the refugees must have been heartbreaking.¹⁰⁴ On the contrary, in Bristol’s September war diaries there is little indication that the tales of murder and terror and starvation and all the duress being suffered by the refugees at Smyrna had penetrated to the admiral’s psyche at all.

Instead, the admiral reported he was more and more coming to the position (despite his visitors’ horrible recital) that the loss of life at Smyrna was really rather small; he had actually expected the Turks to do much more than they had. Though the Turks no doubt set the fires in the Armenian and Greek quarters in reprisal for supposed or actual wrongs, Bristol thought the fires probably got away from them accidentally, and now, “like children,” the leaders were undoubtedly sorry for the loss they had caused themselves to sustain. He thought all the eyewitnesses from Smyrna were overwrought. Once emotions were calmed, everyone would realize that, comparatively speaking, Smyrna was a minor affair.¹⁰⁵

Moreover, although to his credit Bristol had sent several Constantinople relief people to Smyrna very early on, from the beginning of his conversations about the events there, he was adamant that the Greeks and Allies should take the initiative and bear the main evacuation responsibilities, because they had caused the refugee problems in the first place.¹⁰⁶ Back in 1920, when Bristol had heard from McCully that the Bolsheviks were overrunning the Crimea, Bristol had gone to general quarters and ordered under way every vessel he had. Now he dragged his feet. He purposely delayed meeting with the Allies about taking the refugees to safety, lest they try to get the Americans to lead.¹⁰⁷ Even after hearing his own chief of staff, fresh from the scene, call for a massive immediate evacuation, Bristol insisted on pressing the Allies to take their share.

In the American relief committee meeting on the 18th, the utterly patient missionary head William Peet finally grew impatient with Bristol’s rhetoric and pointed to the great needs of the present circumstances. Yes, of course, the admiral then admitted, America must take instant steps, and a general evacuation was the only thing to do. He claimed he had already ordered his destroyers to start. Despite their limited capacity, these ships would immediately begin shuttling refugees to islands in the Aegean Sea. Meanwhile members of the committee would seek help from the Armenian and Greek patriarchs and see about getting ships from Constantinople down to Smyrna.108

Simpson did take some refugees away from Smyrna on the 18th, and three days later, the Litchfield transported some orphans and college students and staff to Constantinople.¹⁰⁹ However, having once delivered its refugees, Simpson was not sent back to Smyrna. Embassy officials seem to have done virtually nothing toward getting American merchant ships down from Constantinople (though the British would soon commandeer and send down a number of British merchant ships), nor did the admiral bother to transfer to Smyrna any destroyers from the Black Sea ports, although his own records indicate some were available. American relief was winding down at Odessa, for example, and the officers on the station ship at Samsun were passing the time hunting more pheasant.¹¹⁰ In fact, there was no naval shuttle such as the admiral had promised. A final indication of the relatively casual attention Bristol paid to this truly unprecedented human tragedy is that once Chief of Staff Hepburn came back to Constantinople—with no evacuation in sight—Bristol kept him there.¹¹¹

At one point, some six hundred boys from an American orphanage were rescued from the Smyrna quay and taken to Constantinople by an American destroyer. Note all the white hats. Thomas Kinkaid collection, The Naval History and Heritage Command

American command in Smyrna thus passed to the next senior naval officer present, the commander of Edsall, Halsey Powell. On the 17th, the day after Hepburn left, Powell found that the deportations inland that had been observed before were still going on and now were being openly acknowledged by the Turks.112 Harry Knauss reported on the 18th (just before his destroyer left the port) that not only males but some women and children too were now were being driven toward the interior, and that measures were being taken to keep these deportees out of sight of the Americans and Europeans at the harbor.¹¹³ Meantime, such disorder was taking place on the streets away from the quay that it was often not safe for Americans to go into the city, even under guard.¹¹⁴ Knauss noticed a large number of bodies being stacked a block away from the consulate, and that in the city’s interior the smell of burning human flesh was clearly noticeable, something also mentioned by Powell.¹¹⁵ Major Davis’s report of the 19th recorded his belief that a Greek church was being used by the Turks as a “crematorium,” but it was blown up as he was on his way to inspect it.¹¹⁶ Meanwhile, the Turks had initiated a house-to-house search, looking for men of draft age, “making a good allowance on each side of the limit 18 to 45.”¹¹⁷ At the concentration camps inland to which many refugees had been herded, men were also being seized. After this, those camps were closed, and the refugees remaining there (now almost exclusively women, children, and old men) fled back to the city. Soon the numbers on the quay began to swell again.¹¹⁸

After the fire, American relief officials had been doing their best to continue to bake bread and distribute rations, but many obstacles hindered them, including the lack of water and fuel, the fire’s destruction of ovens and bakeries, and someone’s having turned off the water at the bakeries. Although the relief workers quickly got the baking going again,¹¹⁹ they became increasingly frustrated with military inaction: “We did what we could in the way of distributing food and medical aid, but it was sickening to see a dozen warships idly riding at anchor while the people on shore were dying of exposure or starvation,” recalled missionary doctor Wilfrid Post.¹²⁰ Commander Powell was frustrated, too. He would note on the 21st that if an evacuation did not take place in a very short time, there would be very few left to evacuate.¹²¹

