by Lou Ureneck
PART
THREE
CHAPTER 22
Halsey Powell
In 1904, when he graduated from the Naval Academy, Halsey Powell had made a reputation among his fellow midshipmen as “a fine soldierly lad of real old bluegrass stock.” Slightly built with freckles and alert brown eyes under gracefully arched, even feminine, eyebrows, Powell was descended from Kentucky pioneers. One of his forbearers had entered the Kentucky territory before Daniel Boone. The men in his family had fought in the Indian wars, the American Revolution, the War of 1812, and the Civil War. John West Powell, his father, a Union army officer and slave owner, was a doctor-turned-planter with 550 acres of sweet Kentucky farmland in McAfee, thirty miles southwest of Lexington. The senior Powell married twice; his second wife was Halsey’s mother, Margaret Halsey Powell. She too was Kentucky pioneer stock.
McAfee was a place of gently rolling farms that naturally grew the smooth meadow grass whose flower pods turned blue in late summer. As a boy, Halsey would have stepped out the door of the family’s white-frame farmhouse and seen “bluegrass” pastures enclosed by rough plank fences and fields of tobacco and corn. The nearest neighbors, a half mile away, were the Dunns, the family of his father’s first wife, in their Greek revival plantation house, Lone Pine. Halsey lived in the woods and fields of Mercer County—hunting fox or raccoon and fishing in the nearby Salt River. Young Halsey grew up as the son of a prosperous and aristocratic family in a place where racial lines were strictly observed but where river trade with northern and southern states had created an atmosphere that was neither Democratic Deep South nor Republican North. Mercer County had its racial haters, but it also had men and women of broader views, and it had come through the Reconstruction period following the Civil War without the hard-edged resistance to slavery’s abolition shown by its Confederate neighbors. Halsey’s father possessed a reputation as intellectual and courteous. He was a gentleman in a place that reared gentlemen. Halsey’s older sister went to Vassar College. The uncannily prophetic letter his mother’s uncle sent her upon Halsey’s birth shows the sort of family that Halsey came from: “This my hope and prayer that your son may be worthy of both his parents; that he may be heir to the best qualities of the best of the Halseys and Powells combined; that he may be healthy, strong, good, brave and generous; that he may be a lover of truth, a friend to the unfortunate, a defender of the oppressed, and a strong friend of his country in war and peace … and that he may leave a good record of himself as citizen, a patriot and a Christian.”
And so he was stamped as a young man. He emerged from his boyhood at Dunlora, as the family plantation was called, with a strong sense of duty and an impulse toward helping others—and ultimately a choice of career that would provide him opportunities for both.
From the beginning, Halsey was bright and independent. At seventeen, he went off to Centre College, a Presbyterian School in nearby Danville, where he won the entrance prize for the highest score on the admission tests in English, Latin, Greek, and mathematics. The next year, he entered the Naval Academy, where he was successful in his course work and sports and well liked by his fellow cadets. (One of whom was his cousin, through his mother, William “Bull” Halsey, who would go on to command the Pacific Fleet in World War II.) Halsey was comfortable with himself, and this made others comfortable with the athletic young Kentuckian who friends called “Tuck.”
In his first fifteen years of naval service, Powell logged only eleven months of shore duty. As an ensign in 1908, he joined the USS Yankton and the around-the-world cruise of America’s Great White Fleet, dispatched by President Theodore Roosevelt to demonstrate America’s new sea power. (The Yankton was a converted double-masted steam yacht that had once belonged to the French actress Sarah Bernhardt.) In December 1908, a giant earthquake struck Sicily, killing 125,000 people. The fleet was in Egypt, and the Yankton steamed to Italy, where Powell got his first taste of rescue work, digging survivors from the rubble. In 1914, the navy assigned him to command the destroyer USS Reid, an event brought about by the American occupation of Vera Cruz during the Mexican revolution—an act of gunboat diplomacy, which had been triggered by threats to an American oil-drilling district around Tampico, Mexico, and further escalated by worries about a German arms shipment to Mexico’s dictator, Victoriano Huerta. Before the incident was over, seventy American warships were in Mexican waters. (Many of the officers at Smyrna had served there, including Bristol. It was a formative experience for a generation of naval officers.) Mexican oil had become crucial to the American economy—drilled in Tampico, refined in Texas, and consumed by factories in the Northeast. President Wilson had taken no chances on an interruption of its flow. Halsey Powell was thirty-one when America put marines ashore at Vera Cruz and he got a close look at the navy’s role in protecting American commercial interests in a foreign country—not the last time in his career.
