The holocaust at Smyrna marked the beginning of a general exodus of the Christian people from Asiatic Turkey. With one accord, they fled to the nearest ports in a frenzy of fear.
—Dr. Esther Lovejoy
Constantinople is certainly the gayest place I have ever seen. They never turn in here. The dizzy pace keeps up all night long.
—Ens. Dan Gallery
While swimming to a warship might get you out of Turkey, it could also get you to the place. At the request of Admiral Bristol upon the Turkish threat to Constantinople itself (the threat posed by movements by the Turkish Nationalist army toward the old Ottoman capital even before the Smyrna crisis had ended), the Navy ordered twelve more destroyers to Turkey in late September of 1922. At Norfolk, all sorts of bluejackets sought to go on the ships.
A man named Christenson was suffering in sick bay on a repair ship when he heard that his destroyer had been ordered east, and immediately he got up to swab the decks. A doctor ordered him back to bed. The next morning he was found polishing the sick bay’s brass, but once more the doctor was unimpressed. That night, Christenson went over the side, swam to the Bainbridge and hid himself in a cold boiler till his destroyer was well out to sea.1 With similar alacrity, even as multitudes desperately fled Turkey, over the next several weeks American destroyermen and journalists alike jumped at the chance to get to the place.2 In no other period was the mixture of tragedy and playground so pronounced.
The journalists came first, most of them arriving just now at the threat to Constantinople. Sent from Paris by the Toronto Star, Ernest Hemingway arrived on September 30 to a city hung with red Turkish flags, menaced by large Turkish armies, and finding its ethnic Greeks evacuating in the tens of thousands. In several articles, including one headlined “Waiting for an Orgy,”3 Hemingway reported that even those Greeks who had decided to stay were arming and talking desperately. Their fear, he noted, was “sickening, cold, crawling.” In contrast, newly arrived correspondents like himself were feeling the thrill of a pitcher stepping onto the mound in a world series game. They hoped to find some great stories.4
Hemingway was not venturing far from his hotel to get them, though. Palavering at the restaurants and nightclubs, he hit it off, among others, with Charles Sweeney, a soldier of fortune on assignment for the New York World. Sweeney is said to have supplied some facts to Hemingway when the latter writer contracted malaria, and he also wrote articles of his own. Yet according to Sweeney’s biographer, while in Constantinople he was mainly working as a spy for the French, providing yet another example of a reporter bent on something less than simple, impartial journalism.5 Hemingway’s own professional conduct while on this assignment was also problematic. Besides writing for the Toronto Star, he was sending some cables on the sly to the International News Service, thus violating his exclusive contract with the Canadian paper.6
Also in the city and attending American and British news conferences (and, one hopes, just doing their own work) were Constantine Brown of the Chicago Daily News, James A. Mills of the Associated Press, Carl von Wiegand for the Hearst newspapers, and representatives of the New York Times and United Press.7 As for John Clayton of the Chicago Tribune, in order to celebrate a $2,000 bonus from the newspaper’s publisher that he had received for the story he wrote about Smyrna’s fires (which, as we have seen, he had actually written while at Athens), about the 1st of October Clayton put on a swank dinner for those reporters and naval officers who had stayed on at Smyrna when he took a ship out of the place. At a craps game afterward, his comrades shared further in the writer’s good fortune by relieving him of some of it.8
While Hemingway and other newsmen whiled away the time in the city, some ersatz reporters were out in the field. At the very end of September, Turkish authorities at Smyrna invited Cdr. Halsey Powell to send some Americans into the interior along with three European journalists, a few Turkish writers, and a Turkish movie man. They were to ride a train under Turkish escort along the route of the retreating Greek army, looking to document how the Greeks in their retreat had ravaged the Turks.9 Powell sent Lt. (jg) E. B. Perry of the Edsall. By naval arrangement (no doubt Bristol’s), this young officer was to be a correspondent for the New York Herald.
In his official report, Perry expressed skepticism about the Greek atrocities that were being spoken of at every stop. Though the burning of “acres” of cities that the group traveled through was authentic enough, at Manemen and Magnesia the party heard and saw no real evidence of atrocities beyond that. To Perry it appeared to be a “propaganda trip, well laid out and all of the actors coached in their various parts.” Similarly at Cassaba and Alashehr: there was evidence of catastrophic fire and maybe an unidentified body or two, but only unverified accounts of raping and looting and killing and such. “We were still looking for concrete evidence and were not finding it.”
Finally, though, after they started retracing their steps, at a burned town called “Salikli” (Salihli), the group was presented with several dozen witnesses whose translated stories of shootings, rapings, beatings, beheadings, and lootings performed by Greek soldiers upon Turkish civilians they could not help but believe. These stories tipped the scale for Perry. Although he had originally been anti-Turk, and still had no doubts that the trip had been arranged for Turkish propaganda, he now thought the Turks had a good case that should be told to the world.10 Admiral Bristol heard from Perry and later listened to Mark Prentiss, who had also taken this trip, and concluded that, beyond the widespread burning, there was some evidence of Greek atrocity, although nothing “on a wholesale scale.” The main problem was that thousands of Turks were now homeless with winter approaching. Later, Bristol would regularly use the figure of half a million Turkish homeless.11
During the same week that Perry and Prentiss were on their Turkish propaganda trip, one more evacuation episode was even then taking place on the Aegean coast of Turkey, an evolution that, except for a story picked up secondhand by a journalist in Athens, went almost wholly unreported (and apparently completely unobserved) by the press. As he completed the evacuations at Smyrna, Asa Jennings warned that great numbers of additional refugees had assembled at nearby cities and villages, and that many of them were starving.12 Hence, beginning on September 29 and 30, Jennings’ ships were ordered to various smaller ports, under escort of the American destroyer MacLeish.
