When you get off in a place like this for seven months and see greed, avarice, and barbarism, as we see it here, you learn how to appreciate gentleness, courtesy, love, and home.
—Lt. Orin Haskell
On the morning of November 17, 1922, Helen Bristol got up early, and, with the escort of Maj. Sherman Miles (the new American military attaché), she traveled to the mosque in front of Yildiz Kiosk, the sultan’s current palace. She had been informed that today, at the sultan’s selamlik (a ceremonial appearance to his women), she would receive the “Order of Chastity, Third Class.” This was a standard award for prominent wives of diplomats. However, Helen had only been persuaded to come by being assured that third class was the highest, not the lowest order.
At any rate, along with many European diplomats there to see her honored, Helen and the attaché waited for the sultan to appear. As the appointed time passed, they were told that the sultan was “on his way,” and they were served Turkish coffee (but no food). They waited longer, to be given again the same assurance, and waited longer yet. After hours they returned to the embassy; Mrs. Bristol was hungry and upset. The sultan, meantime, was indeed “on his way.” At 8:00 a.m., with his son and a few retainers and servants, he left the palace in a British vehicle, was driven to a quay, and was taken by a British launch out to HMS Malaya, which carried him on to Malta. After centuries, the sultan had left Constantinople for good. Meanwhile, hearing that her husband had known of the plans to use Mrs. Bristol’s award as a ruse but had not informed her about it, reportedly “Ma Bristol” (as she was informally called, though not in her hearing) would not speak to the admiral for a week.1
With the sultan’s abdication, and with the expulsion of Christian minorities from mainland Turkey well under way, the writing was on the wall for all those in power in Constantinople. Not only did Turkish armies now control the Asiatic side of the straits, but also even before the sultan left, all of the sultan’s ministers had resigned and the Ottoman ministries had been shut down. The Nationalists would soon take over most of the city’s government, and the large Turkish population of Constantinople was united on the Nationalist side and quite expectant. Within a year, not only would the Allies and their armadas have to leave the Bosporus, but the American warships would have to go, too.
In some respects the American Navy’s departure would be a very natural thing. The grain ships had long since stopped coming, nor was there any need to have destroyers stationed at Samsun to keep in contact with the defiant Nationalists at Angora—the Nationalists were coming to power in Constantinople! Moreover, by the fall of 1923 (when the Allied armies actually departed the city), most of the American relief people and missionaries would have left the Turkish countryside. Hence there would be little need to keep Navy ships on hand to rescue Americans in desperate circumstances, this being one major rationale for having ships on hand. In fact, many American relief workers who had been stationed in mainland Turkey had left with the Smyrna evacuees, although they typically continued to help those desolated peoples in Cyprus, Greece, or elsewhere.
Admiral Bristol argued that American relief efforts should be limited to evacuations per se (from Smyrna or elsewhere in Turkey) and should go no further. As for the multitudes of refugees arriving in Greece, he thought the Greek government “should be made to take charge of the situation and do their own work.”2 Bristol argued this even though most of the hundreds of thousands of refugees arriving in Greece were only ethnically Greek (indeed, a large number were Armenian), most spoke only Turkish, and few had taken any part in the war. The secretary of state declined to restrict the American agencies’ efforts. Many individuals and American institutions like the Red Cross would work with the human deluge engulfing Greece itself for months.3 Those Americans who (unlike the American Navy) stayed in Constantinople would face new conditions, and would have to make significant accommodations.
The Allied ships streamed out of Constantinople and the Bosporus on October 2, 1923. On the day of the Turkish takeover, the city was hung with Turkish flags, sprigs of greenery interlaced with red and white muslin, and Oriental rugs hanging from windows. Turkish troops marched by in their different regiments. Then, after muezzin calls to prayer, crowds of unveiled Turkish women (a startling sight in itself) paraded as did several men’s societies, all of them carrying banners. Hundreds of Turkish Boy Scouts and white-robed school girls also marched. The Americans at the colleges thought they should join in. Elizabeth Dodge Huntingdon (the wife of the vice president of Robert College, George Huntington) later remembered walking through the streets with the marching crowds, after which they all watched a beautiful sunset over the city. It was a symbolic “taking part,” she wrote, suggesting solidarity with the Turks, and implying, if not approval, perhaps forgetfulness of any untoward events of the past.4 It would be the first step of accommodation.
