The Great Fire

by Lou Ureneck

  The next day, Friday, September 29, eleven Greek ships came into Smyrna’s harbor. The estimates of the numbers left to evacuate varied widely—at one point, Powell put the number as high as one hundred thousand. It was as if he was emptying a bathtub while the spigot remained open. People from the backcountry were still arriving, having traveled hundreds of miles, while many others came out of hiding Then, rapidly, and oddly, Powell saw the size of the crowds on the Quay fall to an extent that could not be explained by the evacuation to the ships. (The bathtub drain had been unplugged.) A speeding up of deportations seemed the only explanation, and they were occurring despite the deadline still two days away.

  By the end of the 29th, the number of refugees at the railroad pier dwindled dramatically. They came aboard two at a time, one at time. Fortunately, the British sailors were not needed for loading the final ships. The Turks had installed a field battery on a hill overlooking the harbor, forcing the Curacoa to shift its billet for safety. On this day, Prentiss and a young navy lieutenant were taken by Turkish escorts to the towns and villages along the line of the Greek army’s retreat to gather evidence of Greek atrocities.

  On the following day, September 30, the day of the deadline, nine Greek ships and an American shipping board freighter, the USS Casey, arrived, and the last six thousand refugees in the city were loaded. Meanwhile, the Manhattan Island, which had been chartered by Griswold and Archbell, waited at anchor with two hundred and fifty refugees because the Turkish authorities asserted that the tobacco on board belonged to a naturalized American who had been (and continued to be, in the eyes of the nationalists) an Ottoman subject. It might have been Ery Kehaya, the waiter turned millionaire.

  On this last day allowed for evacuation, Powell received word from Admiral Dumesnil that Noureddin had extended the evacuation deadline one week. It was not needed—Powell and Jennings, the American officers and sailors, the relief committee and the British had done the impossible. They had evacuated about two hundred thousand people in seven days. Theodora and her two sisters were among them.

  The gates to the railroad pier closed at 7 P.M., September 30. “Pieces of paper fluttered on the pier,” wrote a British officer. “The flies rose in clouds; rags and a few forgotten bundles lay about; the cranes hung drunkenly over the side.” The evacuation of Smyrna was over. The Litchfield departed with Dr. Lovejoy, Ernest Jacob, and John Clayton for Constantinople.

  The next day, October 1, the Manhattan Island was released, and its refugees taken to Salonika. Powell called on the Turkish captain of the port in Smyrna to thank him for his cooperation. The port captain and Powell had often stood shoulder to shoulder on the pier during the evacuation, and the captain—not a member of the military—had kept his harbor police under control, refusing to permit robbery or harassment of the refugees. The two men had worked through several difficult incidents—including the matter of the swimmers who had been picked up by Powell’s men—that could easily have led to a confrontation.

  Powell drove around town and the outer areas looking for stray refugees. He wanted to leave no one behind. He had been told that some women and children were still hiding in half-standing incinerated houses and basements, refusing to come out. He searched among the ruins but was unable to find them. Fear kept them hidden. Eventually, they would come out, and he would put them on ships to take them away from Smyrna.

  CHAPTER 34

  After Smyrna

  The evacuation of Smyrna was only the beginning of a more massive exodus that would ultimately involve more than a million people. In its scope and suffering, it stands as one of history’s most remarkable forced migrations.

  On that last day of September, when he had evacuated six thousand refugees, Powell had also dispatched the MacLeish with six Greek merchant ships to Chesme and Vourla. At Vourla, Turkish soldiers marched ten thousand refugees from the upper town to the pebbled beach below to be taken away. Mostly, they were old women and children. Their condition was so poor that about fifty died on the beach as they waited to be rowed to the Greek ships.

  “The usual raping went on until finally one Turkish officer, a captain, stationed a strong guard about and stopped it,” Commander H. E. Ellis of the MacLeish wrote. “One girl was taken aboard in a hazardous condition as a consequence and one woman died on the way out to the ships. She had been stabbed.”

