The Great Fire

by Lou Ureneck

  At 1:30 A.M., Powell broke up the gathering. The Edsall’s boilers were fired for the ship’s return to Smyrna, but a gasket in a steam pipe blew out, and the ship was forced to remain at the pier until morning. The engine crew made temporary repairs, and the Edsall departed Salonika at 9:30 A.M. firing a single boiler, which meant the trip to Smyrna would take nearly twenty-four hours. It arrived the next day, early Saturday, September 16.

  As the ship came to the Quay, the fire in the city was still burning, though not with the intensity of the first three nights. On the previous two days, it had spread north and south along the waterfront, leaving wreckage from the mansions at the southern end of Bella Vista all the way to the Custom House Pier—well over a mile and a half of jagged black walls, smoldering piles of masonry and wood, and barely discernible streets. Refugees remained on the Quay, sitting on the remains of their bundles, many partially burned. Turkish soldiers on horseback patrolled up and down the waterfront, and refugees attempting to swim the ships were shot. Jennings’s safe house at 490 flew an American flag, and children continued to occupy the space outside the front door, but there was no American guard posted there.

  HEPBURN HAD BEEN BUSY in Smyrna on Thursday and Friday, September 14 and 15, while Powell had made his way to Salonika and back.

  The day before Powell’s return, on Friday, September 15, Hepburn had joined a meeting aboard the Galileo, the flagship of Italian admiral Pepe. British admiral Reginald Tyrwhitt, Harry Lamb, the French and Italian consuls, and Dumesnil’s chief of staff were present. The group agreed that a meeting with Kemal was needed to get answers about the Turkish attitude toward the relief and evacuation of the refugees. Pepe suggested that the consuls call on Kemal, but Lamb favored the naval officers as emissaries, and Lamb’s view appeared to prevail when the French officer who had been silent through the meeting finally spoke up. He surprised everyone with the news that French admiral Dumesnil was at that moment meeting Kemal. Clearly the French were working their own channels and agenda, and the group realized there was nothing to do but await the outcome of the conversation between Kemal and Dumesnil. The shipboard meeting broke up, and as Hepburn departed, Admiral Pepe said to him, “There shall be no refugees problem to worry about by the time we get through conferring.”

  Over the previous several days, a storm of diplomacy had been blowing among the Allied governments in London, Paris, and Rome. None of it was a secret to the men aboard the ship except possibly Hepburn—the U.S. State Department itself was staying abreast of the shifting Allied positions through leaks in the embassies at London and Rome. The French had announced that they supported the firm British position that a nationalist incursion into the neutral Dardanelles Strait would trigger war, but the French commitment to force was thin. It would soon disappear, and French foreign minister Raymond Poincaré would fly into a rage at his British counterpart Lord Curzon over an ultimatum to the Turks issued by Lloyd George and Winston Churchill. Even more conniving, Italy openly opposed the British position and had proposed a conference between Turkey and the Allies. The Italians had been trying to broker a Greek-Turkish armistice for a month and had sent a series of questions to the nationalists including one marked confidential: “What oil concessions would Italy get in Turkey in a peace settlement?” The French were slipping toward the Italian position. It was the same old story: the Allies could not agree among themselves on how to deal with Turkey.

  Having heard nothing about Kemal’s response, the next morning, Saturday, September 16, Captain Hepburn decided to call directly on Dumesnil. Hepburn wanted to return to Constantinople to consult with Bristol and he needed to know Kemal’s position on the fate of the refugees. On board the Jean Bart, Dumesnil had no answers for Hepburn—either he had not asked Kemal, Kemal had not answered, or Dumesnil was not saying, choosing to withhold his response. The refugee situation was now less serious, the French admiral said, though on what basis he made the judgment was not clear. Nonetheless, in response to Hepburn’s suggestion, Dumesnil said a meeting between Kemal and the naval officers would be useful, but Dumesnil could not attend because he was returning to Constantinople to consult with his government. Dumesnil warned Hepburn against making demands of the Turkish supreme commander. There should be no ultimatums, he insisted. Dumesnil was making clear his deference to Kemal. Hepburn left the French ship frustrated.