The American colleges would make several adjustments to the new situation. For example, America’s Constantinople Women’s College was soon forced to shut down its emerging medical program (the college had actually been in the first stages of starting a medical school), though its trustees would probably have shut that down anyway because of the financial difficulties the college was beginning to face; with so many Greeks leaving the city, the college’s enrollment was plummeting. On the men’s side, some alterations were fended off by President Gates, but among unavoidable changes, within a couple of years Robert College would be required to abandon its Greek and Armenian departments. This was a major change, as these programs (in language, history, culture) had been a part of the curriculum since that college’s beginning. However, for a time Robert College would retain a mixed population of ethnic groups, as the treaty negotiated at Lausanne in 1922–23 allowed Greeks and Armenians to remain in Constantinople, and many did so.5
Despite their troubles, for years after 1923 the American colleges retained the strong support within Constantinople that they had enjoyed for decades. A striking pair of instances that demonstrates the high degree of the two colleges’ traditional prestige in Constantinople was that the sultan, before he abdicated, and Mustapha Kemal, after he took over the government of Turkey, both sent their adopted daughters to the American women’s college.6 For a period, the American schools’ great traditional prestige continued to buoy them up.
American relief work continued on in Constantinople itself. In late 1922, the Near East Relief in the city evacuated its orphans to Syria and Greece; after that, it kept working both to keep refugees alive at the various evacuation ports, and particularly to provide food, clothing, and medical care when the ships holding refugees stopped in Constantinople before steaming to Greece. (As we have seen, sometimes Greece simply could not handle the masses and asked that the ships temporarily stop coming.)
The times could not have been pleasant for Constantinople NER head Harold Jaquith, who Bristol had “jumped onto” in repeated tirades for such things as bringing Armenian orphans to Constantinople from the interior, where Bristol “knew perfectly well that they were safe,” for not helping destitute Turks enough, and for the “propaganda” of his organization’s Ward-Yowell reports.7 (Bristol apparently never learned Jaquith’s exact role in the latter events.) Despite such antagonism, the Near East Relief would continue its work for a couple of years even after all the Allied armies and ships left, before closing down its operations in Turkey altogether.
In their dealings with the Turkish government, officials of American relief and civic organizations alike had to adjust to the new order. As just one example, for some time Turkish officials had been objecting to the use of the word “Christian” in the title of the YMCA. Though many Turks admired the organization and its service, anything “Christian” was automatically suspect—whatever that word actually meant. Sometime after Smyrna, when Captain Pratt Mannix was spoken to (in Turkish) by an old Turk, a young Austrian woman standing nearby started to laugh. Mannix asked the woman what the man had said. She answered, “He says that the Turks like [the] Americans but they cannot stand those accursed Christians.”8 When some Westerners proposed that the word “Christian” in the YMCA’s title simply be dropped, the parent organization objected. So YMCA secretary Asa Jennings—the same fellow who had somehow found the way to evacuate Smyrna of its remaining hundreds of thousands of ethnic Greek and Armenian refugees when no one else could—formed an organization called the “American Friends of Turkey,” a nonsectarian and international group with a Turkish board, which was to do much of the same kind of work as the YMCA.9
Imitation can be a form of flattery, and hence while it might have raised eyebrows for a Christian to take the lead, this was a foreseeable development. Indeed, for some time a “Red Crescent” society had operated in the Ottoman Empire, this in imitation of the nominally Christian “Red Cross.”