Meantime, Major Davis and Commander Powell had met with Turkish patriot Halide Edib, now in Smyrna, to discuss the relief work taking place. On Davis bringing up the probable need for relief work in the interior, Edib went into detail about the Greek atrocities there, and, by the way, “took it for granted” that the two Americans understood that Smyrna had been burned by the Greeks and Armenians.¹²² Earlier, on his taking over from Hepburn, Powell had begun meeting with Turkish officials on another topic: the possible evacuation of the refugees. Powell, by the way, had been considering the chances of getting Turkish permission for Greek transports to enter the harbor ever since he had taken refugees to Salonika.123 However, when he got back to Smyrna he was told that Mustapha Kemal (the most powerful man in Turkey) “could not take the responsibility of allowing the Greek ships into Smyrna but would have to consult the Government at Angora.”¹²⁴ Eventually, Commander Powell and some of the Allies would get the Turks to agree on an evacuation. However, apparently nobody in authority had gone to the effort of talking to the Greeks about this. Consequently, for days, other than an occasional chartered British or Italian vessel, no transports appeared.

Not every American was content with doing relief work. Just after the fire, two businessmen named Archbell and Griswold found intact some three thousand tons of tobacco, organized a partnership, set themselves up as shipping agents, and solicited vessels to take the cargo. Though Powell passed the word on, he was careful to advise the two men that, until the refugee situation was handled, nothing but human cargo was likely to be shipped.¹²⁵ In this warning, at least, the commander had his priorities in order, unlike his boss back in Constantinople. Even as hundreds of thousands of refugees still stood or died in the stench of the Smyrna pier, and as the Turkish army was threatening Constantinople, Bristol would encourage Col. St. J. Greble to travel to Smyrna to pursue locomotive business with the Nationalists. And so he did. In other words, it appears that Admiral Bristol was already back to promoting business as usual.¹²⁶

And so it was that the initiative for dealing decisively with the disaster passed for a while from all the naval authorities in Constantinople or on the site in Smyrna to an American civilian who really did find the refugees’ predicament “heartbreaking.” The story that follows has been told before, but deserves telling again.

Asa Jennings was a YMCA “boys’ worker” (and an ordained minister) who had arrived in Smyrna with his wife and two boys only a month or so before the fire. He only stood five foot two but was “a bundle of nerves and energy.”¹²⁷ Although he had only been working in Turkey a short time, he immediately understood the dangers the Armenians faced. When he found an Armenian YMCA worker who was frantic about the Turks’ approach, Jennings hired this man as a servant for his family, and in this way enabled him to escape.¹²⁸ More significantly, during the fire and afterward, Jennings took the initiative to protect some of the most helpless among the refugees, despite the doubtful attitude of naval commanders. For instance, as the fire burned itself out, Jennings gathered into a house on the quay the many refugee women who were about to give birth.

Initially, Commander Powell worried that Jennings’ project would antagonize the Turks, particularly as the American sailors guarding the house were acting, as Powell called it, “irresponsibly.” The enlisted men there had allowed two Greek priests being chased by Turkish cavalry to enter the house for asylum. (Lieutenant Commander Knauss happened to be present, and he had the two doff their gowns and hats and duck out the back way.) However, eventually even Powell became infected by the American sailors’ sympathy, and later spoke approvingly of Jennings having gotten as many as four hundred refugees into that building.129 Several of the latter were young Armenian or Greek women American bluejackets or their officers had rescued from Turkish soldiers as the latter (or Turkish officers) were leading the girls down the street. Years later, Red Condon was to recall as a young American naval officer escorting fifty young Armenian women to a safe haven in Smyrna, probably to this very house. To protect them while en route, Condon and his fellows had the girls fashion their hair and dress as if they were children of eight, though they were, in fact, close to fifteen, and hence in substantial danger. The naval party succeeded in getting the girls to safety.¹³⁰

American sailors at Smyrna rescue a young Armenian woman in evening dress. According to the photograph’s caption, “She swam a mile out” to the destroyer to escape the Turks and the fire. Thomas Kinkaid collection, The Naval History and Heritage Command

Powell thought the Navy might be able to evacuate Jennings’ refugees, as long as all the Christian males (desperate men fleeing what were, essentially, death sentences) could be kept from barging into the place.131

As the days wore on, though, and more and more refugees returned from distant camps to the quay, and transports did not arrive (the British brought two ships in on the 19th that would take away a few thousand, but that just tantalized the great throng),¹³² Jennings found his soul increasingly tormented. “I have seen men, women and children whipped, robbed, shot, stabbed, and drowned in the sea, and while I helped save some it seemed like nothing as compared with the great need. It seemed as though the awful, agonizing, hopeless shrieks for help would forever haunt me.”¹³³ A religious man, Jennings frequently prayed, but he also acted. At one point, when a young woman was seen swimming near an American destroyer whose sailors would do nothing to save her—they explained that they could not act without orders, and their officers would not issue any (a prime example of the utter enfeeblement created by Bristol’s insistence on neutrality)—Jennings erupted: “Well, I’ll order it: push off that boat!” The sailors quickly rescued the girl.¹³⁴

