The Great Fire

by Lou Ureneck

  Q: Did you remain there during the night?

  A: Yes.

  Q: Did you see any incident in the streets?

  A: A big (burning) pillow or cushion was thrown into the balcony of a house we were standing in, I caught hold of the cushion or pillow and threw it out.

  Q: Did you remain in the house?

  A: No; after I threw the pillow out I heard people saying, “The house is occupied,” and I got afraid and went to the house opposite.

  A: Could you tell us who threw the pillows?

  A: They were Turkish young men, young Turks.

  Q: Were they civilians or soldiers?

  A: They were civilians, and they said in Turkish, “There are some Christians here.”

  Q: Then you told us you went to another house?

  A: Yes.

  Q: Did you remain in this new refuge of yours?

  A: No. We saw the fire was getting closer so we were obliged to leave.

  Q: Did you see any incident?

  A: We saw two Turkish civilians with a pail and a long piece of stick which was passed through the loop of the pail. Another man got hold of a pillow or cushion and dipped it in the pail, set fire to it and threw it into the house next to the school through the window.

  Q: Did you succeed in getting down to the Quay?

  A: Yes.

  Q: Where did you take refuge?

  A: At the Point.

  AS IT HAPPENED, the sailors (including Petty Officer Webster) who were leading the group that had left the American Girls’ School had gotten lost on the way to the Quay.

  With the fire raging and dense smoke making it difficult to see more than a few feet in front of them, they had pushed on toward the Quay as best they could determine its direction. The setting sun was a bright red ball behind the smoke, and it showed the way westward toward the waterfront. The fire often blocked their way, and they encountered crowds of people who were also trying to find their way to the waterfront, and the crowds pushed them off their intended course. It was like being caught in the middle of cattle drive except instead of dust and dirt there were smoke and cinders.

  As they moved along, Turkish irregulars shot at them, and they took cover behind walls or inside buildings. The American sailors returned the shots. The sailors picked up children who fell and carried them. One sailor carried six children through a burning section of the street. It was difficult to keep the group together in the chaos and smoke, but the teachers continually pulled the children who had become separated back into the line—or the semblance of a line. From time to time, to their horror, they lost children along the way. The group had to keep moving—it was impossible to stop for more than a few moments and search for them. And there was yet another macabre element to the chaos: the fire was dislodging innumerable squeaking rats from the buildings, and they had formed into packs and were moving away from the heat and toward the waterfront.

  “We were about a mile from the docks,” Webster wrote, “and none of the sailors knew the way, and people that did were so scared they couldn’t talk. When we went out, we had to go through streets that were on fire and some of the front of the buildings had fallen into the streets. We had all the people in back and every little bit we had to stop and fire over the heads of the crowd to keep them from running over us. It took me about an hour to get to the docks, as I got lost from the rest of the crowd. There were a couple of hundred people following me.”

  The group needed to move west toward the Quay, but the fire kept pushing them north until they reached Galazio Street, which ran east to west, from the waterfront to the back of the city. They turned left on to Galazio, passed the British consulate and the American consulate, where they were spotted by Charles Davis, who hailed them, and then to the Quay. The sailors led them toward the theater and spotted the staging area that had been cleared astern of the Litchfield. Meanwhile, Petty Officer Webster finally reached the waterfront. “I could hardly get to the headquarters building (movie theater), as the people were packed on the docks like sardines in a can. We began picking out girls that had been at the school and sent them to the Litchfield.”*

  The staff and some of the children from the YWCA also had arrived and gathered there, and the number at the staging place including the children from the Girls’ School was about two hundred. Hepburn was still mindful that he had decided—and had communicated to the Turkish authorities—that he would only embark Americans. Now he was faced with two hundred Greek and Armenian children and the presence of four very determined missionary teachers. He was confronted again with a decision that brought him in conflict with his orders. “It was necessary on the score of humanity,” he later wrote, to remove the children. In his report, he felt the need to justify the decision. He ordered the Litchfield’s motor sailer to take the teachers and children to an American merchant vessel, the SS Winona, which had arrived two days earlier for a cargo of tobacco and figs.

  In the meantime, members of the relief committee, without authority, were ferrying refugees from the Quay to the Winona as well. Miraculously, among those who were taken to the Winona were Arouskiak Sislian, the Armenian nurse, and her children, sister, and mother.