A more problematic kind of accommodation was shown by the American Board of Foreign Missions in its decision “to kiss and make up,” as James Barton once put it,10 which involved a shift of the American Board to “behavioral” rather than “evangelical” Christianity. After the Turkish government passed laws forbidding schools from teaching Christianity, the American Board sent out missionaries who were not to preach or even conduct any formal ministry, but who would simply “live their faith,” maintaining their Christian influence only by “personal example and friendly contact.”11 Put in another way, while French and Italian Catholic schools refused to remove their crucifixes from classroom walls and chose to suffer wholesale closure rather than suffer the inability overtly to profess their religion, some American protestants chose to proceed by “unnamed Christianity.”12
This was, of course, a major accommodation. Christians of all stripes have believed that they should be doers of the word, not just hearers of it (in keeping with James 1:22), but the proclamation of the word itself has always been understood as preliminary and necessary. To say that social workers are preferable to missionaries in overseas work would be a tenable position, of course. (This opinion was often expressed among missionary opponents.) Too, no one would deny that social work and character building can be “good works” in a spiritual sense. However, to practice “unnamed Christianity” could also be understood as becoming a glorified Peace Corps worker rather than a missionary, or being just a good citizen and not necessarily a Christian at all.
As a parallel example, A. C. Ryan, one of the “younger missionaries” of the Bible House in Constantinople, once went to see Admiral Bristol. According to Bristol’s summary of their conversation, Ryan “did not seem to feel that baptism or the profession of any particular creed was necessary in order for a Moslem to become a Christian.”13 Accommodation here has reached a kind of zenith.
Bristol found Ryan both progressive and intelligent, and the admiral was quite enthusiastic overall about this change to behavioral Christianity.14 Actually, in speeches at the colleges and in his conversations with religious authorities, Bristol had long been preaching this very doctrine of “teaching religion by example” instead of “proselyting.”15 Nevertheless, for the admiral to point out as vehemently as he did to committed Christians the way they should proclaim their faith (without proclaiming it) was quite disingenuous. As Bristol once confessed to Gates, he had not darkened a church door for years.16 When, on Sunday mornings, the people from Bible House were attending the Dutch Chapel in Pera and educators at Robert College were worshipping in their chapel, and while even a few Navy people might be listening to one of the occasionally available chaplains, Bristol was customarily to be found with his wife at home, or perhaps on the Scorpion, preparing for the next weekend social function.
Bristol continued to preach the gospel of American business, however. Within two weeks of the last refugee being taken off the Smyrna railroad pier, Bristol was writing American friends, suggesting they should now pursue business with the Nationalists. This “virgin country,” he wrote, was now “open to all kinds of developments.”17 Moreover, in the tense period during which everyone in the city could see the Nationalists were placing guns on the hills above Scutari,18 Bristol could even contemplate optimistically the possibility of new business arrangements in Constantinople itself. As he argued to a Standard Oil friend, “even if the Turks came in and drove out all these Greeks and Armenians that have been here centuries bleeding the country and practicing all kind of business methods[,] I would not consider it the worst thing that could happen to Constantinople.” Considerable suffering and unfairness might be involved in the “cleaning out of the population,” Bristol thought, but even that did not seem so bad, in comparison to the possibility of business then being built up on more “decent lines.”19
At the State Department, Allen Dulles was a bit more clear-sighted than Bristol both on the possibilities for commerce and on the nature of decency. “Turkey wants American business but I can’t imagine American or other business men risking their capital under present conditions or under a regime where they would be at the mercy of Turkish justice or caprice.”20 In the event, the Turks did not immediately enter Constantinople at the time Dulles’ letter was written, in late 1922. Nevertheless, 150,000 ethnic Greeks left the city between 1922 and 1924, and the minorities continued to be expelled from Anatolia till they were virtually all gone. Through such transactions, which cost Turkey its most productive class, for years Turkey suffered “something like an economic paralysis,” and for a decade, American trade with Turkey went stagnant.21
Eventually, neither fearing “Turkish justice or caprice” nor apparently caring what his actions might imply as to his attitude toward the recent expulsions or earlier atrocities, Bristol and staff members left Constantinople briefly to vacation through western Anatolia. With his wife, Helen; the Kinkaids; diplomat Pierrepont Moffat; and Lt. Julian Wheeler, Bristol took an eleven-day sightseeing junket in April of 1924. They first traveled from Scutari to Eskishehir and then to Angora, and afterward on to Konia and through the Cilician range to Mersina and Adana, much of the trip in a private railway car provided by the Turkish government. According to Kinkaid’s biographer, it was a “glorious trip,” and Kinkaid’s journal (as well as the Kinkaid photos) indicates it was filled with monuments, mosques, mountains, plains, and bazaars.22 Monuments probably not visited were the countless appropriated Armenian homes in Cilician cities; the gravesites or bones of the 1921–22 Pontus deportees, many of whom had come from Konia and some even from as far as Eskishehir, not just from the Pontus;23 nor any of the numerous Greek labor battalions formed after Smyrna, most of which by now had been disbanded from lack of living membership.