  Up and down the Aegean coast, in the region from Aivali to Chesme, thousands of refugees waited to be rescued, and Powell continued to direct his destroyers to escort Greek merchant ships to places where people could be loaded. In some towns, there were no deepwater piers, and the American destroyers sent in their motor sailers and whaleboats to bring refugees aboard the merchant ships. It took hours to ferry them to the ships in some places; in others, it took days.

  On October 2, the MacLeish escorted Greek merchant ships to Aivali, where ten thousand refugees waited. An officer and crew went ashore in a whaleboat flying the American flag. Turkish machine-gun fire snapped its flagstaff and dropped the flag in the water. The American officer landed the boat anyway. The Turkish gunners denied there were refugees in the town. The American officer insisted on seeing the senior Turkish officer, and eventually the American crew was allowed to embark the refugees who had gathered there, out of sight of the waterfront. The MacLeish then went on to Phocaea and Scala Nova (the port for old Ephesus), and the USS Parrott, sent from Constantinople, investigated towns opposite the island of Samos.

  All along the coast, refugees continued to appear on the shoreline, awaiting the American warships that brought the Greek merchant vessels. Even at Smyrna, people from deep in the interior had continued to flow into the city. Some had been hiding in the hills, watching the evacuation from the nearby mountainsides and weighing the danger of making their presence known. “Thousands more had only just arrived from the hinterland villages traveling distances of several hundred miles,” Harold Jaquith cabled NER headquarters.

  At Smyrna, Powell remained in radiotelegraph contact with Jennings who stationed himself at Mytilene. As Powell received reports of additional refugees from his destroyers and the British, he telegraphed Jennings, who dispatched Greek merchant ships, which were met by American escorts. Powell continued to work with Admiral Nicholson, who provided British escorts and sometimes British-chartered freighters. The MacLeish, Lawrence, and the Parrott, the other destroyer that had been sent from Constantinople, did most of the escort work.

  Mytilene and Chios were terribly overcrowded. Jennings and Powell had a second challenge—moving the refugees off these two islands to less crowded locations, either other Greek islands or the mainland of Greece. “Shortage of water increases the suffering of the refugees many of whom have fallen ill,” Jaquith said in another cable. “Sick women are nursing sick babies and the whole island is become a breeding ground for pestilence.”

  The span of the evacuation continued to widen. On October 12, Admiral Nicholson informed Powell that there were as many as seventeen thousand refugees at Adalia, on the southernmost coast of Turkey, opposite Cyprus. The Turks had refused Nicholson permission to bring in a British merchant ship to embark them. Powell sent word to Jennings, who sent Greek ships, which traveled under American escort to the town.

  In the second week of October, Powell sought and received another deadline extension to retrieve refugees that had gathered in villages back from the coast. In some places, his officers found that refugees were gone, already sent into the interior. At about the same time, in the second week of October, Jennings, whose fame was now spreading through the region, made a trip to Athens to confer with the new government on locations for distributing the refugees. (Aid workers and the Greek government had begun calling him “Commodore Jennings.”) The situation was appalling in its breadth and lack of resources, and essentially he and Powell were the main armatures in the evacuation and redistribution of many hundreds of thousands of refugees.

  At Mytilene, Jennings constituted another and bigger relief commit
tee to provide food and medical care on the islands. It included Near East Relief, the YMCA, and the American Women’s Hospitals, Dr. Lovejoy’s organization. In Athens, the government promised Jennings its cooperation and passed along pleas for help from refugees at other locations along the Turkish coast. Jennings asked for more Greek ships and received them, and then he coordinated the wider evacuation through Powell in Smyrna.

  It soon was obvious that the refugee situation in Asia Minor was a monumental humanitarian crisis. It reached from Syria in the south (refugees having fled to Aleppo) to the farthest ports of the Black Sea in the north and east—hundreds of thousands of sick and starving people from villages and farms deep inside Anatolia were moving toward the nearest seacoast, filling towns and cities and barren beaches. People trekked over the mountains of northern Turkey, possessions on their backs, a little bit of food in their pockets or sacks. Soon, many would be caught in the mountains’ early snowstorms. Food was scarce everywhere. Ten thousand refugees were subsisting on roots on the island of Marmara, where typhoid had broken out. Typhoid was claiming lives in nearly all the areas where the refugees were packed together.