At a place called Vurla Skala, the five transports that MacLeish was accompanying began evacuating ten thousand refugees. As these women and children were marched down to the docks by Turkish soldiers, according to MacLeish’s captain, Cdr. Herbert Ellis, “the usual raping went on,” until a Turkish officer stationed a strong guard to stop it. All these refugees were in very bad shape. Fifty of them died right on the beach, for instance, and others succumbed during the embarkation or upon boarding the transports. At another port, Chesme, the refugees had been kept in churches and fed by the Turks, and conditions were better. At Aivali, though, despite the wretched condition of another 15,000 Greek refugees, the Turks had kept them inland for several days, well out of sight of the coast. When they were finally released for evacuation (after systematic looting), the separation of men from the women was especially pitiable. Forced to leave her husband behind, for instance, a lone woman with quadruplets boarded a ship with two babies under each arm.
The vessels MacLeish escorted would eventually evacuate over 27,000 refugees from ports other than Smyrna, but Ellis still shook his head, thinking they were not accomplishing much. He was convinced that many more Greeks along these coasts were dying, for Turkish officials admitted to him a policy of deporting their coastal populations. “It is a strange thing that civilized nations do not protest against this making non-combatants [into] prisoners of war,” he further lamented. Ellis argued that such criminalizing of noncombatants and the associated deportations were “savage practices.” Hence, the Turks should be forced to stop it all before anybody treated them as equals by sitting at conference with them.13 Ignoring such niceties, the Allies were already conferencing with the Turks at Mudania, a small city on the Sea of Marmara.
The enterprising John Clayton “scraped and bribed his way” into the Mudania conference, though journalists were not supposed to be allowed.14 Actually, despite the blackout, even an American journalist back at Constantinople got a scoop about the Mudania agreement. Hemingway’s later story in the Toronto Star shows the Constantinople-based correspondent hard at work.
Constan stayed up all night. Every big newspaper story that broke came after midnight in the nightclubs of Pera. It was in one of these, the Pele Mele . . . that an excited young officer just back on a destroyer from Mudania confided the news of the signing of the armistice to a Russian countess who was acting as a waitress.
The officer, who was present at the signing, told the countess in greatest secrecy because he had to tell someone. He was so excited. She recognized the value of the story and told an American newspaperman whom she liked much better than she did the officer.
In an hour, through means of his own, the newspaperman verified the report, and put it on the cable to New York.15
Clearly, the long hours of eating, drinking, and befriending titled Russian waitresses (from one of whom, by the way, Hemingway bought an antique amber necklace for his wife)16 had their journalistic uses.
Among the more important provisions of that Mudania armistice was the decision that Eastern Thrace (the area along the Aegean just to the west of Constantinople), ceded to the Greeks in 1920, was to be returned to the Turks. The Greek army would have to leave within a month. At word of this, Hemingway and several other reporters finally got out to the site of some action. There, they found hundreds of thousands of ethnic Greeks frantically abandoning their cultivated fields and fleeing the Turks, even though Greek civilians were not required to leave the country. “If asked where they are going, they shrug their shoulders. If one asks why they are going, they draw their right hand across their throats,” a British journalist explained.17
The Thracian exodus was comparatively well covered by the press, which was present in numbers there as it seldom was anywhere else. Journalists noted that since the Greek army was doing the herding in Thrace rather than Turks, the ethnic Greek peasants were not being robbed and separated. Yet, as Hemingway pointed out, because the main stream of refugees was far from the coast, on this journey typically there was no welcome succor from America’s Near East Relief.18 Nor were any American naval vessels nearby, American lives not being at risk. In the end, Western Thrace could not hold these three or four hundred thousand peasants, and most of them eventually were dumped by transports down into Greece.
Although he kept some of the more powerful details he observed for his fiction (for his portrait of the retreat from Caporetto in A Farewell to Arms), Hemingway described this exodus well. Indeed, all of his journalistic accounts about Constantinople are interesting and provide good “local color.” However, partly because the writer spent such a short time in Constantinople and never got near Turkey’s interior, his Toronto Daily Star journalism does not go very deep. In fact, his stories get the reader little further toward real historical understanding than the broad generality he penned on the authority of a few days in the city, some bar conversation, and a few military press conferences, at least one of which, significantly, had been given by Bristol himself. Indeed, the admiral himself might have penned what Hemingway wrote then: “The fact is that atrocities are always followed by counter-atrocities in these countries and have been since the siege of Troy.”19
Besides journalists, a host of additional officers and sailors soon swelled the numbers of Americans in Constantinople. The twelve additional destroyers from Norfolk, greeted by waving sheets and pillowcases and whistling and cheering as they steamed by America’s Robert College,20 arrived on October 22, adding over twelve hundred destroyermen to the region. Another 650–700 men and officers came aboard the two naval support ships (the repair ship Denebola and the stores ship Bridge), which arrived about the same time as the destroyers and which stayed moored in the Bosporus for nearly a year.21 And after the armored cruiser Pittsburgh dropped anchor in mid-November, its 680 sailors remained at Constantinople for almost six months.22 So, although several of the newly arrived destroyers were immediately ordered on to Russian or Anatolian ports, every day hundreds of additional American Navy men enthusiastically flooded Pera’s already-crowded streets.
Meanwhile, throughout Anatolia, Greeks and Armenians were also flooding the coastal cities, but of course with a very different temper. Turkish authorities had now set a deadline of November 30 for permission for Christians in Anatolia to leave the country. In early November, Bristol would argue that much of the resulting panic was the fault of the Christians, for he did not understand the Turkish “permission” for Greeks and Armenians to leave ports in the Black Sea to mean that the Christian population had been ordered to leave.23
In fact, of course, it meant exactly that. On the ground at Samsun, Cdr. Harry Pence had the following “definitive” understanding: that the evacuation was not compulsory, but all Christians remaining as of December 1 would suffer the penalty of deportation!24 According to NER cables, everywhere in Anatolia the Turkish invitation was considered “a massacre and evacuation order,” and it initiated “the wildest scenes” of hysteria and terror among the Christian populace. Relief officials anticipated that virtually all the remaining Christians in Anatolia would, at best, be forced to leave the country.