  Still missing, however, were Horton and his wife, Catherine.

  AS THE SUN DROPPED below the horizon, the white banks of smoke over the city turned purple. It was an odd bit of beauty—a lilac sky over a burning city—that would be remembered by many who were there.

  The scene at the Quay was frantic. People were throwing themselves in the water. Where it was shallow enough, in just a few places, they stood in water up to their shoulders away from the heat, but in most places along the seawall the water was deep, and it was either swim or drown. Some tried to swim to the navy ships. Others deliberately threw themselves into the water to drown. Turkish soldiers on the Quay were terrorizing the refugees by whetting their bayonets on the pavement, working the bolts of their rifles, and drawing their hands across their necks. An officer on a British ship made a note in his diary, “The sea front is a seething mass of wretched people of all ages begging to be taken off.”

  By 7:30 P.M., the fire was more than a mile long, and spreading rapidly, a single mass of smoke and flames.

  Consul Horton was still missing. Hepburn assumed he was supervising the loading of his substantial collection of books, carpets, and antiquities, but he actually had departed the consulate at the last minute to save an elderly Greek physician, who, he had been told, was hiding with his family in a Smyrna factory. The old doctor was among the prominent Greeks in the city the Turkish soldiers had been searching for, and Horton knew him well. His name was Dr. Ippokratis Argyropoulos, a Vienna-trained physician, veteran of the Greek army, and president of the Smyrna Greek Club. It was an ill-advised mission at best; it put Horton in danger and complicated the evacuation. Horton clearly had lost his bearings. He no longer was acting simply as the American consul general. It was a grand final gesture of paternalism toward the Greeks that Horton could not resist. He hurried to the factory, where he found Dr. Argyropoulos, his family, and several Turkish soldiers. Horton demanded the doctor’s release, and the soldiers, confronted by the American consul, waving his cane, allowed the doctor’s family to carry him out on a litter. They took him to the Quay, where he died. Horton made his way back to the consulate. He was lucky to return alive.

  While waiting for Horton, Hepburn had decided to get one last look at the fire from the top of the Gary Tobacco Co. warehouse near the consulate. The fire had not yet reached the building, and he had a little time to have a look. From the roof, he saw three distinct lanes of fire—two had originated in the Armenian district and a third, to his left, in the Armenian district but very close to the Greek Quarter. The fires in the Armenian district originated near the Basmahane station and the Girls’ School. He estimated that the fire, by now a single trident moving on three fronts, would reach the American Theater in about two hours and the American consulate sooner.

  Hepburn returned to
the street, where the crowds where growing even larger. People were streaming from additional back-section districts as they caught fire. “The tens of thousands of terrified people,” Hepburn wrote in a navy report, “moved between the Custom House and the Point, and still people continued to pour to the waterfront and soon it was one solid and congested mass of humanity and luggage.” Hepburn hurried on foot back to the consulate to check on Horton and the guards, who had not yet returned. He found Barnes, Griswold, Davis, and the sailors pulling documents from the consulate’s files and packing them in boxes. It was now about 9 P.M. Dr. Post and Agnes Evon and Sara Corning arrived from the Dutch hospital, which had caught fire. Finally, Horton appeared back at the consulate. His wife, Catherine, was upstairs in their apartment.

  Hepburn gave him ten minutes—no more—to get in the truck, and then he returned to the staging area on the Quay, where he waited for them. Horton grabbed a few additional items, including twelve ancient Lydian coins that had been entrusted to him by American archaeologists and the copy of Leaves of Grass inscribed to him by Walt Whitman. He was leaving behind an entire library, and he had trouble pulling himself away. Finally, he, Catherine, his stenographer, an Armenian girl, and his clerk, a Greek—and Horton’s Gordon setter, Tye—went to the waiting truck, and they made their way slowly through the crowds toward the Quay. The fire was now only blocks away. Horton’s stenographer had put her hand on a wall in the consulate before leaving and found it too hot to touch. Davis left at about the same time with navy guards, and as he departed he saw Turkish soldiers pouring a liquid into the street. Davis dabbed his finger in the liquid and examined it, confirming it was gasoline.