Several commands followed the Reid, and in 1916, Powell was assigned to command the USS Jouett, another destroyer, which was at the Naval Shipyard in Norfolk, Virginia. By then, Norfolk was already a navy town, though the giant naval station at Sewall’s Point had yet to be built. For naval officers stationed in Norfolk, there was a lively social life ashore of dances and parties at country clubs and the homes of its leading residents. Halsey met Virginia Perkins, the daughter of a prominent Norfolk doctor, and they were married in June 1916 in her father’s home on York Street, a gracious but eccentric wood-frame home with a turret. Virginia’s family was present for the simple ceremony. Halsey was granted twenty-five days’ leave, and he and Ginger, as he called his bride, traveled to Hot Springs, Virginia, for a honeymoon, then to McAfee, where Halsey showed her Dunlora, and she met his family.
When they returned to Norfolk, Halsey resumed his command of the Jouett, and they lived in the big house on York Street. The following June, three months after the United States had declared war on Germany, Lieutenant Commander Halsey Powell was sent to Europe as commander of the USS Parker, another destroyer. Ginger remained at Norfolk. The Parker was assigned to protect troop convoys against German submarines. On August 3, Powell’s thirty-fourth birthday, the Parker engaged and damaged a German submarine, an action that won him the Navy’s Distinguished Service Medal. A year later, he and the crew of the Parker staged a hazardous rescue of survivors of a British hospital ship, HMHS Glencart Castle, that had been sunk by a German sub. The rescue was a display of seamanship and courage in rough seas and gale-force winds that brought Powell praise in the British Parliament and a letter of commendation from the assistant secretary of the navy, Franklin D. Roosevelt. (Many years later as the nation’s president, Roosevelt would remember the bold young officer with an important and much bigger reward—a promotion to rear admiral.)
After the war, Powell returned to the United States, and he and Ginger visited his parents again in McAfee—he would be drawn back to the Kentucky countryside throughout his life. Then, with new orders, the Powells traveled to Newport, Rhode Island, and the Naval War College, where Halsey became an instructor, mostly marking up the correspondence course exams of officers who were far from Newport. The Powells rented a small wood-shingled cottage in nearby Jamestown, a pleasant small town amid old New England farms with a view of Newport and upper Narragansett Bay. Halsey planted a garden and commuted on a ferry to the War College across the bay. At Jamestown, trouble entered the couple’s happy life with the slow deterioration of Ginger’s health. She had an undiagnosed wasting disease and lost a dangerous amount of weight. In April, Halsey sent a note to his mother that Ginger was down to one hundred and six pounds. In September 1920, she grew more desperately ill and slipped into a coma. She died in Rhode Island on September 22, 1920. She was twenty-eight years old; they had been married only four years. Halsey traveled with her body back to Norfolk, where she was buried. His sister Mary joined him there, at the house on York Street, caring for him during his grief.
Powell soon left Newport and returned to sea, and in June
1922 he took command of the USS Edsall, which was assigned to steam to Constantinople. He was thirty-nine years old. The Edsall was identical to the other “flushdeckers” in the Turkish detachment—the Litchfield, Simpson, Lawrence, and MacLeish. Like the other destroyer commanders working under Admiral Bristol, Powell patrolled the waters of the eastern Mediterranean and Black Sea, ferried oil and tobacco executives around the Near East, and supported the American famine-relief effort in southern Russia.
But unlike others, Powell was a genuine war hero—a boast not even Bristol could make. In looking back for an explanation of his future conduct at Smyrna, the status that his war record had conferred on him might offer a clue. Maybe it gave Powell the confidence to operate from a sense of right and wrong without the blurring considerations of rank or career. The scant record that he has left—crisply written naval reports and detailed ship’s diaries that show not the slightest turn of self-aggrandizement—suggests a man who was supremely capable on the bridge of a ship or in its engine room. He took his own counsel. Surely that had been the case, during World War I, when he had picked up the distress signal from the Glencart Castle and steamed to its last-known position and circled the survivors clinging to debris in high seas and a February gale, always moving his ship to avoid German submarines, while he sent five of his crew overboard to make the rescue. His report back to the navy was brief and without adornment or drama. It said, essentially, the Parker answered a distress call and rescued eight men from the sea. Nonetheless, so daring had the operation been that members of Parliament had sought an adequate way to acknowledge the American commander and his crew. He received Britain’s Distinguished Service Order cross.