On the 20th, Jennings awoke, determined to do something. Seeing a French ship anchored out in the harbor, Jennings decided to ask that vessel to take on some refugees and got Powell to give him a boat. The French captain refused. So Jennings climbed aboard an Italian ship called the Constantinopoli, which was moored at a wharf. Though this captain was also reluctant, shortly Jennings offered a sum (probably from relief funds) and the captain agreed to take a group. Now, would the Turks allow the evacuation? Yes, they would, he was told, but no draft-age males. Jennings and others worked all night. In the morning the Americans found a squad of Turkish soldiers delegated to scan the refugees as they boarded the vessel. Some minority men who had disguised themselves were detected right on the dock, and the grief of the families as the men were marched away was heartrending. However, as Jennings later pointed out, “It was either play the game as the Turks said, or not play it at all.”¹³⁵

The ship sailed the following afternoon with two thousand refugees. To help ensure all of them could be landed at nearby Mytilene, the ship’s captain had insisted that Jennings ride the ship there. Upon boarding, the relief worker could hardly make his way through the crowd. “They fell at my feet in gratitude. They kissed me. Old men got on their knees, kissing my hands and feet, tears steaming down their faces.” Jennings fought his way on to his cabin, fell onto his berth, and wept. Then he got down on his knees and prayed.¹³⁶

But the great rescue had not yet begun. About midnight, when the slow steamer finally sighted Mytilene (it is the capital city of the Greek island of Lesbos), the astonished passengers began cursing. There in the harbor, just a few hours’ steaming from Smyrna, lay some twenty Greek passenger ships, all riding high.137 These were the vessels that had recently transported much of the retreating Greek army away from the Turkish coast. After he landed the refugees, Jennings approached the Greek general Frankos who was present, described the terrible need, and asked if those Greek ships could return to Smyrna. The general wanted assurance that the ships would be protected. After all, the Turks had no navy. Would the Turks commandeer the vessels and then sail them off to capture all the Greek islands? The American’s oral assurance was not enough for the Greek general, so, boarding Litchfield (which Powell had ordered to go pick Jennings up¹³⁸), Jennings sped back to consult with Powell and returned a few hours later with a written authorization from the American commander. Not only had the Turks authorized the Greek ships to come, but American destroyers would accompany the ships into the harbor.

Frankos was still reluctant. Jennings again promised to ride the ships. But on Jennings pressing the issue—“Will you, or won’t you, give us these ships?”—Frankos still waffled.¹³⁹

Jennings stomped out, convinced the general would never agree. Then he noticed in the harbor what looked like an American battleship. And indeed it was . . . or once had been. Years before, America had sold the old Mississippi to the Greeks, and now the renamed and reflagged Kilkis stood anchored before him. With faith that somehow God would make things come right, Jennings found a boat to take him out to the warship. The ship’s captain agreed to help Jennings send a message to Athens. American citizen Asa Jennings had decided to go over General Frankos’ head and appeal directly to the Greek government.¹⁴⁰

The response of Athens to his initial message explaining the situation and asking for ships was, quite naturally, who on earth was Asa Jennings? “The head of American relief at Mytilene,” Jennings signaled back. And perhaps he was, though he was also the only American at the place. Another message from Athens announced that even though the cabinet was not in session, Jennings’ request had been submitted to the prime minister; a later reply said the prime minister would consult the cabinet at 9:00 a.m. the next day. In those messages and in the cabinet’s eventual response were several questions to which the answers were, in fact, quite uncertain. What protection would be offered the ships? Would the Americans fight if the Turks tried to take the vessels? The Greek cabinet (only a few days from its own fall) seemed even more cautious than the local general. Jennings negotiated back and forth by coded signal until four on the afternoon of the 23rd, but found himself increasingly frustrated.

Finally, recollecting all “those poor folks awaiting certain death there on the quay,” Jennings decided to try the last: an ultimatum. Unless the cabinet ordered the vessels to Smyrna, he threatened to wire openly without code to whoever might listen, that despite many American guarantees, the Greek government had refused to release their own ships to save tens of thousands ethnic Greeks facing certain death.141

It was an astonishing bluff, and even the captain of Kilkis (perhaps worried about his own part in this episode) attempted to get Jennings to go below and get some sleep.¹⁴² But Jennings stuck to his program. At about six that evening, he received this wire back: “ALL SHIPS IN AEGEAN PLACED YOUR COMMAND REMOVE REFUGEES SMYRNA.” Asa Jennings had just effectually been made an admiral in the Greek navy and placed in charge of a fleet of some fifty transports.¹⁴³

With such authorization, the problems that arose afterward were soon disposed of. Jennings agreed to several Greek conditions, including the stipulations that the ships be escorted into the Smyrna harbor by an American destroyer, that the Greek ships not fly their flags, and that Jennings himself would ride the first ship (even though the only thing he knew about ships was “to be sick on them”). Jennings also got the governor of Mytilene to agree to accept the refugees, to open a hospital and a warehouse, and so on—providing Jennings could provide the refugees food. The relief worker then returned to Smyrna (again he traveled on Litchfield—there seems to have been no other reliable way for Jennings to communicate with Powell than in person).¹⁴⁴ Once they checked things through on that end, Powell sent Jennings back to Mytilene again on Litchfield (which this time was en route to Constantinople, and dropped Jennings off along the way), to finalize the transport. When several of the Greek merchant captains announced they had developed engine trouble or needed more sailors or required additional provisions, the captain of Kilkis threatened to inspect every ship and prepare court-martial charges for any captain who was misrepresenting his vessel’s condition. In the end, ten vessels got under way on the 24th, with Jennings riding the lead ship. Having first stowed their Greek flags, they steamed toward Smyrna under escort of Lawrence.¹⁴⁵

When his fleet arrived at the harbor, Jennings was still on the bridge, a bit green from the journey, but able to appreciate the terrific vista. From one aspect it was the most desolate and fearsome scene he had ever witnessed: only smoking ruins where Smyrna’s handsome business district had once stood, and at the water’s edge an apparently lifeless black mass. But he knew that the black mass was a living body, one that had for days been “waiting, hoping, praying for ships.” As his transport approached the pier, Jennings found the air filled with “cries of such transcendent joy that the sound pierced to the very marrow of my bones.”146

From this time forward, Jennings would be known among the Americans in the region as “Admiral” or “Commodore” Jennings, and even Admiral Bristol would smile at the appellation.