  With all the Americans, including Horton, accounted for and in the whaleboats or aboard the destroyer, Hepburn also left the Quay to board the Litchfield. He ordered the ship’s stern lines slipped from the Quay’s bollards, and the Litchfield’s hull, catching the south wind, immediately swung around to anchor and lay about 250 yards off the seawall. The evacuation was complete. Only one American civilian remained ashore in the city—Jennings.

  The Simpson was already under way and steaming out of the harbor toward Piraeus. The Paradise families and their entourage of servants, children, and college employees and the reporters were on the afterdeck watching the city burn.

  “… as we headed for the harbor entrance one could hear the shrieks of women and report of rifles,” Knauss noted in the ship’s diary. “The flames and glow of the burning city were plainly visible for over fifty miles.”

  In Athens, Clayton filed a story with a Smyrna dateline reporting the fire. “The loss of life it is impossible to compute,” he wrote. “The streets are littered with dead. Thus, despite Kemal Pasha’s assurances, Turkey has regulated past accounts.”

  CHAPTER 17

  “All Boats Over”

  With the wind still blowing out of the south, sometimes shifting to the southeast, the Litchfield tugged at its anchor chain with its bow pointing south, and it quartered slightly away from the Quay, so that its port side afforded an uninterrupted panorama of the burning city. The sailors and officers gathered at the rail.

  The fire by now raged along nearly two miles of waterfront, and in some places it was nearly a mile deep. It had moved diagonally across the city in a mass of explosions and reached the Rue Parallele just behind the Quay. It gained ferocity with each passing hour, and by the time the American evacuation was complete, the flames were shooting hundreds of feet into the air, and the explosions launched fiery towers of glowing red cinders followed by oily clots and columns of black and gray smoke. The smell was nauseating; the sound of crashing buildings and bursting stores of ammunition was deafening. Even aboard ships far out in the harbor, the pneumatic pulses of exploding kerosene drums thumped in the chest and ears of the sailors.

  Hepburn stood on the wood-plank deck of the Litchfield and felt the heat on his face and arms and brushed away the cinders and ash carried by the wind. Ships a quarter mile out in the harbor had to remove flammables, including canvas awnings, from their decks, lift anchors, and retreat to avoid the blast of heat and fall of ash. The screams of the people followed them.

  Backlit by the crimson light of the giant fire, the refugees appeared to Hepburn as a single swaying swarm—a dark snake a mile long filling the narrow space between the line of waterfront buildings and the seawall. Mixed among the people were animals, carts, and crates. Some of the people, crazed with fear, refused to let go of their parcels even though they had burst into flame. Hepburn and his officers and men had been too busy evacuating Americans to appreciate the full scale of the disaster until the ship had been repositioned away from the Quay. Now they stood at the rail and watched in awe. In his report, Hepburn noted the tremendous noise of the fire—explosions and rifle fire—but there was one auditory detail more than any other that stayed with him: “High above all other sounds was the continuous wail of terror from the multitude.”

  In places, the people were so tightly packed that those who were crushed to death or asphyxiated by the crowd did not fall to the pavement. The people closest to the seawall kneeled and lifted their arms, begging to be rescued by the warships. Their screams and moans merged into a mournful drone that reached the destoyers, the rails of which were lined with sailors appalled and sickened by the sight. Some hundreds of the refugees threw themselves off the seawall, standing up to their chests in the shallow places, the women’s skirts blooming around them in the black water as they held their children aloft. Many drowned. Turkish soldiers shot others as they swam toward the ships.

  The Turkish cavalry moved among them, sometimes individually or in small groups, stealing rings and watches and snatching young women. Herded together by mounted soldiers, some of the refugees seemed to have lost the capacity for panic. Their exhaustion was complete. Mothers made their blankets wet in the seawater and put them over their children and awaited their own deaths. Some women went into childbirth. It was impossible to calculate the number of people on the Quay—three hundred thousand, four hundred thousand, a half million.

  Hepburn could not understand why the refugees did not leave the Quay by moving left or right, either toward the Standard Oil tanks or the Turkish military barracks, both of which were outside of the fire zone. He guessed they were paralyzed with fear. What he didn’t know was that Turkish soldiers were positioned at the two exit points to keep the people on the Quay. The soldiers were armed with machine guns, rifles, and bayonets. On the north end, in the direction of the oil docks, the soldiers were only a few hundred yards from Jennings’s house at No. 490. Deeper in the city, in the back sections, in places not yet reached by the fire, some groups of refugees had attempted to leave by finding the road east to Bournabat, the so-called Daragatch Road, but they had been driven back by soldiers who put their rifles and bayonets forward in the fashion of troops breaking up a labor strike.