They were already streaming toward the ports. By November 14 some ten thousand refugees had reached the shores of the Black Sea, and thousands more were within two days’ march of Samsun. All the males were still being detained, a NER telegram said; the refugees were, again, mainly women, children, and old men.25 On Turkey’s southern border, things were much the same. At the end of November, Consul Jackson reported that 35,000 refugees had arrived at Aleppo from the Turkish interior, having been coerced both by the “permission” orders from Angora and by widespread threats uttered by individual Turks or printed in Turkish newspapers. Jackson added that since none of these refugees had been allowed to sell anything of value, practically all were destitute.26 As another observer commented, the circumstances of such deportees typically included “leaving homes in midwinter, hasty flight, arduous road for many days or weeks, with danger and terror all the time.” No wonder these mostly ignorant villagers started the long journey with their morale thoroughly broken and proved easy prey to disease, plunder, and abuse while en route.27
By late November, a conference was being held in Lausanne, Switzerland. to settle problems between the Europeans and the triumphant Nationalists. Bristol was among the American delegation (to the despair of American missionary leaders there, who were still concerned about the Armenians), and back in Constantinople, Bristol’s substitute, Frederick Dolbeare, was cabling the State Department that, despite anyone’s wishes, throughout Anatolia “the evacuation is becoming more of a fait accompli every day.”28 These “unilateral expulsions”29 of the Turkish minorities are not to be confused with the widely used term “exchange of populations.” The latter was an expedient agreed on at Lausanne that directed the exchange of ethnic Christian minorities in Turkey and ethnic Turkish populations in Greece. The measure was largely the result of urgings of explorer and humanitarian Fridtjof Nansen, who hoped to mitigate the terrible conditions of refugee multitudes. Signed in mid-1923, it was only actually executed (and then only partially) in 1924. By that time, of course, except for detained males, the vast majority of Christian minorities in Turkey had long since been forced to leave their ancestral homes for Greece.30
Beginning in October, at Bristol’s orders the American destroyers cooperated with Asa Jennings, who now sent his Greek ships throughout the Turkish littoral to effect further evacuations. The naval ships mainly acted in a liaison role, though this was important enough, to be sure; no doubt the coordination and presence of the American Navy ships and officers in the Turkish ports helped saved many thousands of refugee lives. Moreover, Bristol kept his enlarged contingent of destroyers circulating from port to port, even to the smallest ones.
As a result of this mass movement, for months there were continuing huge contrasts between the high life being led by American Navy people and others in Constantinople, and the awful conditions they and other Americans encountered among the refugees in Asia Minor. A series of examples will illustrate these contrasts.
Some of the examples recorded below are severe, to be sure, and one might object both that many Americans did not participate in the good times described, and, more important, that by no means all the refugees suffered to the extent that the Anatolian examples reported below might suggest.31 There would be some truth in such an argument. Some ethnic Greeks and Armenian refugees—the women, children, and old men, that is—made it directly to the coast and were evacuated pretty quickly. However, not a few refugees died on their journeys, which usually were suddenly imposed treks of whole families (minus able-bodied men) of tens, fifties, or even hundreds of miles, and this in early or mid-winter. Actually one historian of the exchange of populations estimates that tens of thousands of ethnic Greeks died in the expulsion from Turkey or because of it.32 Moreover, huge numbers were abused (beaten or raped), most of the million or so Greeks and Armenians expelled were robbed more than once while en route (at the portside gates, if not before; just as at Smyrna, so at other ports the American Navy men mostly could only stand by and watch), and virtually all property owners lost their homes and other properties without compensation.
As for the many tens of thousands of minority males who were detained by the Turks, almost all of them noncombatants, Dobkin says that by October of 1923, most of the males had perished, basing her judgment in part on the awful circumstances described by three Armenian males who had survived being taken inland, with whom she conducted interviews in the late 1960s.33 More recently, parts of the autobiography of noted Greek author Elias Venezis on his labor battalion experiences have been translated from Greek into English. Venezis was taken inland from Aivali (a coastal town to the north of Smyrna, mentioned above), and with his fellow prisoners he underwent such horrific suffering that, if one regards his reported experiences as authentic, it would not be surprising at all that only twenty-three of the three thousand males taken from Aivali in his group survived until the actual population exchange—which is what the Greek author claims.34
Such reference to isolated personal accounts from ethnic Greek and Armenian sources might seem idiosyncratic. However, on this same topic, besides referring to past experience of minority male prisoners in Turkish hands for probabilities (both the experiences of ethnic Armenians in 1915, and in other circumstances like those recounted throughout this book), one can also listen to contemporaneous estimates expressed by Admiral Bristol and by Fridtjof Nansen himself. According to Bristol’s war diary account of October 12, 1922, in a conversation involving several high Allied officials, Nansen expressed his opinion that if all the Greek men in labor battalions were not released immediately, few would be left by the spring—that is, the spring of 1923. “This was tacitly agreed to by everyone,” Admiral Bristol recorded, “because we all know that the Turks treat prisoners and labor battalions abominably, even if their own people are in the labor battalions.” However, under the exchange of prisoners that Nansen negotiated, very few of these detainees were actually released until 1924.35
That one’s being in a labor battalion in essence amounted to “a death sentence” would no doubt have been the opinion of Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis. Although there are several differing accounts of how Onassis got out of Smyrna (being a Smyrna native of Greek heritage of about eighteen, he was in the greatest danger), perhaps one of the more likely was the account of biographer Peter Evans. He says Onassis was protected from death by a Turkish lieutenant who became the young man’s lover. Several weeks after the fire, when things had calmed down a bit, an American vice consul spirited Onassis out to Edsall in sailor’s garb, and the destroyer took Onassis on to Mytilene. The young man eventually was able to join the women of his family in Greece. In this account, even despite the Turkish officer’s and then the American official’s help, it had been a close thing. At one point, Onassis had to climb into a large rolltop desk to hide from a Turkish search party, lest he also be sent to the doomed labor battalions, or instead be hanged—which had been the fate of three of his uncles.36
Given such circumstances, I would argue that the severity indicated by the following sets of contrasting examples is historically representative.