Besides Jennings and the other relief workers and all the naval personnel, a few other Americans had come to the city and were living on the Navy ships. Unlike Jennings, some of these people were as interested in furthering their own careers as they were in supporting the refugees.

Take the journalists, for instance. As has been noted, Constantine Brown’s social ties to Admiral Bristol were very strong, and his offer to use his Chicago Daily News articles about the Ward and Yowell reports as propaganda tools for Bristol speaks to an obvious bias. In contrast, John Clayton’s report from inland Harput about all the Pontic Greeks marching and dying there had showed an independent streak. Still, when Bristol sent these two men to Smyrna on Lawrence early on, both of them agreed that, since they were going by Bristol’s permission and by his destroyer, they had to protect the admiral’s interests.¹⁴⁷ Hence it not surprising that while aboard an American destroyer in the harbor, George Horton heard one of them say distinctly, apparently throwing up his hands while typing a telegram to his paper, “I cannot send this stuff, it will queer me at Constantinople.”¹⁴⁸

Clayton’s series of stories is particularly instructive. His early reports might seem to indicate a pro-Turkish slant. On the 11th, he wrote that there had been very few killings, fewer than anybody had expected (except for the shooting of some looters and snipers, and, well, some “executions”; he had seen the bodies). The journalist added that the discipline of the Turkish troops was excellent, and given the circumstances, this was “nothing short of remarkable.” The next day he reported that while there were many more executions of Greeks and Armenians, nevertheless relief work was proceeding well, and overall Smyrna was quieting down. On Wednesday the 13th, Clayton got a huge scoop, an interview with Mustapha Kemal himself, an important interview in which Kemal spoke to the freedom of the straits, the safety of Constantinople, European access to oil, suggestions for an “exchange of populations,” and the status of Thrace. Kemal also assured the journalist that there had been no massacres in Smyrna, nor would there be. It was difficult to control an army in such a situation, “But control we will,” said Kemal. “You can say order has been completely restored from to-day. . . . We are not here to regulate past accounts.” In the same article, Clayton reported that the streets were being swept, shops were being opened and “Smyrna has settled down to normal life again.”149 And, indeed, the trams on the quay had begun operating that morning; a few cafés had even opened.¹⁵⁰

With the outbreak of the fire, however, which had begun making headway even as the reporter was meeting Kemal on Wednesday, Clayton’s stories became very different. A cable with Clayton’s byline dated “Smyrna, Thursday” reported that Smyrna was in flames, and that the Turks seemed to be responsible. According to this piece, it was impossible to number the Greek and Armenian dead, many of them having been burned in their houses. And the “Smyrna, Friday” story that Clayton wrote on the 15th seemed to complete the journalist’s about-face: Three-fifths of Smyrna was in ashes, the loss of life was impossible to compute, the streets were littered with dead, and the problem of the minorities had been solved for all time: “Thus, despite Kemal Pasha’s assurances, Turkey has ‘regulated’ past accounts.”¹⁵¹

And so one might think that despite Bristol’s warning, Clayton’s instinct for truth in journalism had now taken over again. However, when Clayton wrote these last two stories (and even on the 17th, when the journalist penned a story about plague breaking out in the city) he was not even in Smyrna. According to the memoir of fellow journalist Brown, Clayton had ridden Simpson to Athens with Consul Horton and several other evacuating Americans (probably to ensure the filing of his interview with Kemal). That destroyer had left Wednesday night just as the fire was reaching the quay. Clayton based his portrait of the fire’s aftermath on an intercepted wire story of Brown’s and on recollected details about the city. The only authentic detail in these stories was his citation of reports about the origins of the fire, the latter given by Minnie Mills and others from the Collegiate Institute. These people had taken the Winona out of Smyrna, and were now with Clayton in Athens. Yet as late as 2008, one of Clayton’s stories was being cited as firsthand evidence of what was then going on in Smyrna.¹⁵²

Another American writing from Smyrna had a stronger connection to the embassy than either Clayton or Brown. With the blessing of the embassy and the Navy (which handled his wires),¹⁵³ NER representative Mark Prentiss had become a special representative for the New York Times. His articles to that paper soon took on both a pro-Turkish and a pro-Prentiss slant. For instance, as Halsey Powell would later report at length, prior to the evacuation on the Greek ships the Turks had erected five different barricades that each refugee had to pass, and Turkish soldiers robbed the refugees regularly at almost every one of them. This practice would be mentioned and deplored by Commander Powell and several others.¹⁵⁴ However, by reading Prentiss’s New York Times article on this topic, one would learn only of the refugees’ “present[ing] money in various sums for special privileges,” as if the chief evil was the refugees’ offering of bribes, which proved too much for the poor Turkish soldiers to resist.