In contrast, within a year of Bristol’s trip, that British writer and sculptor and relative of Winston Churchill named Clare Sheridan who had been at Smyrna and witnessed many terrible events firsthand was struck by certain Turkish “monuments” as she made an unescorted journey into Anatolia, traveling down the whole Pontic Coast. The Turkish handiwork she particularly noticed included the defacing of every church in sight. The “jewel of Trebizond,” for example, its own Santa Sofia church, smaller but to Sheridan even more beautiful than its namesake in Constantinople, had had its thirteenth-century frescoes chipped by hammer and chisel beyond recognition. “This destruction is deliberate, irremediable, and complete.” The mutilation had also occurred in Samsun and in Kerasonde. “Wherever there were Christians there are ruins. Every shrine, every chapel, every church upon the way, is reduced to a mere mass of rubble.” The mutilation did not stop there. The Christian cemeteries in these cities had suffered the same, or even worse. “The tombstones are broken, the monuments overturned, the mausoleums looted, and human bones lying among fragments of marble carving and iron railings.” The Greek cemetery in Samsun had been plowed up and planted with tobacco, apparently with no complaint from the American tobacco firms still doing business at the place. Nor, Sheridan added, was all this desecration the result of a single act of war madness. It had been in gradual process for three years.24
Bristol’s friendship for the Turks remained strong, and he was retained in Constantinople as a de facto diplomat for four additional years despite the departure of all his Navy arm, reportedly hoping eventually to become the actual American ambassador (something that would never actually occur). With other Americans who remained in the city, Bristol would lobby for the approval of the Lausanne Treaty. When it was rejected (in January of 1927), within weeks Bristol had helped negotiate an exchange of notes that restored diplomatic relations anyway.25 In that same year, Bristol was ordered to naval fleet command in China. Years before Bristol left Constantinople, of course, not only all his destroyers but even Scorpion itself had been ordered away.26 Virtually all the Navy people had gone with the ships.
Departing famous places is usually not as exciting as arriving at them. Moreover, people seldom write letters describing their journeys home to family members who will be waiting for them on the pier. Still, by referring to naval diaries and a few other documents, one can get across the flavor of American sailors’ and officers’ departure from Constantinople, thus rounding out the story we began.
When Ens. Dan Gallery heard that the Pittsburgh was finally leaving after its six months’ stay, he was having drinks on the sly aboard ship with buddies in a junior officer’s stateroom. He went on the beach right away, determined to have a big night. He first stopped at the “little chapel” in Pera for confession, considering he had no idea when he would have another such opportunity. Then he stopped by the home of his ex-girlfriend, where she was emotionally bidding farewell to her new boyfriend (who was, again, Gallery’s best friend). Moving on, he stopped by the Bear for dinner, where he saw shipmate George Bahm and his Russian girlfriend, Valentina—“another sad farewell, of course.” Gallery and the Pittsburgh paymaster eventually trooped over to the Hotel Tokatlian at 9:00 to pick up yet another friend, and then they met the whole gang at the Petit Champs. After a couple of hours, some eight or ten junior officers left this place thoroughly drunk and committed some petty vandalism as they proceeded to Maxim’s, which they hit “like a West Indian hurricane.” More carousing and then off to the Merle Blanc, which Gallery estimated might be repaired in a week. Two of the officers took a flivver at three, and leaving a “wake of destruction” as they went, finally made it back to Dolmabagtche dock.
The ship did not leave till the early evening of the next day, and, under the insistent eye of his executive officer, Gallery had time to settle for damages done on the Pera the night before.27
Bert Berthelsen’s destroyer squadron had departed Constantinople a couple of years earlier (ending its fourteen-month stint), after it received orders to sail for the Far East via the Suez Canal. For several days the sailors of Smith Thompson (and those of the squadron’s other three ships) paid bills, took on stores, swept down and cleaned up the ship, and decorated it with colored bunting. The night before leaving, the squadron moored its ships together at USN Buoy 2 for a joint reception, with a Navy dance band playing on one of the destroyers’ forecastles. Then off to the city, where the bluejackets’ night was wild and replete with sad farewells.