Consider, to begin with, the general style of the Navy’s good times in Constantinople versus what Americans saw in Anatolia, including the general atmosphere, the food and drink consumed, and the treatment of women.
When they first went ashore from the newly anchored Pittsburgh on November 16, 1922, the junior officers found the place spectacular. They were dazzled by the nightclubs, the Russian sword dancing, the beautiful Russian waitresses, the great music, and the late hours, all this despite the ubiquitous refugees and the rumors of Nationalist guns being placed (at that very moment) on the Asiatic side of the Bosporus! Of course, helping to fund the high spirits was all the good food and drink. At places like the Muscovite, for instance, you could get an excellent dinner and French champagne, besides a floor show.37 At all the nightclubs, Scotch and soda simply “flowed like water.” Seeing all this, Dan Gallery was convinced that “not even Paris hits as gay a clip.”38
It is true that a number of American sailors (like sailors from the beginning of time) took advantage of the vice district and streetwalkers, thus often exploiting women of many races, who, desperate for sustenance, had turned to this trade as a last resort. Still, some sailors had genuine feelings for their women, and not a few Americans, officer and enlisted, were romantically inclined. Lt. Cy Olch of the Pittsburgh would meet a charming young Russian woman named Ileana Shillenkoff. Then working at an American orphanage in Constantinople, Shillenkoff had once been a dispatch rider for a White Russian cavalry regiment. Olch and Ileana would marry when they met again in Nice.39
In fact, marriages took place throughout the Navy ranks. On the Goff— one of the twelve destroyers that arrived in October—a Filipino mess attendant was found to have married a Greek girl after a brief courtship, even though neither spoke the other’s language.40 And before that same squadron’s cruise was over, its very squadron commander had married a Russian waitress (“Olga #2”) from the Muscovite, the woman “who had kept him up so late so many nights in the past year.” Captain C. M. Tozer (a rather august, white-headed personage, according to photographs) would take Olga home with him.41
To such good times and romance in the city, on the mainland Americans found several terrible contrasts. From Mersina on the Mediterranean coast of Turkey, for instance, McCormick passed along a message that had reached it from an American relief official named Joseph Beach. Beach worked at Caesarea (Kaysari), far inland. He wrote that on November 19 seven hundred Greek women and children had arrived at his relief station, having been deported from villages near Smyrna (over four hundred miles west of Caesarea as the crow flies) several weeks before. These people were the remnant of an original group of four thousand deportees. Early on during their trek, the men had been separated out and had not been heard from since; the women and children had been driven along through winter weather without food or shelter. “Their condition may be judged from the following facts,” Beach said. “One of our American women brought in to our hospital with a truck twenty-nine who had fallen out on the road and had been left to die. . . . Of these two died before they reached the hospital. . . . Fourteen died in the following ten days. . . . They all cried for bread and suffered the most terrible pain.” Beach said there were other groups in a similar state.42
In mid-October, Bristol had written a friend that some of the Greeks and Armenians at the time of the Smyrna crisis were said to have been marched inland, but he believed that these people had afterward found their way back to the coast and been evacuated.43 Hence it was inconvenient to hear via McCormick of actual deportations from Smyrna, and he attempted to get this message discounted.
And consider the treatment of refugee women at Mersina. Cdr. Bruce Ware of Overton, like most officers who took their lead from the admiral, was originally strongly pro-Turk. However, in the process of evacuating refugees at this coastal city, Ware came to learn of such a series of kidnapping and gang rapes of female refugees (along with brutality, graft, killings, threats, and official obstruction) that his outlook toward the Turks reversed itself. Sometimes three men had committed the rape, sometimes seven; the rapes had typically continued all night. Those who committed these acts included Turkish soldiers and local Arab or Turkish police. From personal observation, Ware cabled to Bristol that the condition of the victims being cared for was “pitiful, comma horrible,” and that the whole refugee situation was “critical and frightful.”44 In his war diary entry for the admiral, he made this statement: “I must enter and go on record here in naming the Turk, the Arab from the Mutasarriff and the most well to do man to the little ragged boy on the street, as savages and barbarians; cruel and pitiless. I have frequently read and listened to tales of atrocities committed by Mohammedans; during the past week I have seen them, and it has turned me completely in my sentiments from pro-Turk. It is impossible to place any trust or sincerity in these people. . . . Exclusion from the world; from all social privilege or favor is his due.” Just nine days earlier, Ware had verbally belabored two American women relief workers newly arrived at Smyrna from Harput with five hundred orphans. He had lectured them about their evident intense hatred of the Turks. Now Commander Ware had come to feel the same disgust.45
A second contrast of American highlife and refugee predicament involves two roughly parallel experiences of young men boarding a ship.
In the wee hours one night in Constantinople, Dan Gallery and his friend, Ash Pleasants, returned to Dolmabagtche landing in a carriage, after a smashing evening in the bars of Galata. As they rode down the hills, just for kicks they took their canes and knocked off every fez they encountered. Naturally enough, at the boat landing they were apprehended by a band of irate Turkish policemen who roughed them up a bit. Eventually, Gallery was loaded into a caique, which was to take him out to his cruiser Pittsburgh. Before the boat left the pier, however, the offended Gallery found a boathook lying in the small vessel and slashed at the Turkish sergeant back on the dock with it, forgetting that the boatman was also Turkish. Suddenly, Gallery found himself on his back in the stern sheets of the caique with a knife poised an inch from his throat. Gallery was hauled back to the dock and beaten up some more. Finally, he was released, and allowed to proceed out to his ship.