And who solved this bribery problem? No other than the writer himself! In his story’s first paragraph, Prentiss claimed that the chartering of the ships and their ferry service was being conducted “under my direction.” A bit later he referred again to “my personal direction of the embarkation.” Further on he pointed out that, in quieting panic, his own helmet and police whistle were “everywhere identifiable.” No wonder that at the specific request of this awesome figure, the Turkish officers had immediately stopped that iniquitous Christian bribery.155

Halsey Powell would later point out that the whole of the evacuation was actually handled by the Turks and by naval forces. While one relief committee member did come to assist, Powell commented, “as it was an entirely military affair, his services could be of little value.”¹⁵⁶ Also, as Dobkin points out, not only did Prentiss’ journalism over this period shift radically from being anti-Turk to anti-Greek, but eventually he was being escorted around the city by a Turkish major.¹⁵⁷

Among the two or three other journalists present, a British writer who arrived at the beginning of the last week was often assumed to be an American, because Halsey Powell was lodging her aboard his own ship. This person was also furthering her own interests while at Smyrna. Her interests, however, at this historic moment, were not so much in the line of journalism—as in art.

Clare Sheridan was a quite fascinating person. A painter and sculptor of about thirty-five, she had sculpted her first cousin, Winston Churchill, in 1920, and then greatly embarrassed that same statesman by traveling to Russia and sculpting Marxist revolutionaries Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky, too. Sheridan published her diary of this “mad escapade”¹⁵⁸ first in the London Times and later in book form.¹⁵⁹ Trotsky reportedly conceived a passion for this attractive, golden-haired widow, and asked her to accompany him on his travels throughout famine-stricken Russia. Sheridan decided against that, but on her tour of the United States the next year, journalists discovered her living in tents in a eucalyptus grove in California with silent film actor Charlie Chaplin and spread that story worldwide.¹⁶⁰

After sculpting Chaplin, too, Sheridan took an assignment with the New York World to write twenty-five stories about Europe.¹⁶¹ Toward the beginning of this assignment, she published an interview with British writer Rudyard Kipling in which she claimed Kipling had disparaged America’s part in the war effort and its soulless love of money. (Kipling denied it all.) Then she heard of the Anatolian crisis and immediately took passage from Geneva to Constantinople on the Orient Express. Meeting her in the capital the morning she arrived, John Clayton found Sheridan “garbed in flaming orange.” He wrote his paper that she insisted on the accuracy of her interview with Kipling and that she was also intent on quickly moving down to Smyrna.162

Sheridan then met with Admiral Bristol, who found the British woman tall, well proportioned, and good-looking. “She has a very direct and expressive way of talking and looks you squarely in the eye when she does it.”¹⁶³ A sympathetic Turkish official provided the journalist with identification papers, after which she took passage on a French ship on its way to Beirut.¹⁶⁴ On this ship’s stop in Smyrna’s harbor, Sheridan was told there was no safe place for a woman ashore. Her steamer was almost on its way again when a friendly reporter (Constantine Brown?) took her in a boat to Edsall. He introduced her to Halsey Powell as “an American correspondent,” though not a citizen. So addressed, Powell puzzled briefly, but then told Sheridan she could stay aboard the destroyer until she found a place ashore. One of his lieutenants would give up his cabin. But what was in that tin she was carrying? “Clay,” she said. Clay that she had bought from a pipemaker in Constantinople. She planned to sculpt Mustapha Kemal.

The officers on the Edsall all erupted in laughter.¹⁶⁵ But the Americans treated her kindly, as a kind of “ship’s mascot,” Sheridan would later write.¹⁶⁶ They confessed it was excellent for Edsall’s morale to have a woman aboard, and no doubt it was, especially a woman as charismatic as this one. They also enabled her quixotic enterprise. The next day, commandeering a Ford from the consulate, Powell sent Sheridan under officer escort to see Kemal, who was then housed at a Levantine villa outside town, in the suburb of Bournabat.¹⁶⁷

Kemal was unsmiling, but extremely polite. Sheridan could not fathom him. He pointed out that since he had already discussed the political situation, any further interview along those lines would be useless. Eventually, he offered Sheridan jam and water and smiled slightly, seeing she did not know how to eat it. He would send for the “lady of the house.” Sheridan tried to forestall the latter courtesy by showing Kemal some photographs of her work. He gazed long at Lenin and said that, in Turkey, Bolshevism could take no root, for “Turks are not industrialists, and the peasants own the land.” Then Sheridan asked directly: Could she do Kemal’s bust? He would be delighted . . . but not the next day. He had little time. (His armies, after all, were even then being shifted toward Constantinople!) Sheridan pressed the issue. Even Caesar, Alexander the Great, and Napoleon, she suggested, had somehow found the time. “You have clean-cut features and the expression of a sphinx. I would like to do you in your tall fur kalpak. It would be good!”168 At just this moment, a short and thick-set young woman entered and confronted Sheridan with a stare of “insolent contempt.” The hostility Sheridan felt from Latife’ Hanum (who Kemal was shortly to marry, and three years later, to divorce) successfully opposed Sheridan’s great charisma, and the sculpture was off.¹⁶⁹

