Everywhere in the city was the same anti-militaristic attitude. Even walking in the streets, I was met by scowls and often muttered imprecations. This happened to all men in uniform. It seemed to me that they deserved better of their fellow countrymen after risking their lives for them. I am sure a number of these “pacifists” would have attacked me if they dared. Many of them carried foreign language newspapers and had clearly come to the United States only recently to escape the crushing conditions in their homelands. Obviously they felt that their first duty was to change matters in the nation that had given them shelter.
One evening, as representative of the Navy, I was required to attend — in full uniform — a large, formal dinner given by the English Speaking Union. The speaker was Mr. Arthur Balfour, the famous British statesman. In his speech he assured us that the United States did not need a Navy; we could depend on England to protect us. His remarks about our Navy were so abusive that people turned to glare at me. I felt that I should have vanished like the devil in a pantomime through a trapdoor but unfortunately none had been provided. I thought how different our reception had been in Great Britain a few years before. Of course, at that time they needed us.
At the end of his speech, the audience gave him an ovation. A number of them, both men and women, rushed up and actually kissed his hand. I watched his aides during this performance. They were barely managing to keep their faces straight.
A high dignitary of our own Episcopal Church turned to me and said enthusiastically, “A wonderful speech, was it not?” I began to wonder whether I was crazy or whether everyone else was. How that bishop could possibly imagine that an American naval officer would approve of abolishing the Navy and turning over the defenses of our country to a foreign power.
In Washington at the conference we agreed not to fortify our island possessions in the Pacific. The Japanese agreed to the same thing and of course went ahead and did it anyhow. Other nations gave similar assurances and likewise broke them. Meanwhile we had either sunk or dismantled the ships that would have made us the first naval power in the world.
Perhaps I was unduly embittered by the Disarmament Conference, but it seemed to me that I accomplished very little by my year’s shore duty in New York. However, shortly before I was detached and given sea duty again, I received the following letter from the Navy Department:
From: The Chief of Naval Operations
To: Commandant, Third Naval District.
Subject: Activities of Legal Department.
1. The following comments of the Judge Advocate General is quoted for the Commandant’s information.
“The work done by the legal department of the Third Naval District had been of invaluable assistance to this office and it is suggested that an organization in other Naval Districts, patterned on the Third, be established.”
Well, I suppose that I did do something useful.
Although I was glad to have been able to spend this time with my family, I was eager to get to sea again and see new lands. Polly, I knew, was equally eager to return to her familiar life in Philadelphia, and young Dan, who had developed a curious passion for animals, hated New York and could not wait to get back to The Hedges and his pets. So everyone was delighted when my orders came through to take command of a Destroyer Squadron bound for a two-year cruise in the Levant. This was to turn out to be the most interesting and varied duty I ever had.
Chapter 13
The Levant 1922-1924
Awake! for Morning in the Bowl of Night
Has flung the Stone that puts the Stars to Flight:
And Lo! the Hunter of the East has caught
The Sultan’s Turret in a Noose of Light.
— The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
The reader who has stayed with me thus far will know that I have always enjoyed seeing exotic lands and meeting interesting people. The Levant, my last foreign tour of duty, was by far the most picturesque and unusual place I have ever seen — not excepting the Orient.
I took command of the Destroyer Squadron’s “mother ship”, USS Denebola, in June 1922. We had six destroyers already in the Levant and I was to bring twenty more with me for Turkey and Greece were at war and it was vital that the passage to the Black Sea be kept open. Already half a dozen European nations were rushing warships to the trouble spots.
I have never had the deep attachment for any ship, or any place, that I developed for the Denebola. When she was put out of commission some years later, I paid a special trip to New York to say goodbye to the old lady. It nearly made me weep to see her rusty hull, dirty decks, and broken ports. During the years when I was in command of her, she was kept up like a gentleman’s yacht and you could have eaten your meals off her deck. That she should have come down in the world like that! Ah well, perhaps it’s as well we cannot see into the future.
First, let me fill you in with some background of the Middle East of the time. Turkey had been an ally, albeit a rather reluctant one, of Germany in the First World War. When Germany was defeated, it was natural to assume that Turkey also was defeated especially as Constantinople (we hadn’t learned to call it Istanbul in those days) was occupied by the troops of Britain, France, and Italy.
Warships in Constantinople.
However, certain of the Turks refused to admit defeat. Instead of remaining in Constantinople under the supervision of the Allied troops they took to what, in the Philippines, we used to call the “bosque”, that is to say the wild country in Asia Minor and here more and more of these irreconcilables began to gather. They included discharged soldiers whose occupation was gone, farmers driven from their farms, police whose duties had been taken over by the Allies, tramps, criminals of varying degrees of criminality and a hodgepodge of others who, for one reason or another, had no intention of submitting to the rule of the Western nations.
This ragtag and bobtail array needed someone to weld it into an effective fighting unit and to inspire it with the patriotism necessary to oppose the foreign soldiery then occupying their country. They found that someone in a truly great man, Mustapha Kemal. Kemal has always reminded me of George Washington. Some of my Constantinople friends have told me that he had certain private habits that were not a bit like Washington but no matter. In his official life he most certainly was “first in war and first in peace”.