The next day was memorable, too. All the warships in the city (including the great foreign battleships) had dressed ship in the squadron’s honor that day, and in the late morning, boats, launches, and caiques began circling the moored destroyers. The sailors’ girlfriends in these boats threw kisses and sobbed; some grew hysterical. At 1:00 the ships cast off lines, formed a column, and briefly headed up the strait. Then they turned back south and came up to standard speed. The buglers on the British battleships sounded attention; all their bands struck up “Auld Lang Syne” as the four destroyers passed in line ahead, and the crowds lining the banks waved, cheered, and wept. “It was just too much for any outfit to take!” recalled Berthelsen. On Smith Thompson, tears came to the sailors’ eyes, and no one noticed if a man stepped out of ranks for one last wave. Indeed, the officers in charge wept right along with the men.28
Although Robbie Dunn also left Constantinople on naval orders, apparently it was his freewheeling spy work that had ended his naval duty. Someone in Constantinople complained of Dunn to the State Department, and then an official in the Division of Near Eastern Affairs suggested up the line that the lieutenant be removed. In a long memorandum, Harry Dwight observed that Dunn’s intelligence reports were “too yellow-journalistic” to suit him, far too much like “Levantine coffee-house gossip.” He remarked that others had complained of Dunn in the past, including Colonel Haskell on his return from the Caucasus. (Haskell, then the Allied high commissioner for Armenia, had denounced Dunn for abusing his hospitality and evading his instructions.) Dunn’s rumored Great War fame of jumping into German trenches with John Reed and taking potshots at the French also came in for criticism (whether he had actually picked up a rifle then or not). To top it off, the jest Dunn had made with the Arabs at the bar in Therapia was taken quite seriously at State: “Cumberland says, corroborated by Mears of Commerce, that the Admiral’s intelligence officer has turned Turk, being known in Islam as Mehmed Ali Bey.”
Hence, despite Dunn’s value to Bristol, the State Department asked the Navy to have Dunn transferred, and immediately the Navy complied by telegraphing orders.29 The lieutenant rode St. Louis out of Constantinople, and its captain, Bill Leahy, noticed that, as the domes and minarets faded astern, Dunn could not keep tears from his eyes.30 Actually, even Leahy himself found himself affected, as he noted in his diary. “Stamboul is today in reality an ugly, decrepit, dirty city, with all its ancient glory gone probably beyond recall; but seen from the sea in the evening and from a distance it is transformed by the color of age and romantic history to a strange and a real beauty. No sailor I am sure ever saw it recede into the evening distance without a desire to return some time.”31
A young officer who made the voyage home just as unexpectedly as Robbie Dunn had but about a year later was Ted Wellings, who had been serving on the destroyer Litchfield. One day Dan Gallery heard that Ted was to be married to a White Russian girl. On the way to the wedding, though, he was told that Bristol had talked Ted out of it. Wellings was not the only man to be dissuaded from marriage to a foreign woman on the grounds that it would injure his life or his naval career. As a destroyer’s commanding officer remembered, “it was Admiral Bristol’s policy to place all reasonable obstacles in the way of sudden and ill-advised marriages between our men and foreign women.”32 Even Mrs. Bristol sometimes got into the act. At one point she made certain that staff lieutenant Julian Wheeler stopped dating the Italian girl he was so smitten with.33
At any rate, not only was Ted Wellings’ wedding called off, but the young officer also was sent home on the next destroyer, probably to make sure Ted did not change his mind.34 In the year 2000, though, when the author contacted Wellings’ son, Ted Jr., by phone, he was startled to hear him say, “Did you know, Bob, that my mother was a White Russian?” Apparently, Wellings found the money for passage, sent it to Constantinople, and (despite the admiral’s wishes) married the Russian girl when she arrived in Boston.35