At the time, Gallery was shaken and angry (not badly hurt, apparently), but later he would delight in retelling this story, typically omitting to mention any offense he had given to the Turks in the first place. It became a simple account of youth and high jinks.46
In contrast to this carefree, if mildly irresponsible, episode is the story of the escape of Efthim Couzinos from Turkey. Unlike Gallery’s adventure, here lives were very much at stake.
We last saw Couzinos hiding (like Jews evading the Nazis during the Holocaust) in a hole under the floor of the kitchen of the Marsovan College infirmary. He had entered this hiding place in July of 1921. In October and November of 1922, however, upon the perceived ultimatum for Christians to leave Anatolia, the Americans at Marsovan began moving their orphans by arabas (carriage) down to Samsun for further evacuation on a transport ship. En route to the city they would pass ethnic Greeks and Armenians who had been walking for days or weeks. At twenty-three, Couzinos was right smack in the “military-aged” population of males forbidden to leave Turkey. Rising from the dead in the infirmary, he tried to disguise his features, but he was still desperately worried that somebody in the crowd of Turks at the college gate would notice him. A newly arrived American relief worker named George Williams learned that some endangered young men were among the students being transported. Riding beside Couzinos’ arabas as it left the college gate, he flourished a pistol and kept shouting “American property” in Turkish. In such a way he successfully distracted the crowd’s attention.47 Williams was not the only relief worker to help, by the way. Gertrude Anthony rode horseback back and forth alongside a group of endangered Marsovan orphans the whole two days’ travel to the coast.48
Once at Samsun, the students had to walk two by two from the American orphanage down to the wharf, where large caiques would ferry them to an anchored freighter. (American destroyers seem to have been present at most of these evacuations,49 but the Americans’ observation, coordination, or occasional escort function seems everywhere to have depended on their allowing the Turks to manage things all the way up to the ships themselves.) At the end of each platform on the wharf stood a Turkish gendarme, whose job was to arrest any draft-aged males among the refugees. Though Couzinos tried to slouch by, he suddenly felt a huge hand on his collar and heard the man say (in Turkish), “Where do you think you’re going?” He was hauled out of the line of orphans and ordered to stand next to the Turk. He did so for maybe thirty seconds. But when the official stepped away into the crowd of orphans to apprehend another unfortunate fellow, Couzinos leaped into a half-full caique, crawled to the bottom of it, and got some boys to sit on him. Somehow the gendarme failed to notice, and the caique soon cast off lines and took its passengers out to the American-chartered freighter. It had been, according to Couzinos, thirty seconds between life and death.50
Finally, a third contrast between American good times and refugee trouble was sometimes seen even in Anatolia’s ports. During the months after the fire and evacuation at Smyrna, several nations kept a duty warship or two in the harbor, and the equanimity of the American destroyermen there (many of them new to Turkey since the fire) was only occasionally interrupted by reminders of the earlier sufferings. Even during Smyrna’s agony, the great warships had kept up their luncheons and formal calls and military flourishes, and Navy bands had played concerts far into the early morning.51 Now American officers at this same place were kept busy returning formal calls in frock coats or cocked hats upon Dutch or Italian or French ships, playing bridge with Dutchmen and Belgians, and playing tennis with French or British officers either at a French club that was still standing or at an undamaged Swedish court across the harbor that had been appropriated by the British. Despite its horrible past, for the American Navy Smyrna had quickly become, as one destroyer captain remembered, “a very pleasant little social colony.”52
A few months later a fire would destroy a forty-two-room Armenian palazzo that the new American consul had made into a temporary consulate, and the drunken American tobacco men on hand would pass out bottles of whiskey to the sailors as they helped fight the fire. Unsurprisingly, the building became a total loss.53 Back in November, though, liquor was scarce and things were more tame. For recreation, sometimes the Americans hiked to Mount Pagus, which overlooked the city. From there they could view both the burned and unburned sectors of the city, along with the famous quay and the harbor and the ancient Roman viaduct. At other times the sailors played baseball or haggled with shopkeepers in the Turkish bazaar, which had not been touched by the fire. The Americans also watched caravans of camels pass by and took photographs of some of the Greek prisoners who were still working in the city under guard. Renwick McIver, a junior officer in Gilmer, concluded in a letter home, “We have had quite an enjoyable stay here.”54
When another destroyer took its place at Smyrna, however, McIver’s destroyer had to transport some refugees who were still being collected by the local Near East Relief people out to Mytilene. According to the young officer, the 220 people they took aboard were a “miserable looking lot.” The refugees were immensely relieved to get away—those that did get away, for eight of the fourteen men among the refugees were taken by the police as being of military age. The two separations McIver himself witnessed, of a boy from his dad, and of a dignified older man well over forty-five from his grief-stricken wife, were, again, emotionally wrenching. When the destroyer got under way, the sea was choppy, the wind was cold, and it rained. Most of the refugees were topside and were now seasick as well as homeless, and quite pitiable. The bluejackets initially took great delight in tending the unfortunates, passing out hot soup and coffee and giving the children candy. Some sailors gave up their own blankets and raincoats to the poor people. When the ship reached Mytilene, however, the refugees pushed and shoved and became so obsessed with fear that the Americans lost patience. As McIver put it, “We were glad to get rid of the whole jabbering lot.”55
An epilogue to this particular evacuation at Smyrna manifests the occasional callousness of naval commanders. A Greek cook working for the American YMCA ashore, where the sailors got coffee and donuts, had been hiding her nephew, a young Greek soldier who had escaped from a Turkish prison camp. She persuaded some American sailors to bring a sailor’s uniform ashore, dress her nephew in it, and smuggle him up Gilmer’s brow. The destroyer’s officer of the deck saw the Greek fellow come aboard among a group of sailors, and he called the captain to the quarterdeck. The Greek man fell on his knees and begged the captain not to give him back to the Turks.