  President Harding convened a meeting of relief agencies at the White House in October to initiate a public fund-raising drive to help the refugees. Near East Relief and the American Red Cross took the lead, and the American public responded generously. By the end of October, the Red Cross was feeding a half-million refugees in Greece. Belatedly, at the month’s end, Bristol asked for twelve additional destroyers and a supply ship.

  In November, Turkish authorities distributed notices in the Black Sea regions and deep in the Anatolian interior that Christians would be allowed to leave until November 30. The invitation to depart was a warning to depart. Moving over rough terrain and with only the possessions they could carry, sometimes through snow, 250,000 people began moving toward Trebizond, Sinope, and Inebolu and the Black Sea coast.

  The evacuation of Black Sea ports presented a more difficult problem—the Turks would not allow Greek ships through the Bosporus. So, Jennings, who remained at the center of the massive forced ejection of the Christian population of the subcontinent, arranged for the Greek government to lease British-flagged merchant ships. They began the long process of removing Greeks and Armenians from the seven-hundred-mile coast of the Black Sea.

  There was yet another enormous problem. The return of eastern Thrace to Turkey had triggered the flight of hundreds of thousands of Greek farmers from that region. Much of Thrace was marshland, and the peasants were departing in a time of heavy rains. At Rodosto, in Thrace, Jaquith reported, “Infants are dying in their mothers’ arms. In the confusion children separated from parents wander crying through the streets and hysterical mothers in turn search for them.”

  Hemingway watched the peasants departing Thrace and was moved to produce his most memorable journalism: “ADRIANOPLE—In a never-ending staggering march, the Christian population of Eastern Thrace is jamming the roads towards Macedonia. The main column, crossing the Maritza River at Adrianople is twenty miles long. Twenty miles of carts drawn by cows, bullocks and muddy-flanked water buffalo, with exhausted staggering men, women and children, with blankets over their heads, walking blindly along in the rain beside their worldly goods.”

  The tidal wave of refugees overwhelmed Greece. By the end of the year, it had received more than a million people, increasing its population by a fifth. The million was in addition to the hundreds of thousands that had arrived before the defeat of the Greek army. Greece was broke and without resources to absorb, feed, and clothe the refugees. One hundred and ten thousand refugees were camped in Salonika, doubling the city’s population. In Athens, people were stashed wherever there was space, in fields of tents, among the city’s classical ruins, even in the boxes of the Royal Opera House. In refugee camps, people were dying at the rate of one thousand per day.

  A refugee ship from Samsun arrived in Piraeus with two thousand people on board, seventeen hundred of them infected with typhus, smallpox, or cholera. Even two of the three doctors on board were seriously ill.

  Greece buckled under the strain and announced in January 1923 that it could take no more refugees. For a while, the door was closed, but the Greeks and Armenians of Asia Minor continued their trek to the Turkish ports. The flow gorged Constantinople with sick, hungry, and ill-clothed peasants. The Selimyeh Barracks in Scutari groaned with disease-ridden refugees, and the backup of refugees in ships and in the cities created enormous problems of sanitation and disease.* The conditions were appalling, and growing worse. At Constantinople, refugees were placed in stables intended for animals.

  “Many died on their journey to the sea, many more in the filthy and crowded ships,” reported Dr. Post in Constantinople. “Most of them are insufficiently clothed and lying either on the bare ground or on thin pallets or quilting or sacking. On one such quilt there were seven people, all ill with typhus or dysentery. Two days later there were only three left; two days later only one; and the last time I was there, this last unfortunate had just passed… . As one after the other died, their bodies were carried jostling through the crowd to the dead cart, which then moved on until it was full; then it jogged its way through the streets of Scutari to the edge of the town where the bodies were dumped unceremoniously into a long pit.”

  Powell had remained at Smyrna until late October with the Edsall, then returned to Constantinople. At the urging of his crew, the ship returned with orphaned refugee children, the last to be taken from Smyrna. The officers and men of the Edsall paid for a house in Stamboul to provide a home for the children, and they allotted a part of their paychecks twice a month to pay for food and a teacher at the orphanage. Each morning, the orphanage’s teacher and children said a salute to the American flag.