Once Navy people got home, of course, they ran into each other occasionally and shot the breeze about their Turkish experiences. Those officers who had been on the admiral’s staff—along with their wives and the diplomatic officials and their families—kept in pretty close contact. Many remembered the Constantinople years as “glorious,” with all the terrific social life and their various escapades. In the States they entertained Russian visitors like Baroness Wrangel, still seeking funds for her refugee countrymen, and made snide remarks about Admiral McCully’s Russian waifs, though the children themselves seemed quite happy. Margaret Bryan and Admiral Bristol wrote frequently. Soon after she got home, Margaret was startled to receive a fitness report from Bristol. Margaret was identified as “the Junior Aide,” and the admiral reported that this officer “can cooperate, if she wants to,” and so on. Margaret’s letters were very lively, and Bristol once suggested she ought to write a book.36
Naval people occasionally did write about their experiences, and of course I have frequently quoted from their writings here. In 1925 Lt. Cdr. Richard Field published two long and informative articles for the Naval Institute’s Proceedings that described the Near Eastern experiences of USS Goff. This ship (which Field had commanded) was one of the twelve destroyers that had steamed to Turkey right after the burning of Smyrna. In the 1960s enlisted engineer Bert Berthelsen wrote his humorous and detailed book about service aboard Smith Thompson during its year in Turkey (from 1920 to 1921); it also described his ship’s later duty in the Philippines. Berthelsen was aided in this by a diary of his own and by journals kept by one of the ship’s officers. Dan Gallery’s fascinating diary about his naval service as a junior officer on Pittsburgh and other naval vessels of the day has only recently been discovered and published; six months of its pages describe life in Constantinople, particularly life ashore (for the cruiser mostly stayed moored in the harbor, and Gallery and his mates were much happier going ashore than staying aboard). Unfortunately, Gallery never turned his considerable talents at humorous short fiction to the Turkish experience—except briefly, in his autobiography.37
As we have seen, a couple of journalists who later were to become famous novelists interacted very briefly with Admiral Bristol while writing for their papers at the one-time Ottoman capital. The articles Ernest Hemingway wrote for the Toronto Star about happenings in Constantinople right after Smyrna are quite evocative, but as they were based on less than three weeks’ visit (and Hemingway was sick at the time, to boot), they are not probing. Hemingway spoke with Admiral Bristol a couple of times (as recorded in Bristol’s war diary) but apparently talked with no other American Navy men—Hemingway typically ran with the British. Similarly, while John Dos Passos was most impressed by the admiral and did observe that meeting of the Commander Houston with the Greek Orthodox patriarch, these two officials seem to be the only American Navy people with whom he interacted. Dos Passos’ travel book, Orient Express, a small portion of which discusses his three weeks or so in Constantinople, is marvelously impressionistic, but for the most part it touches the Navy hardly at all; moreover, Dos Passos remained ignorant about the real state of things in Turkey.
In contrast, the two hundred pages of Robbie Dunn’s book, World Alive, that deal with his Turkish experience have, as a root, his two and a half years in the city as a naval officer on Bristol’s staff, besides forays deep into the countryside. Published posthumously in 1956 but most of it probably being written not long after the events, the Turkish parts of Dunn’s book are wonderfully descriptive of both personality and place, even of twang. They also are highly redolent of the admiral’s strong prejudices, some of which Dunn no doubt helped to create.
Most regular naval officers naturally kept their eyes strictly on their naval duty and wrote nothing more public than letters, journals, diaries, and official documents. Several of these men would later become highly successful in the naval service, not only being promoted to admiral at one level or another, but also taking on major jobs and accomplishing important things. After Bristol’s chief of staff, Japy Hepburn, for instance, became commander in chief, U.S. Fleet, in 1936, he then headed the “Hepburn Board,” which set in motion the massive U.S. defense expansion of the late 1930s. Then, for three years during World War II, he had charge of the Navy’s General Board. (Capt. Harry Pence, commanding officer of McFarland during two Turkish tours, was a member of that same board.) In that same war, Bristol’s one-time assistant chief of staff, Thomas Kinkaid, commanded the 7th Fleet during the New Guinea campaign and the great Battle of Leyte Gulf, while fellow staffer A. Stanton “Tip” Merrill commanded the cruiser-destroyer force that won the Battle of Empress Augusta Bay.