  Then later in the day, a proclamation went up around the city, in Turkish, that settled Hepburn’s question. It announced that all Christians must be evacuated by October 1—two weeks away—or they would be deported to the interior. Women, children, and old men could leave, but all Greek and Armenian men between the ages of eighteen and forty-five would be held as prisoners of war. The Turkish authorities also declared that the names of refugees who wanted to depart must be furnished in advance. Given that at least 250,000 refugees were in the city, the overwhelming number without documents, the requirement was a logistical impossibility. The Turks seemed to be setting up a situation that had no logical outcome except the erasure of the refugees through death or deportation.

  To Hepburn, the situation was moving backward toward some sort ultimate catastrophe.

  Hepburn decided to call on Kiazim Pasha, the city’s military governor, to work out a compromise to the demand for refugee lists and documents. By now, Powell was back in Smyrna, and Hepburn brought him along, but the Turkish governor was absent. Hepburn returned to the Litchfield, and Powell, who was ashore in Smyrna for the first time, went to have a look at the refugee concentration sites. The largest group was at the Greek cemetery at the north end of the city, where about twelve thousand people milled about, sat on their blankets, and huddled with their children. As Powell walked among the crowd, the refugee men, mostly elderly with thick broad mustaches and dressed in farm clothes, removed their hats as Powell passed by, stood at attention and gave him military salutes, offering to escort him through the makeshift camp. “There is no doubt that they knew and appreciated what our visit was for,” he wrote in his ship’s diary. The suffering and the obvious appeal for help touched and made an impression on him.

  THE BURNED CITY THROUGH which Powell walked was a ghastly scene—a vast plain of rubble and destruction, leveled almost entirely by the fire except for the shafts of naked chimneys, brick arches where once there had been grand entrances, and blasted churches without roofs. The twisted metal and cinder-filled streets were discernible only by the broken lines of standing walls of masonry, the remnants of capacious buildings. The blackened warehouses and hotels that still stood at the perimeter of the fire zone showed floorless vacant interiors—the rectangles that once were tall upper windows afforded a view to more ruins beyond, or the sky. The scene resembled those places in France that had been devastated by artillery fire in the Great War, except this was worse because it was a not a Picardy village or a town that been shattered by exploding shells but an entire city that had been broken, burned, and flattened. Jagged and partially standing walls resembled headstones. The spread of it was appalling—nearly a mile deep and more than a mile wide. The blasted cityscape smoldered still, smoke rising from the piles of mortar and stone at various places, and it gave off the smell of wet ashes, tobacco, and death. The corpses of the people who had been trapped by the inferno or shot in its aftermath lay in distorted positions, blackened, on the pavement. Dogs roamed, pulling at the putrid flesh. It was surely a piece of hell reconstructed on earth. Here and there, Turks picked through the ruins for unburnt booty, or a pod of refugees took shelter in the shade under an overhang of scorched masonry. Occasionally, under the wind, in a pile of rubble or a tumbled building, flames would flare back up. The only part of the city undamaged was the Turkish section at the base of Mount Pagus, the small adjoining Jewish section, and the terminus of the Point. Turkish residents had taken to fishing along the Quay with hooks and strands of salvaged telegraph wire for submerged bodies from which they could remove valuables: rings, coins, or gold teeth. The water was remarkably clear, an
d the corpses could be seen waving like seaweed below the surface. For years afterward, a big fish would be caught and opened and a bag of jewels would come out of the stomach.

  Throughout the day, Merrill had been busy, pursuing his own agenda for Bristol. Bringing along Brown from the Chicago Daily News, Merrill also had called on Kiazim Pasha, who told him the police had arrested twenty-two Armenians for starting the fire. He said they had confessed and belonged to an organization of six hundred Armenians that had plotted the city’s destruction. Merrill asked to interview the fire starters. Kiazim agreed but was unable to produce them. Merrill continued to press for them, but they were never produced. He also visited Noureddin at the Konak, seeking a copy of the letter written by Dr. White that proved American missionaries had conspired with ethnic Greeks in Marsovan against the Turkish government. This was the letter that Noureddin had described in the conversation five days earlier in the meeting with Hepburn and Dr. Post. Merrill told Noureddin he wanted to take it to Admiral Bristol. (It would make an excellent talking point for the admiral in his press campaign against the missionaries.) Noureddin said he didn’t have the letter in Smyrna but he would send for it and have it delivered to one of the destroyers for transmission to Bristol. (If the letter was ever delivered, it appears not to have made its way into Navy or State Department archives, and even if it had been, it hardly could justify the killing that took place in Marsovan.)