  “I sat up all last night watching the whole city of Smyrna burning fiercely,” Arthur Duckworth, a radioman aboard the Iron Duke, wrote to his parents. “No one could go to bed. The wind caught the flames and huge houses were burnt in five minutes to ashes and dust. Loud explosions and crashes from falling roofs continuously. Above all the steady screams and yells of thousands of terror stricken people.”

  The American men (besides Jennings) who had decided to continue the relief work were aboard the Litchfield. The American reporters had departed on the Simpson; none were present to see the conflagration. On board the Litchfield were Davis, Prentiss, Jaquith, Lawrence, and Barnes. Standing with Hepburn and the crew, they watched the city burn.

  Then, at about, 10 P.M. the horror intensified. Davis saw Turkish soldiers pouring pails of kerosene on the side streets that led down to the Quay, just north of the Hotel Splendid. The kerosene flowed down the slope of the streets to the places were the refugees were packed together, bringing with it dancing blue flames. He saw another group of Turkish soldiers throwing accelerant onto the barges where many hundreds of refuge
es had been living for days.

  Davis was also convinced that Turkish soldiers had formed cordons at either end of the Quay to prevent the refugees from exiting the narrow zone ahead of the fire. (His hunch was correct—Turkish officers would later corroborate it at the London trial.)

  The prospect of the people being set afire was too much for Davis. He asked Hepburn for his permission to use the Litchfield’s motor sailer to tow the empty barges in the harbor to the Quay so that the people could climb aboard and get towed away from the fire. He proposed doing it himself with Prentiss. Hepburn judged the ploy too dangerous—the Litchfield’s motor sailer lacked the power to pull a barge, and any approach to the Quay by a whaleboat would invite a mass of people to try to board it, which would end with its being capsized. He told Davis he could not take the risk.

  Davis persisted. If the Litchfield’s motor sailer was incapable of the task, what about asking the British or French to use theirs? Their battleships were equipped with heavier boats. Hepburn realized that it was a reasonable suggestion, at least technically. But he was stuck: Bristol had specifically told him there were to be no joint operations with the Allied navies, and he had received nothing from the admiral since his arrival that freed him of his original orders. An officer in Hepburn’s position did not have to guess at the consequences of defying Bristol even indirectly. It would be a career-ending move even in these circumstances.

  Hepburn only had to consider the case of Commander Victor Stuart Houston to know the price an officer under Bristol’s command would pay for showing sympathy to the Greeks. Stuart had been commander of the destroyer USS Brooks a year earlier when it was in the Black Sea port of Samsun. Greeks living along the Black Sea coast were being deported and killed by the thousands, during the Noureddin military command, and missionary and press reports of the brutality had reached Constantinople and the wider world. In July 1921, Houston and another officer on a second U.S. destroyer at Samsun were made aware of a planned deportation order of fifteen thousand Greek women and children from Samsun, a certain death sentence. Realizing that thousands of lives hung in the balance, Houston steamed back to Constantinople determined to deliver the news to Bristol, who, he hoped, would send a message of protest to the nationalists in Ankara. Bristol refused to see him. Bristol’s chief of staff said the admiral was too busy. Days later, Houston was at dinner in a Constantinople restaurant with a group that included the Greek Orthodox patriarch, the writer John Dos Passos, and others, and he described the pending deportations in Samsun. Understanding the seriousness of the deportation order, the Greek patriarch left for the embassy and appealed to Bristol to try to stop it. Bristol was furious at Houston for having revealed the information to the Greek cleric, insisting that it was a violation of his order to remain neutral in the war between Greece and the nationalists. He attached a letter to Houston’s fitness report that criticized his lack of discretion and his failure to follow orders. Bristol ultimately did send a letter of protest to the nationalists; under the circumstances, he had no choice. But the letter in Houston’s file ended any chance of Houston’s promotion to captain. Nonetheless, Houston filed a response to Bristol’s letter, defending his action in the name of humanity. Houston ultimately was relieved of his command, and he retired from the navy four years later at the age of forty-eight.