A few people who rode or commanded Navy ships at Constan and in the Black Sea also gained naval fame and public attention during or shortly after World War II. For example, Robert Ghormley, who had commanded the destroyer Sands while in Turkish waters, worked his way up in the 1930s to become the vice chief of Naval Operations. In the war to come, Ghormley had command of all the operations in the Southwest Pacific for a time, until being dismissed by Adm. Chester Nimitz for being too pessimistic. Bill Leahy, who had captained St. Louis at Constantinople, became chief of Naval Operations in 1937, and although he retired after that assignment, he was brought back to active duty on the outbreak of World War II to become President Franklin Roosevelt’s chief of staff (effectually the first Armed Forces chief of staff), a position he kept throughout that war. And in 1944, the task group that Ens. Dan Gallery commanded carried out successfully Gallery’s astonishing plan to capture a German submarine on the high seas. Promoted to rear admiral partly because of this exploit, Gallery did not retire until 1960, by which time he had orchestrated a move to get that same German submarine placed alongside the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, where it remains (having recently been moved inside and refurbished) till this day.
A diplomat on Bristol’s staff who became particularly prominent after the war was Allen Dulles. He became the first civilian director of central intelligence in 1953 and remained in that office until 1961, when he was forced to resign partly because of the notorious failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. Later he served on the Warren Commission that investigated the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
At least two American naval officers eventually went back to Turkey. During World War II, Webb Trammell (who had commanded Fox in the Black Sea) and former Bristol staffer Robbie Dunn were ordered to naval duty in the city now called Istanbul. Trammell (now a captain) was assigned as naval attaché, and Dunn (appointed a lieutenant commander upon returning to active duty at age sixty-four) was his assistant. Though an old kavass at the embassy gates kissed Dunn’s hand, otherwise Istanbul was a “city of ghosts” for the writer. Pera was slovenly, the Grande Rue (now Istiklal Caddesi, or Independence Avenue) was the world’s ugliest artery, Dunn thought, and the once bawdy Petit Champs had been turned into a children’s playground.38 (Reportedly, upon their occupation of Constantinople in October of 1923, the Nationalists had closed four thousand public houses—and had kept most of them closed.39)
Dunn’s business was still spying, but because of Turkey’s neutrality during the later war, the great city seems to have been a pretty dull place compared to earlier years.40 Dunn left before 1945, the year in which the American Hospital in Constantinople was renamed “Admiral Bristol Hospital,”41 the name it carried for fifty years, and with some justice, for Bristol was probably the hospital’s greatest sponsor both while in Turkey and when he returned to the States, as well being as a major friend of the Turks.42 Not only did some Nationalists regard Bristol as “one of the heroes of their national struggle,” by the way, but a few historians also have credited the admiral with helping to lay the foundation for the relatively good relations obtaining between America and Turkey since the late 1940s, and even during the Cold War.43
Finally, one naval enlisted man who no doubt would have liked to have gotten away from the Black Sea region, but for some time did not, is worth comment.
In June of 1922, Chief of Staff Hepburn wrote Admiral Niblack in London about Niblack’s former steward. This sailor, named Thomas, had been on Niblack’s staff while the admiral rode Utah into the Bosporus and up into the Black Sea and back, this in 1921. However, Thomas had then transferred to Bristol’s navy. In Constantinople (Hepburn wrote) Thomas had accumulated such a list of bills, apparently just from living it up, that Hepburn was taking unusual action. Hepburn was sending him into the Black Sea and ordering him to “remain in that region, transferring . . . from one destroyer to another, until he has saved enough money to pay his debts.” If that were possible, Hepburn added, and “if Thomas lives.”44
One is reminded of Edward Everett Hale’s The Man Without a Country and of Philip Nolan’s being transferred from ship to ship on foreign stations, never to see America again.
Hence, besides all its other missions, at least in this way, Bristol’s Black Sea Fleet briefly became a prison of sorts. It was not a bad thing, then, that this small American fleet eventually was dissolved. Otherwise, Steward Thomas might be making the rounds from ship to ship even to this day.