Back in 1921, at Samsun, an exhausted fourteen-year-old Greek boy had swum to Sturtevant to attempt to get food and help for fellow Greeks. Told of the incident, Capt. Bill Leahy of St. Louis (then at the port) recognized that if the Navy kept the boy and the Turks heard of it, it might jeopardize American negotiations for the safety of the Greek women and children at Samsun. However, he also knew that the boy would likely be shot as a spy should he be given up. So Leahy ordered him to be dressed as a sailor and taken aboard his own ship. The lad was fed well and was secretly made an honorary member of the crew. It appears he was safely put ashore in Constantinople.56
In Smyrna, however, Commander Zogbaum of Gilmer had a different outlook. Apparently nobody ashore had taken notice of the Greek soldier being brought aboard. Still, because “all our evacuation of Turkey’s enemies had been by arrangement with the Turkish authorities,” according to Zogbaum—though of course Turkish officials were causing the expulsions of its own citizens in the first place—Zogbaum considered it a “point of honor” to hand the young man over. Did the captain know the likely consequence? He did. As he reported the stowaway to the Turkish captain of the port, Zogbaum made this noteworthy comment: “If you have to shoot this man please don’t do it in the presence of my men.”57
As a counterbalance to Zogbaum’s disgusting act, let us cite one other destroyer captain’s unquestionable heroism at about the same time, the only significant episode of its kind through four years of American naval involvement in Turkey.
On the early morning of December 16, 1922, the destroyer Bainbridge was in the Sea of Marmara heading toward Constantinople when its officer of the watch noticed a flash of light astern of a vessel off to starboard. Steaming closer, the bridge watch saw that the ship (it turned out to be the French military transport Vinh Long) was aflame, with smoke billowing out of its after hatch, boats getting ready to lower, and a varied mass of people milling the decks. Bainbridge’s skipper, Lt. Cdr. W. Atlee Edwards, ordered his fire and rescue boats away, and then directed that Bainbridge itself be brought near the French ship. On approach, he strained to hear the French captain speaking to him through a voice hailer, but then the vessel’s after mast was blown skyward with a terrific roar. At about the same time, one of his boats brought a semihysterical fellow back from the transport who was shouting that the French ship was loaded with powder and that if the American destroyer remained close by they would all be blown to bits.
Edwards decided to attempt a rescue anyway. He ordered his ship taken alongside the French vessel and quickly had some lines put over. Then the fire reached Vinh Long’s after magazine. Another great explosion parted all the lines and flung the vessels a ship-length apart, swinging the stern of the Bainbridge perpendicular to the Vinh Long. Almost thrown to the deck by the concussion, everyone on the bridge of Bainbridge was momentarily rendered blind and speechless. When Edwards came to himself, he saw hundreds of people gathered on the forecastle of the French ship.
How could he position his vessel alongside the transport long enough to board the refugees? Edwards’ expedient was both unique and dangerous. He determined to ignore any potential damage to Bainbridge and its crew (and to his own career) by ramming the French vessel, hoping thereby to wedge his ship’s bow into the transport, and at the same time maybe flood that ship, thereby stopping the fire. Warning his crew and those aboard the Vinh Long, he backed Bainbridge a hundred yards, then ordered full steam ahead, directing the helmsman to aim between the ship’s bow and its superstructure. The destroyer’s bow crunched violently into the transport, with great shrieks of tearing metal, and locked the two ships together. Edwards’ maneuver had succeeded. A hurried transfer began over the destroyer’s bow, and within twenty minutes Edwards was told that all those who were living had been taken aboard.
Edwards backed away, saw that, fortunately, Bainbridge was itself in no danger of sinking, and in the early light turned attention to completing the rescue of the scores of passengers who had leaped over the Vinh Long’s side. Then he got up steam toward Constantinople. When he moored to Navy Buoy 2 off Dolmabagtche sometime later, the French admiral Dumesnil boarded from a boat and embraced Edwards on the deck, kissing him on both cheeks. The Bainbridge had saved 482 of 495 men, women, and children, mainly dependents of French officers; they had been en route to Constantinople from Bizerte. For this action, Edwards was awarded the Medal of Honor by America, and the Legion of Honor by France.58
Chaplain William Maguire was serving in Bristol’s Navy then. In a memoir, he would tell about reading the news of Edwards’ sudden death one morning at breakfast in 1928. According to Maguire, when the officers in his fleet mess heard the news, they spontaneously delivered “the finest composite eulogy I have ever heard given to a fellow-man.” Back in 1923 the chaplain had also admired the fact that Edwards was free of the cynicism about the refugees that possessed many Americans. In particular, Maguire had found that many Navy people damned all the refugees for the manipulativeness of a few, but Edwards continued to sympathize with the suffering Armenians.59
One of Edwards’ young officers, however, put his ship’s captain in a slightly different light, adding the Constantinople high-living touch. In a letter written a few months after the Vinh Long episode and just before Bainbridge returned home, Orin Haskell wrote that Edwards had become much smitten with an ex-Austrian countess and had recently outdone himself in entertaining the woman (no scandal, to be sure, just total admiration). The captain was “really branching out,” Haskell considered, for he had recently invited a Russian prince, an Egyptian princess, and a son of the ex-sultan (besides his countess and other dignitaries) out to the ship for dinner. Moreover, Edwards was not only going to take the Russian prince back to the States, but also was planning to buy a Rolls Royce and carry it across the Atlantic on the destroyer’s deck. “When we sail into New York with a prince in tow and ride up Broadway in his Rolls Royce,” Haskell penned in amazement, “there will be nothing to [rival] it.”60
As more and more of the Greek and Armenian refugees were expelled from Anatolia, they finally came knocking on the very back door of what, for many Americans (not only the Navy people), was the grand nightclub of Constantinople.