  Hepburn finally had concluded he had the information he needed and decided to return to Constantinople on the Litchfield early that night to report back to Bristol. As he prepared to leave, Jaquith and Davis came to him with a request to evacuate Armenian orphans who had been left behind by the Winona. The children had spent three nights on the Quay. (They were not among those under Jennings’s care.) Turkish soldiers, Jaquith said, had already taken some of the orphan girls from the group. It was imperative, he argued, that the children be evacuated to save their lives.

  Hepburn did not want to evacuate anyone without Turkish permission—in fact, he was reluctant to evacuate anyone under any circumstances. He had made exceptions on the night of the fire and the morning afterward, but he was not inclined to make yet another. Bristol was adamantly opposed to bringing orphans to Constantinople. Jaquith and Davis assured Hepburn that they had secured Turkish permission (with bribes), and Jaquith said the Near East Relief would pay for their support. Hepburn played the issue back and forth. The dreadful events of the previous week had softened his attitude, and, while it would be impossible to keep the news of it from Bristol, he agreed reluctantly to take them along.

  At about 5 P.M., just before Hepburn’s departure, the Simpson, with Knauss in command, returned from Athens where it had delivered the American evacuees including Consul Horton. It anchored near the north end of the Quay, almost opposite Jennings’s safe house at 490, where it could keep watch over a new and temporary consulate in a mansion that had been the home of an Armenian family before their departure. Powell brought the Edsall in front of the new consulate as well. No doubt the presence of the two warships in front of the string of safe houses gave Jennings some comfort. The Lawrence was anchored in front of the Standard Oil pier, where ten sailors remained ashore as guards. At 6 P.M., Jaquith arrived, at the place where the Litchfield’s whaleboats had tied up at the Quay, with the orphan children—nearly five hundred of them, more than twice as many as he had asked Hepburn’s permission to bring along. Nonetheless, they were all put on board the Litchfield, and Hepburn departed. Also on board were Aaron Merrill; Irving Thomas and Miller Joblin of Standard Oil; Yantis, the tobacco agent; Harold Jaquith; Myrtle Nolan of the YWCA; and Mark Prentiss, the publicist.

  On the way back, Prentiss wrote another story for The New York Times, which he cabled to New York from Constantinople. He blamed the violence in Smyrna on Greek snipers, who “exasperated the Turks beyond their officers’ control,” and the role he ascribed to himself in the relief effort outshone any of the other Americans, including Jennings, who did not get a mention in the story. Prentiss’s reports continued to play down Turkish actions. “I made a personal investigation,” he wrote in the Times story, “and could find nothing resembling an organized massacre by the troops on the Quay.”

  AS HEPBURN AND THE LITCHFIELD passed Pelican Point on the way back to Constantinople, Halsey Powell became the senior American officer in Smyrna.

  His first act was to answer an invitation to go aboard the French vessel Jean Bart for another meeting of the discordant admirals: Pepe of Italy; Levasseur of France (representing Dumesnil, who had departed); and Tyrwhitt of Britain. Each of the officers had been ashore, and each had witnessed the suffering. The French still had five thousand protégés gathered around French-owned buildings at Cordelio who awaited French help in departing. The Italians continued to have problems gathering and removing their nationals and affiliates.

  Powell was not caught in the crosscurrents of competing national interests, as were the Allied officers, all of whom outranked him, and he cultivated a working relationship with all of them. He was the trim, practical, and straight-talking Yank. The British in particular took a liking to him. The officers decided among themselves that the only acceptable path forward was evacuation of the refugees and that Admiral Pepe should approach Kemal with a request to allow Greek ships into the harbor to remove the people. It was a bold plan—simple and straightforward: bring in Greek ships, and take away refugees. It was the idea that Powell had raised in the Edsall’s wardroom back in Salonika. At the meeting on the French ship, the officers decided to inform their home governments of their decision rather than to seek their permission. Of course, no arrangements had been made to obtain Greek ships. The naval officers would cross that difficult bridge when they got to it.