  Jennings had become a central figure in the international relief effort by then and moved between Athens, the Greek islands, Smyrna, and Constantinople. He established his headquarters in Athens, and Admiral Bristol stationed a destroyer at Piraeus so that Jennings could maintain radio contact with destroyers continuing the evacuation. Many Greeks had the impression that Jennings was acting on behalf of the United States government. He was not; the official relief agencies were the American Red Cross and Near East Relief, but Jennings’s energy and initiative often outran the official organizations. In December, following a report in The New York Times, one of Bristol’s aides called Jennings to the embassy to explain to him that he did not have the authority to promise American naval escorts to chartered merchant ships entering the Black Sea. It was a gentle reprimand. Bristol by then understood Jennings’s standing.

  After the Aegean evacuations were mostly complete, Jennings had turned his attention to the Black Sea ports, where tens of thousands awaited ships. Again, he collected Greek ships and he found ways to charter others, including British-flagged merchant ships. Bristol quietly resisted providing naval support to the Black Sea evacuation. By the late fall of 1922, the League of Nations was involved, and its high commissioner for refugees, the world-famous Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen, traveled to Constantinople to coordinate with Bristol. Bristol’s natural antagonisms surfaced, and he took an immediate dislike to Nansen.* Faced with a mounting crisis, Bristol turned again to Halsey Powell and sent him and the Edsall to the Black Sea to watch over the movement of refugee transports. Powell and Jennings were reunited in the rescue mission, and together they evacuated many more tens of thousands of refugees.

  The situation was reminiscent of Smyrna: “Nearly all are women,” an American officer wrote of the refugees in Trebizond. “They are in rags and evidently do not know where to go while waiting for transportation… . Many have sold their belongings in order to leave. In the meantime, they are subjected to taxation and confiscations so that soon they will be unable to pay their way out.”

  The first refugee ship that entered the Black Sea was the British-registered SS Gabriella, which Jennings had arranged for Greece to charter at its expens
e. At the last minute, the ship’s captain had refused to make the trip because some of the crew was Greek and he feared trouble on arriving in Turkish ports. Jennings found Russian sailors to replace the Greeks, and the ship sailed for Samsun on December 9 with Jennings aboard. Powell met the ship in Samsun and assisted in its loading. And so it went as before in Smyrna—despite the diplomatic complications and hidden antipathy inside the American embassy, Jennings and Powell continued to rescue cargo after cargo of helpless and frightened people.

  In May 1923, as the exodus slowed, the navy transferred Halsey Powell back to the United States, to a desk job as an intelligence officer in Washington, though he soon would be back at sea. Asa Jennings remained in the Near East, continuing his relief work. “I have wondered since many, many times,” Jennings said afterward, “how I lived through those days. I guess it was because God knew I so much needed strength that He gave it to me. I can account for it in no other way.” Jennings departed for New York in July, but not before hitching a ride on a navy destroyer that was steaming to Palestine. He went ashore and found his way to Jerusalem.

  AFTERWORD

  Greece awarded Asa Jennings its highest military and civilian awards, and in the years that followed, he returned to Turkey embarked on a new project, the American Friends of Turkey, an organization whose mission was to create child-care clinics, sports clubs, and libraries in Turkey. It attracted financial support from American businessmen and put him in Bristol’s favor, but it faltered during the Depression and ceased operating. An American policy of engagement with the Turkish Republic divided the missionary community, many of whose members saw the Turkish Republic as a bloody regime that ought to be shunned by the United States. Jennings was not among them, and he developed a close relationship with Turkish officials, including Kemal. It also brought him together with Mark Bristol, who was among the strongest advocates of American engagement with the Republic of Turkey. In 1933, on a visit to Washington to confer with Turkish authorities and after having spent the night as a guest of the Bristols, Jennings was stricken while walking near the White House and died on the way to the hospital. His weak heart had finally stopped working. Widowed, Amy made her home in Winter Park, Florida, until her death in 1970. Asa’s oldest son, Asa Will, became a lawyer and handled legal work for the Turkish government.