Although Sheridan’s effort failed, another important “artistic” description of Smyrna’s terrors ultimately succeeded, to the point of ultimately reaching wide literary attention. Ernest Hemingway was then working for the Toronto Star, and upon the news of the events in Smyrna and the obvious Turkish threat to Constantinople, the paper immediately sent him to the capital. Perhaps the only document now widely read about the Smyrna tragedy is the lead piece from Hemingway’s 1930 edition of In Our Time. “On the Quai at Smyrna” is a fictional monologue of a British officer pictured as having served on a warship in Smyrna’s harbor. It begins this way: “The strange thing was, he said, how they screamed every night at midnight. I do not know why they screamed at that time. We were in the harbor and they were all on the pier and at midnight they started screaming. We used to turn the searchlight on them to quiet them. That always did the trick. We’d run the searchlight up and down over them two or three times and they stopped it.”¹⁷⁰ This piece is often taught in literature classes today. However, few readers realize that, perhaps because Hemingway apparently designed it as an introduction to a “senselessly brutal universe,”¹⁷¹ the author has intentionally dehistoricized the circumstances. Consequently, like the British officer, usually neither professors nor students have a clue as to what the refugees are screaming about.

Observers who were actually on the quay did know about those screams, however. One of them was Esther Lovejoy, an American doctor representing the American Womens Hospitals service who had come to the city upon hearing of the fire and related crisis, and who spent her days delivering babies and otherwise attempting to help as best she could, meanwhile being immersed in the terrible sights, sounds, and odors of dead beasts and human excrement of the refugees. As for her nights, rather than sleep in an officer’s bunk on a destroyer, Lovejoy took a room with other relief workers in a still-undamaged house on the quay whose balcony overlooked the mass of refugees. Because of this immersion in the refugee problem, Lovejoy could both describe the “terrible sounds” she heard in horrified sleeplessness right out her bedroom window and identify their cause: “Night after night blood-curdling shrieks, such as Dante never imagined in Hell, swept along that ghastly waterfront. From my room-mate I knew what these cries meant. When the Turkish regulars or irregulars, under cover of darkness, came through the ruins to the quay for the purpose of robbing the refugees or abducting their girls, the women and children, a hundred thousand or more in concert, shrieked for light, until the warships in the harbor would throw their searchlights to and fro along the quay, and the robbers would slink back into the ruins.” In this context (not provided by Hemingway, who had neither been at Smyrna nor had taken care to portray the reality underlying the refugees’ fear), the British officer seems simply clueless. One could argue, though, that as a character, he realistically resembles many an oblivious naval officer through history who, upon visiting a strange, troubled port, does not bother to take the effort to understand what is happening in the darkness just beyond what he can see from his ship’s deck.

At the same time, from her position ashore, Lovejoy was able to point out yet another kind of willful ignorance on the part of the navies present: their attempt to seal themselves away from the terror by playing records on their ships’ Victrolas. In the nights, Lovejoy says, the strains of “Humoresque,” for instance, or Caruso singing “Pagliacci” were clearly audible throughout the harbor. Apparently they were being played so that some at least of the Allied forces present might continue to sleep rather than have their slumbers recurrently interrupted by “that frightful chorus of shrieks from the Smyrna quay.”172

Although tens of thousands continued to suffer terror and depredation both day and night as long as they remained on the quay, the rescue arranged by Jennings finally began.

When Powell had initially inquired to make doubly sure that the Greek transports would be allowed in the harbor, a Turkish official had replied by writing that while the ships would be allowed to come, they could not lie alongside the quay or piers, but must transfer the refugees to the ships by boats or lighters.¹⁷³ Fortunately, however, the American businessman Griswold cajoled the Turkish harbormaster into allowing the Greek steamships to come alongside the Aydin railroad piers at the northern end of the quay instead of requiring they board passengers while moored out in the harbor. At these railroad piers the refugees might be embarked by two, three, or four ships simultaneously rather than depend on the complicated operation of scarce lighters working a seaborne transfer.¹⁷⁴ Powell adopted this plan (which no doubt saved maybe days of work and maybe hundreds of lives), and, having passed the word via Jennings to the Greek captains, also organized the steamships’ arrival and departure at the piers so that as some ships were getting under way or docking, the others could keep boarding passengers.

Commander Powell also accepted the offer of the British admiral Sir William Nicholson to send British sailors to help with the embarkation. Given the poisoned relations between the British and the Turks (not only had the two nations been combatants during the Great War, but the British all along had been the chief European power supporting the Hellenic Greek incursion into Turkey), the Turks asked that the British contingent stay away from the Turks. So the British officials directed that their sailors help the refugees only when they reached the end of the pier; they would also help stow the refugees on the ships themselves. Powell coordinated communications between Turkish and British authorities and directed that American officers and sailors organize operations at the last barrier the refugees had to pass, and also handle any pierside interactions with the Turks.175

As mentioned before, on the way out to the ships, there were five gates or barriers through which the refugees would have to pass; they were to be herded all the way along and checked at each of these gate by Turkish military forces; the American sailors (and, after them, the British) would take over only after the refugees had passed through the very last gate. The refugees by this time were not only psychologically exhausted after their long ordeal, but most were terrified by the Turks and were frantic to get to the ships before becoming subject to that terrible September 30 deportation order. Hence, Powell thought the use of Turkish troops was necessary to get the refugees to behave, for his own people would not be rough enough with them.