The ones who arrived in the city came mainly from the Pontic ports. Refugees from Smyrna and points south typically sailed directly to Greece on getting away (maybe via Mytilene), and initially most refugee ships from Turkey’s Black Sea coasts also steamed directly to Greece, bypassing the great city on the Bosporus. Then Greece filled up with maybe a million distressed, so many in fact that the Greek government in January told the relief groups temporarily to stop sending more.61 Hence, in early 1923 many transports offloaded their burdens in Constantinople instead. In early March, Constantinople relief head Harold Jaquith described the circumstances.
In the harbor crowded with twenty-one warships of seven different nations, are four refugee ships crammed with deportees from Asia Minor, who have waited for days to be landed. Ashore, at eleven different places along the Bosphorus, earlier arrivals are huddled together in windowless, doorless, leaky buildings under conditions beyond description. Afloat and ashore, smallpox, typhus, dysentery and pneumonia are unchecked. . . . Weakened by days of travel, by wagon and foot . . . these wretched people fall easy victims to disease. Many of those who survived their march of terror to the sea died on shipboard and 60 per cent of those who lived through the voyage on filthy, crowded ships, were diseased on arrival here.62
At one point there were over thirty thousand Anatolian refugees in the city.63 Their condition was more than wretched. On one “death ship” in the harbor, Near East Relief personnel saw cases of “smallpox, typhoid, dysentery, pneumonia, and typhus lying a hundred in heaps together”; in this black hole, two hundred had died within three weeks’ time.64 Ashore, until the League of Nations lent its aid, the Greek refugee camp at San Stefano was said to harbor in old, broken-down barracks some twenty-five hundred refugees who were dying at the rate of forty to fifty per day.65 And when Esther Lovejoy visited the Greek Hospital at Yedi Koule, the camp had been swamped with typhus to such a terrible degree that five of its Greek physicians had died from the disease, including the head of the hospital.66
However, by far the worst place of all was across in the suburb of Scutari, ironically at the very location where the nursing profession itself had been founded, that is, at Selimieh Barracks, site of Florence Nightingale’s famous achievements. According to Lovejoy, the barracks there was the “worst pesthole” she had ever seen. It was certainly the worst in the world at that time.67 Here, ten thousand refugees (again, mainly women and children) suffered from typhus and also from smallpox. At the height of the epidemic a hundred and forty died per day, according to some estimates; others say three hundred a day.68 Europeans and Americans were at first prevented by Turkish authorities from working here, with the natural result that, according to Doctor Lovejoy, the conditions were worse than anything even Nightingale herself had ever encountered. In early 1923 foreigners were finally allowed into the barracks (and into the stables, too, which itself housed a thousand refugees), to delouse this “colossal incubator of pestilence,” clean up the reeking floors, and begin quarantine and feeding.69
American relief workers and missionaries were prominent among those risking their lives at Selimieh. Aided by a Turkish interpreter, two American doctors, Wilfred Post (from Konia and Smyrna) and Christopher Thurber (from Sivas), organized the relief efforts. Thurber, who himself had undergone a grave bout with typhus before coming from Sivas with its orphans, cheerily donned a nurse’s white costume, put a pipe in his mouth, and began work again.70 Fresh from trying to keep children alive in Marsovan and elsewhere in Anatolia, Ruth Compton sorted clothing for the refugees that had been sent from the States.71 The outfit she wore, which featured a bag of mothballs at her neck to keep out the lice, perhaps helped ward off the disease. Two American doctors and a nurse got typhus here, but recovered. Henry Flint, cashier of the American Board in Constantinople, volunteered to run a feeding station, for, of course, here as everywhere Americans were providing bread, soup, potatoes, and rice, which helped save hundreds. Flint himself, however, got the germ and died.72
Heroic as these efforts were, their charitable impulse did not reach throughout the American community. This descent of Christian refugees from Turkey on Constantinople differed substantially from the earlier invasion of Russian masses, and not just because of the rampant diseases. The Anatolian refugees who actually stopped in Constantinople composed a much smaller group than the Russians had, for one thing. For another, rather than including many cultured Europeans, most of this new group of forlorn humanity were Turkish-speaking peasants from Asia, which meant they were generally much less interesting to the Europeans and Americans in the city. Moreover, many of the hundreds of thousands of refugees who had preceded this new group were still in the city. For such reasons, this new mass of diseased and dying unfortunates did not impose itself greatly on most Americans’ conscience. As writer Bill Ellis commented, “Their fate . . . is outside the range of the ken and interest of the city and its visitors. Only the serious-minded few know or care.”73
The sailors from the cruiser and destroyers were certainly not among the “serious-minded few.” Though they did their Navy jobs well and were encouraged to contribute to the Red Cross, when they went ashore in the city it was not to visit the hospitals or refugee camps. The sailors who had done such a great job at Smyrna or Samsun or Mersina were now to be seen in crowded carriages singing and shouting, on their way to such places as “Dinty Moore’s Place for American Sailors” or the “White Thrush.” Captain Hepburn would speak of sailors rolling down the Pera and singing “Hail, hail, the gang’s all here.”74 Esther Lovejoy’s assessment was more sober, even bitter. Although Constantinople was “gay at night,” it was also “ghastly in the morning,” she noted. In particular, “Sailors on the rampage were common sights.”75
Young officers probably partied even harder than the enlisted, for their money went further. Naval Academy classmates who had once caroused wildly in New York or Philadelphia now were delighted to discover each other in this astonishing Near Eastern city and to celebrate their renewed friendship at the Pele Mele or Muscovite or Rose Noire or Maxim’s, Black Thomas’s place being the favorite of all. If called to an official luncheon during the day, they obediently hauled “bricks” around the dance floor, but they were visibly upset if offered only tea to drink rather than spirits. In the evenings many got thoroughly spiked at newly found oases like the Oiseu Bleu or the Dutchmans, and then after dancing with the Russian waitresses or other young women, they got into fights and tore up the bars and walked off with pictures or potted plants.76 Oil men and journalists remaining in the city frequently joined in the fun. Indeed, military and civilian alike often joined in the “Bosporus Club” too, that select group of revelers who managed somehow, while in their cups, to tumble into the sea.77