By 1922, the Allied nations were fed up with war. They didn’t want to send an expeditionary force into the hills of Asia Minor against an array of brigands who would scatter at the first impact and then harry the Allied troops all the way back to the shores of the Bosphorus leaving the situation exactly as it had been before the expedition started. Still, the Allies had a partner ready and, presumably, able to take on the job . . . Greece. Over the centuries Greece had suffered greatly from Turkey and now was the chance to take her revenge. A Greek army was landed in Asia Minor under the guns of an Allied fleet and then left to its own devices. Kemal promptly defeated the Greeks and then drove them across country to the Mediterranean port of Smyrna. In the course of these operations a large part of Smyrna was destroyed by fire. The Greeks said that the “Unspeakable Turks” had done it. The Turks retorted, “Why should we have burned a city that already was in our possession?” I was inclined to agree with the Unspeakables.
The first thing the Greek Army did on returning home was to escort their cabinet to an open place and shoot them. When I was in Athens, about a year after the event, I discussed this affair with a Greek Army officer and intimated that the punishment was, perhaps, a bit drastic. He replied, “Those men betrayed their country; due to them, Greece has suffered a national humiliation and the bones of thousands of our young men are bleaching on the hills of Anatolia. In England or America they would have gotten away with it; we made up our minds not to let them get away with it here. If every group of politicians who embark on a war that plainly cannot be won was shot instead of
the soldiers who had to fight it, there would be fewer senseless wars.” Perhaps he had a point.
This campaign resulted in the deaths of thousands, the paying back of countless old scores, the burning of Smyrna and the advance of the victorious Turkish Army (it had become an army) to the shore of the Dardanelles. It was feared that Russia — which had recently become a communist nation with the murder of the Tzar and killing or exiling of the old nobility — might move in and occupy the straits. We were involved because American business interests were imperiled and also the life of every American in that part of the world.
While in New York I looked over the length of time at sea of the captains of the various units and noticed that the skipper of the Denebola, my old classmate Vic Tomb, was due for shore duty. I immediately got on the telephone and in a few hours received telegraphic orders to report on the Denebola as his relief. I was given twenty-four hours leeway in which to start but left in five minutes after receiving my orders, afraid the department might change its collective mind.
The Denebola was an old ship and presented problems. As a tender, she had been loaded with auxiliaries and these took a lot of steam to run. When these auxiliaries were turned on, there wasn’t enough steam to run the engines so like the little tug whose engine stopped every time she blew her whistle, we were dead in the water. I solved that by disconnecting as many of the auxiliaries as possible and leaving them disconnected. Even so, she couldn’t make more than eight knots but, as our engineer force gained experience, we were able to bring it up to ten. This proved to be important when we had to fight the fierce current in the Bosphorus.
The USS Denebola in the Bosphorus.
We had movies every night in the big machine shop and they were very good, previews most of them. I remember that some of them were Douglas Fairbanks in Robin Hood, the Gish sisters in Orphans of the Storm, Blood and Sand with Rudolph Valentino and The Prisoner of Zenda with Alice Terry and Lewis Stone. The ship turned out to be very comfortable in a seaway; she had an easy roll and pitch. There was some trouble with the drinking water caused by rust in the tanks but the medico devised a filter and, while the water tasted a little like the medical department smells, it became crystal clear and presumably healthful.
On November 12th we raised the Azore Islands. By noon we had dropped the islands astern and had started our great circle to Cape St. Vincent Light on the southern end of Portugal. From there we took our departure for the final leg to Gibraltar. Here I made a formal call at the palace and met some old friends I had known long ago in London. I remember one was Sir Walter Cowan, Bart., who had a long string of letters after his name. Cowan was on Togo’s flagship as a naval observer at Tsushima and a man was killed alongside of him and his white uniform covered with blood. Cowan rushed below and the Japs thought he wouldn’t appear again but he reappeared in a clean white suit and continued making notes of the battle.
We sailed for Constantinople the next morning. Coasting along Africa we had a fine view of Algiers and great mountain ranges fading off into the distance. At Gibraltar, I had been warned that a British Navy oil tanker had been fired on by a French battery in the Dardanelles two weeks before. She had attempted to pass through at night and they thought she was Turkish. To guard against misunderstandings, I determined to arrive at the Dardanelles in full daylight, to have the men dressed in their best uniforms and also to have our largest American flag flying at the gaff and our longest pennant, the universal sign of a naval vessel, at the truck. Then came a rumor that the Turks had seized the Dardanelles and were not permitting any foreign vessels to pass. Just in case this was so, I arranged to have two chests filled with rifles and small arm ammunition located conveniently and inconspicuously on deck and to mount our machine guns (we didn’t have any other guns) with some old canvas thrown over them and the gun crews lounging casually in the vicinity. Also, most important of all, a fire hose was laid out in each gangway and maximum pressure to be kept on the fire main. If any attempts were made to board us, the boarders would receive a bath. I didn’t intend to look for trouble but it might have been ugly if a body of armed men got on our decks.