In support of his view, Powell noted that when the gates opened, “the crowd became a mob; women were knocked down, were walked over, children were torn from their arms by the crush,” and to control them, the Turkish soldiers “used their bayonets, butts of rifles, belts and canes; in some cases they knocked them down and kicked then. This was the only restraint that the refugees paid any attention to whatever.”¹⁷⁶ Of course, the Turks continued to ensure that no draft-age ethnic Greeks or Armenian males got through the lines, and they made liberal allowance in estimations of age. Consequently, over the six days of embarkation, many hundreds (E. O. Jacob says thousands) of ethnic Greek and Armenian males, not a few of whom had attempted to disguise themselves, were taken even at the very last gate.¹⁷⁷

As they had done throughout the Smyrna crisis, in the week of the embarkation itself, the American sailors did their best to make themselves useful. Upon arriving at the port, they had been sent to guard the major American schools and YMCA/YWCA properties, the Standard Oil property, and the consulate. They also led some refugees from the Collegiate Institute to the quay, operated launches in the harbor, carried foodstuffs ashore from arriving vessels, shepherded young ethnic Greeks and Armenians away from Turkish plundering and rape, and drove American relief workers on scarce automobiles from place to place in the city—besides a thousand miscellaneous missions. An American sailor who was driving Dr. Post to a pharmacy did shoot a Turkish soldier who attempted to seize their car and apparently killed him 178—but most of the sailors’ work was less dramatic. When the Greek transports arrived, the sailors working at the gates carried stretchers burdened with the helpless or sick, aided the weak to stand and walk, carried the refugees’ bundles, loaded the bundles and the stretchers onto the railway carts, comforted children who had been parted from their mothers, and even caught babies that desperate mothers dropped over the fences to them.

In a few cases (before or during the loading of the transports), sailors helped smuggle young men to the waiting ships. Moved by the plea of family members who said their brother was “already in America,” for example, one sailor let an Armenian family board the lighter, which was supposed to carry “only Americans” to a waiting vessel out in the harbor. Another helped a movie producer (who somehow had gotten to Smyrna) smuggle a couple of young Greek men past the gate guards. At least one such attempt misfired, however, again because an American officer felt he was bound strictly to obey Bristol’s orders.

For six straight days, American sailors like these worked to evacuate some 200,000 refugees from Smyrna, this after a lowly American YMCA worker named Jennings finally found and brought some Greek transports to Smyrna, something that nobody else had managed to do. Esther Lovejoy, Certain Samaritans, 2nd ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1933)

That is, toward the end of the evacuation, a sailor told a young Greek boy who had been working with the relief workers to carry Doctor Lovejoy’s suitcase aboard the lighter, which was going out to the destroyer Litchfield. (The doctor had decided to return to the States to raise funds for her organization.) The doctor overheard the sailor’s whisper: “Take this suitcase aboard for the lady and don’t come back. Listen! Don’t come back.” The destroyer captain noticed the young man boarding, however, and perhaps influenced by the presence of the American vice consul, he ordered the boy back ashore, to a very uncertain fate.179

Once the transports arrived, twenty sailors were ordered by Powell to “assist in patrolling and in preventing undue violence.”¹⁸⁰ However, at this point, the ability of the sailors to help anyone was severely limited. The several gates of inspection not only allowed the Turks to keep the refugees under control and help them to spot draft-age men, but they also enabled Turkish soldiers to rob the refugees again and again on their way out of Turkey. Moreover, as the lines of tens of thousands of refugees were organized, they were shaped so as to snake back into the ruins of the city, where many terrible things might occur.

At the gates themselves, the horrible reality of the embarkation would impress itself upon Clare Sheridan, who, after being turned down by Kemal, decided to visit the pier daily and try to help. Her first visit to the refugee lines was particularly traumatic. Sheridan was originally pro-Turkish to the hilt, thinking the Greek fear “most absurd,”¹⁸¹ and she was utterly unprepared for the degree of their desperation. Again, the deadline of September 30th that the Turks had set had spread expectations of massacre, and while Sheridan herself had heard Kemal say the deadline would be extended, she discovered it was quite another thing to convince the “hysterical maniacs” in front of her. There was worse than hysteria. Standing next to her was a Greek man who had just been arrested. Suddenly, Sheridan clutched an American standing by and cried out in terror, “There’s a man cutting his throat.” The American told her to get hold of herself. Failing to cut his jugular vein, the apprehended Greek threw himself down and dashed his head against a stone. When that failed to kill him, he leaped into the water, already thick with rotting corpses. As his movements finally stilled, a Turk waded out, took off the man’s coat and searched his pockets before dropping the corpse back in.¹⁸²

Though shaken, Sheridan stayed on the pier. She saw refugees fight to get through the gates only to get whipped and trampled on; she watched women drop their children over the spiked fence and get beaten back themselves; she handled babies “until my arms ached, dirty, half-dead babies covered with scurvy, sucking at their mothers’ empty breasts.” She saw a young boy fall from the quay and drown, with no one except his mother taking notice. She noted that when refugees were found to have died, their bodies were simply toppled into the sea.¹⁸³

Several witnesses (Sheridan included) described the “systematic” robbery that took place at each barrier.184 Powell pointed out that the looting was so widespread that eventually most of the refugees had been stripped of everything before they even got to the gates. Certainly if they had anything left by then, they lost it at those barriers.