IN AUGUST 1922, Powell took the Edsall to several ports on the Black Sea. He called on Varna, Bulgaria, where Standard Oil had a terminal and American tobacco agents bought tobacco leaf, and Novorossisk, Russia, another Standard Oil depot, where he picked up Miller Joblin of the Standard Oil Co. And then the ship made a clockwise cruise of the Black Sea, stopping at Batoum, the port from which Russian oil from Baku was shipped, then to Trebizond, on the north coast of Turkey, where an American destroyer was often positioned to watch the port, important to American tobacco companies. In that last week of August, it became clear to Powell that something big was afoot inside Turkey. He was denied permission to land at Trebizond. The Edsall then moved west to Samsun, another Turkish Black Sea port.
He would soon learn that the nationalist army, opening its offensive against the Greeks at Afyon Karahisar, had closed the country’s northern frontier, including Trebizond and Samsun. From the Edsall’s deck at Samsun, Powell, with his officers and crew, watched the city celebrate the nationalist advance with fireworks, a parade, and machine gun and artillery fire, some that came too close to the Edsall for Powell’s comfort. He demanded the shellfire near his ship immediately cease. The Turkish battery complied.
After three days of waiting, the Turkish military governor allowed Powell to come ashore, and he learned that the nationalist army had advanced as far as Ushak. A Turkish officer showed him nationalist communiqués that alleged Greek army atrocities in the line of its retreat. Powell made an inspection of the city, toured the Near East Relief orphanage and hospital, met the Turkish governor, and went pheasant hunting with two Americans in the city. During the day afield, Powell upheld Kentucky’s reputation for producing marksmen: the day’s bag was twelve birds. Powell had a navy commendation for small-arms proficiency. (McAfee, Kentucky, is only a short ride from Pall Mall, Tennessee, home to Sergeant Alvin York, the most famous marksman of World War I.)
The Edsall departed Samsun on September 7 (a day after the Litchfield, the first of the American destroyers, had arrived in Smyrna) and, delayed by a broken steering cable, arrived in Constantinople late the next day at the Standard Oil docks where it took on 104,000 gallons of bunker oil. On September 9, the Edsall moved to the buoy opposite Dolma Bahtche palace, and on September 10 it steamed fifty-five minutes to Prinkipo Island, one of Bristol’s favorite destinations for recreation. The ship loitered at Prinkipo on Sunday, September 10 (the day Kemal entered Smyrna), as Bristol and a party of eighteen, walking and riding on mules, went on a picnic and climbed to the picturesque St. George Byzantine-Greek Monastery. By his own account, Bristol enjoyed the day, though he was disgusted with a Greek priest who had related the legend of an ancient priest who had been directed in a dream to discover a lost icon on the island. Bristol bristled at anything Greek: “It makes you rather angry,” he noted in his diary, “to have these Greek priests tell you such stories with a straight face and think you are fool enough to believe it.”
The next morning, the Edsall ferried Bristol and his group on the short trip back to Constantinople, took aboard flour and stores from the Near East Relief pier, then, early on September 13, headed to Smyrna, by way of Salonika, with Merrill and the Standard Oil men aboard.
After getting Hepburn’s urgent radio message early in the morning of September 14, as the fire raged at Smyrna, Powell increased the Edsall’s engine speed and arrived in the city at 6 A.M. By then, Hepburn had already made his decision to send the refugees he had on board the Litchfield to Salonika. The Edsall came alongside, unloaded flour and bread, and took aboard the Litchfield’s 671 refugees as well as Mark Prentiss, the publicist from New York, Dr. Post, and nurse Sara Corning. They departed for Salonika at 8 A.M. A careful record keeper, Powell noted the ethnicity of his bedraggled passengers: 500 Greeks, 170 Armenians, and one Jew. The refugees were crammed on the narrow deck of the ship. Powell had his men string lines fore and aft along the ship’s rails and stationed sailors at the lines to make sure none of the children went overboard. “During the trip,” he noted in the ship’s diary, “the refugees were easily handled, obedient to instructions and caution about keeping back from the rail, and about keeping their children off the forecastle.” He gave them two meals at sea—the first food many of them had eaten in days.