Even one destroyer captain had to be sent home for his abuse of alcohol.78 However, usually the senior naval officers and embassy staff (including clerical staff and wives of naval officers or diplomats) enjoyed more sedate recreation. Although the embassy did continue to host refugee benefits, few of these senior people were paying much attention to the desperate Greeks and Armenians (the Russians still held center focus). And just as Bristol had played tennis while the events at Smyrna were transpiring, so during these later months the embassy staff continued about its leisure activities, with picnics across the Bosporus, or swimming parties on Captain Mannix’s large repair ship, or excursions to Prinkipo to party and to see the destroyers shoot. At the latter place the embassy people had such a good time that even the junior officers objected: “We have had dinner parties aboard ship and dinner parties ashore until we are all tired of living.”79
A few final contrasts manifest a degree of ignorance and insensitivity on the part of some Americans. In December of 1922, diplomat G. Howland Shaw wrote Admiral Bristol (still in Lausanne) of lately having cranked a phonograph at the NER personnel house while Refed Pasha, the so-called “Terror of Christians and Scourge of Minorities” and the ranking Nationalist in the city, danced with a pretty Near East Relief girl there. Shaw could not help gloating as he wrote Bristol (who he thought was sure to be “enormously amused”) about the potential effects that a photograph of the occasion might have had on relief supporters back home.80
The young relief woman would probably not have appreciated being made the subject of such triumphant crassness by an American diplomat. Still, her likely ignorance was nothing to the apparent cluelessness of Professor Edward Fisher of Robert College. In early October Fisher noted in his diary having just attended a lecture on “The Limitations of Nationalism and the Need of Reviving Christendom.” The history professor failed to note a huge irony: this lecture was being delivered at his college even as Turkish Nationalist forces were threatening the British at Chanak, and just as the Nationalists were beginning to expel all the Christians within Turkey’s borders.81
And then there were the Americans on the ocean liners, Homeric, Rotterdam, and Mauretania among them. The passengers on these great ships, which had bypassed Athens because of its huge refugee problems,82 had wonderful days in Constantinople in the winter of 1922. They dined at the embassy and at the restaurants and attended dances ashore as well. Then they reciprocated with dinners and dances for American naval officers and diplomats and other local Americans on board their own ships. They also visited the famous sites of the city, from Sancta Sophia to the whirling dervishes to the Roman cisterns to the Princes’ Islands to the fascinating Grande Bazaar. Yet they remained almost completely oblivious of another equally powerful vista, that is, of those ten thousand women and children suffering and dying behind the imposing walls of Selimieh Barracks, in plain view from their liners, just one more caique trip away. Ironically, though, while the tourists knew nothing of them, those afflicted refugees knew intimately of the high times being enjoyed by the tourists. As Doctor Lovejoy observed, having visited both Selimieh Barracks and Rotterdam on the same day, “They saw the big ships during the day tended by hundreds of caiques, and after dark they heard the mocking music from the brilliantly lighted decks, where thousands of God’s favored people danced the hours away. The outcasts were included in these dancing parties. In the dead of the night, when Death came reaping along the corridors of their prison house, he came on the orchestral waves of these liners from New York, and frequently to the rollicking tune of ‘Yes! We have no bananas, we have no bananas to-day.’”83
Nevertheless, even the Americans from the liners visited local Near East Relief headquarters while in Constantinople, as many had contributed to that organization, and few Americans were purposely insensitive. Frequently enough they reached out in generosity even in these confusing days. Sometimes the efforts of a relief worker or doctor or missionary would save a life. Maybe a diplomat’s spouse (often Helen Bristol herself) would be moved by somebody’s troubles and summon effectual aid, or a destroyer captain would notice an especially troubling situation and do what he could to help. However, perhaps one of the more striking personal touches was provided by the offhand comment of a naval enlisted man, a comment that I choose to regard as characteristic of American naval men performing their ordinary duties in that forgotten day.
We last saw Efthim Couzinos boarding a steamer with his classmates from Anatolia College and thanking God for his escape, the success of his departure from Turkey having been in grave doubt even at the Samsun dock. With him, all the refugees crammed on their steamer were ecstatic to be out of Turkish control. Their happiness did not last long, however. As the transport steamed west through the Black Sea (a body of water, incidentally, that many of the refugees from inland Anatolia had, until now, never seen), the refugees fed on hardtack and drank from the ship’s water supply. Unexpectedly, about midnight they drained the water tanks dry. Suddenly they all became tortured with thirst.
What was to be done? That was obvious to the ship’s captain: radio an American destroyer. The refugees on Couzinos’ steamer would later remember a tiny speck of light appearing somewhere near the Turkish coast . . . which soon became a searchlight . . . which finally illuminated the transport from end to end. The “fast, trim, beautiful ship” came to a stop close by, and the destroyer sent a boat over with a water line.
Acting with characteristic efficiency (after all, it was just one of a thousand such errands of mercy carried out by America’s Black Sea Fleet of that period), the enlisted men quickly completed the water transfer. Then, as one of the American sailors turned to go, he happened to notice a group of young women among the ragged refugees. “What pretty girls!” he remarked. One of this group who had learned American English in a mission school demurred: “You should have seen us two years ago. We are refugees now!” The sailor was undeterred. As he stepped down into his motor boat, he replied, “But you are very pretty, just the same,’ As Couzinos later wrote, “This sailor might have expressed these same words to any group of girls around the world and have gone unheeded. But the insistence and clarity in the tone of his voice when he said, ‘But you are very pretty, just the same, was the most encouraging sentence that he could have uttered.”
And so it was. It comprised, in fact, “the most rhetorical, deep-seated, inspirational statement” that any human being could give to another, especially in the circumstances: a packed-in shipload of worn-down, frightened, anxious, penniless, filthy, and ragged refugees in the middle of the Black Sea.84