Occasionally, a Turkish officer’s approach would stop the looting. Powell, for example, reported seeing a Turkish officer beat a soldier so fiercely that his cane broke, so Powell loaned him his.¹⁸⁵ However, Lovejoy found a similar performance on the part of a Turkish officer a bit “too emphatic.” After this officer got on the case of a Turkish soldier for looting (in the presence of the Americans), she kept watching until the officer walked further down the pier, casually stopped an old man ripe for the picking, led him away, and robbed the man himself, “incidentally giving an impressive demonstration” of thoroughness.¹⁸⁶

Nevertheless, the doctor thought the worst thing happening at those “infernal gates” of the Smyrna pier, the “greatest crime against humanity with which I am personally familiar,” was the separation of families. “As family after family passed those gates, the father of perhaps 42 years of age, carrying a sick child or other burden, or a young son, and sometimes both father and son, would be seized. . . . In a frenzy of grief, the mother and children would cling to this father and son, weeping, begging and praying for mercy, but there was no mercy. With the butts of their guns, the Turkish soldiers beat these men backward into the prison groups and drove the women toward the ships.” Once, at Lieutenant Commander Rhodes’ request, a Turkish officer relented and allowed the brother of some beautiful girls (who spoke perfect English) to pass through the gates to safety, and then accommodated Lovejoy’s plea for another young fellow. But those were the only exceptions among many hundreds of separations. Lovejoy reported that the biblical prophecy, “Their wives shall be widows and their children orphan” had been fulfilled on the Smyrna railroad pier.¹⁸⁷

A few Greek men recognized that they could not get through the Turkish barriers and determined to try another method. One evening, apparently the only night that refugees were taken aboard the Greek ships after dark, Sheridan watched while Turks standing right alongside both British and American naval officers began shooting at two swimmers caught in the cone of a searchlight; the swimmers were making for a warship in the harbor. The water was very smooth, and everyone ashore stood spellbound. There was no noise, no screaming. The shots at first went wide, but the splashes got closer and closer. Then one of the swimmers stopped swimming. At that point, Commander Powell protested and offered to send a boat to pick up any swimmers. Because America was neutral, he said he neither could take them to the British destroyers nor to the Turks, so he would land them back on the quay. The Turks agreed, and the spectacle ended—though not the desperation.188

The day after the shooting of the swimmer described above, Lovejoy accompanied a woman who was in labor to the door of one of the few buildings still standing, and after pounding insistently, they were let in. The place was full of troubled people, all terrified of the Turks. The doctor tended to the expectant mother, but as she was leaving, a woman took her upstairs and showed her several young men “lying flat on their chests looking out through peepholes under the eaves.”¹⁸⁹ Knowing they could not pass the Turkish guards at the gates, the men were measuring the watery gauntlet they would shortly have to brave. Their mothers were in anguish after witnessing the terrible drama of the preceding night. The woman asked Lovejoy to help.

But the doctor knew she could do nothing, despite knowing what Sheridan also would admit, that for most, this terrible separation of males from their families was permanent. After all, that was what deportation in Turkey had always meant, particularly for Greek and Armenian men: “a short life sentence to slavery under brutal masters, ended by mysterious death.”¹⁹⁰ And of course it meant this still, for it was far less likely now (given the Nationalist triumph) than it had even been before that a disinterested European or American force would interfere in the interior of Turkey. The inaction of all those ships in the harbor proved that.

And failing outside interference, who in Anatolia itself was going to stop the long-ingrained privileges of loot, rape, and slaughter after a victory? Not commanders like Noureddin Pasha, who made it very clear he could not have cared less, nor Mustapha Kemal, either, who had earlier okayed the Pontus deportations (or at least helped cover them up) and who was heard to utter, when Smyrna was in flames, “Let it burn, let it crash down.”¹⁹¹ It is possible that Kemal might have wanted to stop the killings and he might have preferred to stop the fire, too, but he would have been powerless against public feeling that had been aroused by all the years of the war, by all the burning Turkish villages, and by the relentless Turkish propaganda the Nationalists had themselves promoted for years. Beyond that, he was already about other things: elements of his army were already streaming toward the Dardanelles.

Nevertheless, thanks in great part to YMCA workers like Asa Jennings (above all); relief workers like Major Davis, H. C. Jaquith, and Esther Lovejoy; Commander Halsey Powell; and (especially) all the American sailors and officers present on their ships and ashore in Smyrna’s streets and piers, during these final days a magnificent evacuation did take place. In the week following the arrival of the first ten of Jennings’ ships, nearly two hundred thousand ethnic Christians were taken away from Smyrna proper. Most of these refugees would survive to begin life again in Greece. Jennings kept the Greek ships coming; Powell did the necessary coordination between officials; American sailors tended the refugees on the piers and shepherded them toward the ships; and, well separated from contact with the Turks, British sailors helped the refugees board those same vessels. Through the whole three weeks of the crisis, America had the only relief committee working in Smyrna (again, they had been sent by Bristol even before the fire), and, by providing food and water and medical help, the relief workers helped keep most of the women and children and old men alive till their embarkation. That American “mascot” from the British aristocracy got her hands dirty too. And Bristol’s long-term policy of neutrality certainly had at least this good effect: the Turks trusted the Americans to supervise the pier side of the embarkation and to provide the Greek ships protective escort in and out of Smyrna’s famous harbor.

On September 30, a few hours before the Turks’ fearful deadline (which at the last minute was extended), the great evacuation from Smyrna itself was completed. The massive expulsion of Christian minorities from Turkey, however, had just begun.

CHAPTER 10

THE BURNING OF SMYRNA