On the way to Salonika, the Edsall radioed Bristol with a message from Prentiss, the first transmission in what would eventually form a controversial record of the Smyrna fire and its aftermath. It began, “Prentiss requests following telegram be sent N.Y. Times corrected as you deem best.” The substance of the cable was a proposal to write a story about the burning of Smyrna. Bristol approved the message and had it relayed from the radio room of the American embassy in Constantinople to New York, and the Times agreed to take an article written by Prentiss.
Prentiss’s first story appeared on the front page of America’s most important newspaper two days later: EYEWITNESS STORY OF SMYRNA’S HORROR. In it, he described the city’s suffering during the fire, but he played down the brutality leading up to it. “I personally saw Turkish officers escorting a wounded old lady to a hospital. I saw Turkish soldiers giving food and water to dying Armenians and Greeks. I saw officials arrest junior officers for brutality to prisoners.” Throughout the Times story, Prentiss stands at the center of the action as a principal character in the relief effort. There was no mention of Jennings, his shelter, or the women brutalized by Turkish soldiers. Over the following months, Prentiss would make himself into the hero at Smyrna. Once again, he was inventing a résumé.
The Edsall reached Salonika at 11 p.m.
Powell put the refugees ashore. The Greek civil officials and military officers at the port warmly received him, and he responded with his own hospitality, inviting them and the U.S. consul at Salonika, Leland B. Morris, aboard the ship. Morris was a thirty-six-year-old Foreign Service officer from Texas.* Powell, Morris, and the Greek officials descended to the Edsall’s tight wardroom, under the forward deck, and a Greek officer in halting English rose from his seat to thank America for its kindness in helping his stricken countrymen. The Greek officer, in his heavily accented English, said he was not surprised that America had come to the aid of Greeks since America was a friend of Greece—perhaps now America was its only friend. His words brought similar speeches of gratitude around the tabl
e from the officer of the port and the Greek naval officers. Powell was moved by the display of appreciation.
The two hours he had spent alongside the Litchfield on Smyrna’s waterfront earlier in the day had been enough to convince Powell of the urgency of an evacuation. As the Glencart Castle episode had demonstrated, he had an instinct for rescue. In the Edsall’s wardroom, he raised the question of how to organize an evacuation of Smyrna’s refugees. There was a lot of talk among the men, and the outline of a plan began to emerge. Powell suggested using Greek merchant ships. One of the Greek officers said the Greek military would make Greek merchant ships available at Chios but the Turks would not allow the ships into Smyrna’s harbor. Powell considered the man’s comments and responded in his soft Kentucky drawl that he thought it would be impractical for the Greeks to bring in their own ships. He suggested an alternative—to have the American chargé d’affaires in Athens request Turkish permission for the Americans to take over Greek merchant ships and conduct the evacuation. Someone at the table suggested that Bristol might be able to work it out; everyone knew Bristol had good relations with the Turks.
On its face, the idea was far-fetched. It would require American intervention, and the U.S. government had been disinclined to get involved, even as an interlocutor between the Greeks and Turks for the handover of the city to prevent its destruction. Authorizing American naval officers to take indirect command of Greek shipping and work between the Turks and Greeks to direct a large-scale evacuation seemed even less likely. Besides, Bristol was downright opposed to an American-led evacuation. He was hewing to his line of neutrality and the sole mission of protecting Americans and American property. As the conversation continued around the table in the cramped quarters, lit by an electric light powered by the ship’s generator, Powell offered an alternative to relying on Bristol. Why not have the senior Allied and American naval officers in Smyrna work out an agreement with Mustapha Kemal directly? It eliminated layers of decision making and potential opposition. The obstacle to this approach was that it violated Bristol’s order against working in concert with the Allies. Still, it seemed to Powell, as workable if handled in the right way. The men talked past midnight.