  Powell included the French summary of the meeting in his naval diary. It read, in part:

  An intervention must be done if we want to save some refugees. Mustapha Kemal Pasha’s intention is to send them in the country’s interior… . Admiral Pepe is willing to secretly ask the Excellency Mustapha Kemal Pacha if he would consent… . Admiral Pepe is willing to ask also, at the meeting with S.E. Moustapha Kemal Pasha, if the occasion occurs, what are his thoughts about the removal of the bodies in town.

  The Italian admiral had been the obvious choice among the officers to approach Kemal. Italy’s policy was the most favorable toward the nationalists. (In a few days, the Times of London would report that Russian agents were in Italy purchasing arms for the nationalists and had placed an order with Fiat for armored cars, trucks, automobiles, and machine guns. In other words, the Italians were assisting the Turks prepare for what soon might be war with the British.) No timetable was set for the meeting with Kemal. It would be up to the Italian admiral to work it out. There was yet more waiting.

  That night, some of the fires flared up again, but for the most part the city appeared burned out.

  OVER THE NEXT SEVERAL DAYS, Powell attempted to assess American property losses and intercede with the Turkish military on behalf of the relief committee. The losses were big. The fire mocked Bristol’s reassurances about the safety of American property. Horton’s proposal for American mediation to ensure an orderly occupation was beginning to seem prescient.

  The fire had destroyed or damaged millions of dollars of inventory and buildings owned by the big American tobacco companies. All the big tobacco companies bought tobacco in Smyrna: the American Tobacco Co., Liggett & Myers, and R.J. Reynolds. Most American cigarettes were made with a blend of Turkish tobacco. It was crucial to the American tobacco industry.

  In 1900, before the widespread introduction of Turkish tobacco, Americans consumed two and a half million cigarettes each year. In 1920, when nearly 85 percent of American cigarettes were blended with Turkish tobacco, the consumption grew to more than fifty billion cigarettes per year. The luxury brand was American Tobacco Co.’s Pall Mall—made from 100 percent Turkish tobacco.

  The American companies had their own buyers in the
city; they also purchased tobacco through agents such Alston Tobacco Co. or Standard Commercial Trading Co., which was owned by Ery Kehaya, an Ottoman Greek born in Turkey who had lived an astonishing life. As a young man trained for the priesthood, Kehaya made his way to America, where he had become a citizen and a waiter at Greek restaurant in New York. One day some of his customers, who happened to be in the tobacco business, learned that Kehaya had been born near Samsun, one of Turkey’s rich tobacco-growing areas, and soon one of those customers asked him to help sell a load of tobacco. Kehaya made the sale and used the commission to go into business for himself. That was in 1912. Ten years later, he was one of the largest tobacco dealers in the world, and R. J. Reynolds was a principal customer. Young Kehaya built a fortune and an international company, married the daughter of a prominent North Carolina cigarette manufacturer, listed his company on the New York Stock Exchange, and sent his son to the St. Paul’s School and Yale.* Such was the money to be made in tobacco.

  Standard Commercial had lost two of its five warehouses and about $900,000 worth of tobacco in the fire. (A million pounds of leaf were in the two warehouses, and Smyrna tobacco was selling for about 90 cents a pound.) The local American manager for Standard American, William P. Dortch, had quit after the fire and refused to leave the Edsall. A Standard Commercial manager, E. P. Rogers of Richmond, Virginia, who had been on his way to Macedonia, diverted to Smyrna, hired an armed Turkish guard, and went to inspect the warehouses. He found Turkish bandits sifting through the ruins for loot. Gary Tobacco, which had twenty-seven warehouses in the city and supplied Liggett & Myers, the makers of L&M and Chesterfield cigarettes, lost about $1,000,000 worth of leaf. The American Tobacco Co., manufacturer of Lucky Strike, lost about $500,000 in stock, but its agent had wisely advised the company to buy insurance coverage that protected it against losses due to war or civil insurrection. Also hard hit was MacAndrews & Forbes, whose stock, warehouse, and offices were destroyed.