As we entered the straits, we saw on our right the wrecks of two French cruisers, sunk by the Turks, and a great collection of old ruins along the shore. Among them, perched on top of a hill, was the fort of an old Turkish corsair. From this vantage point he could see approaching ships a long distance away and decide which ones he wanted to plunder. It was hard to believe that here in the twentieth century we were making preparations to repel boarders much as other vessels had done since time out of mind.
As we approached the narrows it began to snow; horizontal snow with a gale of wind behind it. At the Chanack, which is the narrowest part and where there is a sharp turn, we could see a lot of British battleships and cruisers and also a crowd of merchant ships. No sign of the French battery that had supposedly fired on the British oil tanker and no Turkish warships. Still, we went very slowly expecting to be intercepted at any moment but nobody paid the slightest attention to us, so I rang up full speed and kept on.
Just beyond the Chanack is the famous Hellespont. I found it especially interesting because I am fond of swimming and according to legend, Leander, who lived on the Asian side of the strait, used to swim it nightly in order to be with his sweetheart, Hero, a priestess of Venus who lived on the European side in the town of Sestos. One night there was a storm and Leander drowned. Hero, in despair, killed herself. According to Bulfinch’s Mythology Leander’s feat was long regarded as fabulous as swimming the strait was considered impossible because of the rip current running from the Sea of Marmora into the archipelago, but in 1818 Lord Byron made the same swim, thus proving he was a crack athlete as well as a great poet and lover. Possibly two or three other men have made the swim but, as far as I knew, no American had even attempted it. Studying the strait from the bridge of the Denebola and watching the set of the current, an idea popped into my mind which had its fruition a year later.
We passed the town of Gallipoli, scene of the grisly British disaster in the First World War when they had tried to take the place with landing parties but were disastrously defeated by the Turks. The snow kept getting heavier and it was hard to see anything. We finally emerged into the Sea of Marmora and the weather got better; it still snowed but we could see. In about an hour we sighted one of our six destroyers. It was the Bainbridge. We exchanged greetings by signal.
When it got dark our troubles began. For some reason, few of the navigation lights listed on our chart were burning. About two in the morning, I sighted ahead a glow of lights that looked like Broadway on a Saturday night. My navigator said, “According to the chart, sir, that’s not Constantinople. It’s a town this side of it.” I couldn’t believe that any small town would be so brilliantly illuminated. I went to the starboard wing of the bridge to see better and there, looming close aboard, were three dark blotches, a little darker than the night. The young officer of the watch told me, “Those are three ships anchored without lights, sir.” While he was still talking I stopped the engines and rang full speed astern just in time to avoid the objects whatever they were. We took a sounding and the officer of the watch reported, “Twenty fathoms. You see, I was right, sir. We’re well within the channel.”
“We’ll wait here until morning,” I told him. “I want to see what those things are by daylight.” When the sun rose, we found that we were cozily nestling against three rocky little islands. Beyond them was Constantinople. We made a careful swing at slow speed around the islands and headed for the city.
I mention this matter not to show that I am always right — unfortunately that isn’t the case — but to stress how careful the captain of a ship must be never to take unnecessary chances. If anything goes wrong, by Naval Law it is always the captain who is responsible; never a subordinate. There is no “passing the buck”. You may not always be right but you’re always the capta
in.
As we approached the city, the rising sun shone full on it. It was the most beautiful sight I have ever seen. Constantinople covers the hills on both sides of the Bosphorus and was a mass of towers, mosques, and minarets, most of it brilliantly colored and all sparkling in the sun. It was like nothing in Europe or America. It was like something out of the Arabian Nights or out of a dream.
American destroyers off Constantinople.
As we rounded the Golden Horn, we passed four British battleships, a flotilla of destroyers, two French cruisers, a Spanish cruiser and several Italian warships with all of whom we exchanged bugle salutes. We saw the other five of our destroyers at anchor and they began signaling us, “Have you our spare propeller?” and so on. I gave orders not to answer any of them until we were anchored ourselves.
I took good care to anchor next to a British ship. The British have their faults but they are seamen, which is more than I can say for some other European nations. The current running down the Bosphorus from the Black Sea is so swift that ships, except those anchored close inshore, don’t swing but they frequently drag their anchors. If anything like this happened, I wanted to be next to a vessel whose crew knew what they were doing.
I shifted into full dress and called on our admiral on the Pittsburgh, our flagship. He filled me in on local conditions. Our men were allowed liberty but not in Stamboul, the native quarter, after dark. They were not to leave the city limits. If they did they were liable to be captured and held for ransom by various brigands that infested the suburbs. “A number of men have been murdered in the city,” he told me. “Mainly English. The Turks don’t like the English. They like Americans but occasionally mistake our men for Britishers which is unfortunate for our men. There are a lot of Russian refugees, many of them aristocrats, in the city who fled the Bolsheviks. Many of the restaurants employ only Russian girls as waitresses. The city is divided into quarters: the British have one quarter; the French another and the Italians a third. They don’t like us to trespass on their territories. Watch out at all times for the current; it’s like a millrace and even in a small boat you’re not always safe.”
The Old Navy Page 31