The Great Fire (31 page)

A
fter World War I, the navy had sent Mark Bristol to Belgium to help watch over German naval disarmament. He was then sent to Turkey with the title of Senior Naval Officer in Turkish Waters, a modest assignment given the small contingent of American vessels assigned to the region.

As a naval officer, Bristol understood that America’s sea power required oil, and he was an advocate of America’s oil companies in the Near East from the moment he had arrived in Constantinople on January 28, 1919. He was also an advocate of America’s mining companies, tractor and locomotive companies, sewing machine companies, banking companies, car companies, alcohol companies, and tobacco companies. He was for American companies, pure and simple, but oil was his priority.

Bristol’s ties to business were a point of pride with him, and he eagerly enumerated them in listing his achievements to his navy superiors. When he was denied a promotion in June 1920 that would have made him a permanent rear admiral, he wrote to his superiors with characteristic confidence, “With my complete file before the board I can not believe it possible that my brother officers of that board could have passed me over unless there was some information attached to my record that is not known by me.” (There was nothing hidden in his file.) He had followed up with a five-page single-spaced memo detailing his accomplishments
and citing numerous letters of praise from oil executives and especially Standard Oil of New York, where his close friend and confidant Lucien Irving Thomas was a director.

In his advocacy of American commerce, Bristol was no different from legions of others in military and government service. The point that separated Bristol from others was the nasty edge he brought to his advocacy. He wasn’t just for America; he was against its competitors, notably and almost singularly, Britain. Earlier American representatives to Turkey, including Morgenthau, had championed American business, but they had done so without Bristol’s acidic touch. He nurtured a distrust of the British and a disdain for the local commercial “races” of Greeks, Armenians, and Jews. Bristol believed Britain wanted to lock the United States out of Near Eastern commerce and oil exploration. Like many of Bristol’s assertions, there was a grain of truth in his indictment of the British, but he carried it too far, and with Bristol everything ultimately became personal.

All this mattered for one important reason: Bristol was the American decision maker in Constantinople, and it was Bristol who would make the early decisions about how to respond to the Smyrna crisis when it began. He was not going to damage the good relationship he had built with the future rulers of Turkey (and the owners of its oil) to conduct a humanitarian mission on behalf of Greek and Armenian refugees.

IN THE FIRST HALF
of September, in the days leading up to the fire at Smyrna, Bristol had carried on his routines at the embassy and Therapia. He had his usual rounds of meetings with American businessmen and minor American officials passing through Constantinople. American businessmen wanted assurances about the safety of their property in Smyrna, and he gave it to them.

He told the agent of the Gary Tobacco Co. not to worry and reassured the manager of MacAndrews & Forbes when they called on him at the embassy. As usual, he didn’t miss an opportunity to expound his views, and he continued to take his lunch at the Pera Palace Hotel, a few steps from the embassy.

The hotel was a masterpiece of belle epoche design and a favorite among passengers arriving from Vienna on the
Orient Express,
sometimes carried to its door on the Rue Grand de Pera in a sedan chair. The hotel’s ceiling domes were made of turquoise-flecked glass that admitted shafts of colored sunlight into the grand hall, and its restaurant offered an Ottoman-French menu—Tournedos Rossini, Poulet Mascotte, Asperges See Mousseline, Souffle Rothchilde. Bristol had lunch at the hotel on September 8, 1922, with Lord Beaverbrook, owner of the
London Daily Express
. He had traveled to Turkey on a secret mission to make contact with the nationalists on behalf of the British government. Over the meal, Bristol got in a dig at Rumbold but he had to endure Beaverbrook’s support of the Greeks. “They had been supported by us and we had left them to be wiped out by the Turks,” Beaverbrook told Bristol, whose dark eyes were sizing up the publisher across the table. “Short man with a rather large head compared to the rest of his body,” Bristol noted with condescension.

In the afternoon, Bristol rode in his admiral’s barge back to the
Scorpion
and in the evening attended a dinner party at the home of a prominent Turk and his princess wife, a granddaughter of the sultan. As usual, the Bristols carried on a busy social life. His war diary often noted the social events of the week: September 6: “In the evening Mrs. Bristol and I dined with Prince and Princess Serge Gagarine in the gardens of the Russian Embassy.” September 9: “After dinner we attended the regular dance at the Yacht Club at Prinkipo.”

THROUGHOUT THE FIRST TWO WEEKS
of September, Bristol rationed his cables back to the State Department, and each was reassuring in its own way. He drummed at three points: the Turkish occupation of Smyrna was orderly and Turkish authorities were acting responsibly; the Greek army had committed atrocities in its retreat toward the sea and Greek soldiers had threatened to burn Smyrna; the Greeks and Allied powers, most especially Britain, were refusing to accept their responsibility for solving the refugee problem created by the Greek defeat.

These assertions were not altogether untrue, but they came with
good deal of spin, exaggeration, and even misinformation laced in. Bristol simply was in no hurry to help Britain, Greece, or the refugees. One of the noncommissioned officers at Smyrna remarked that he thought he had been sent there to protect the American tobacco company warehouses—an attitude that reflected Bristol’s actual point of view.

Bristol was deliberately slow to dispatch ships, and the aid he had sent aboard those ships was insufficient. The
Litchfield,
then the
Simpson
and
Lawrence,
had been dispatched to Smyrna primarily to gather information and protect American property. It was not until later that they began to carry significant amounts of food aid to the city, and at no point does the record show any attempt by Bristol to requisition American shipping to deliver supplies or ferry refugees to safety. Bristol had become aware of the Turkish offensive days after it had commenced on August 26. George Horton’s urgent cable asking for assistance had come on September 2, the same day Harry Lamb had cabled Admiral de Brock, who had decided to immediately make a run for Smyrna. Bristol had not shown any inclination to send a ship until September 5 by which time he had been directed to send a destroyer by the Navy Department. That first ship, the
Litchfield,
didn’t arrive until September 6.

Bristol’s go-slow and do-little attitude soon would become a headache for the State Department, and for Acting Secretary Phillips in particular. Faced with a stubborn admiral, Phillips’s stiff Boston exterior of courtesy already was showing some cracks.

Bristol was also finding reasons not to work with Britain, France, and Italy on what was clearly a crisis that Britain, France, Italy, and the United States had helped to create. In his cabled repetitions to Washington about Britain’s responsibility, Bristol conveniently forgot his country’s role—Wilson early on had accepted the division of the Ottoman Empire, approved the Greek occupation of Smyrna, and failed to engage the problems of the postwar Ottoman Empire. Even Harding, as a candidate for president, had thrown his support behind Greece’s aspirations. “You may be assured that to do my just part to further the righteous cause of the Greek Nation and of the splendid element of citizenship it has contributed to our country,” candidate Harding had locuted, “I will continue to help in every possible way.”

Bristol seems to have believed that his personal influence with the Turkish nationalists was strong enough to prevent a massacre at Smyrna. The memorandum he had handed to Hamid Bey when the two had met in his office on September 7 appealed to the nationalists on the basis of his personal friendship. His belief that he could steer nationalist policy seemed boundless. “I am convinced,” his memorandum to Hamid Bey said, “that this is the greatest opportunity that Turkey has had to show the world that a new regime has been established and is successfully maintaining the highest principles of civilization and humanity.”

Bristol waited three days to send his first cable to Washington following the arrival of the
Litchfield
at Smyrna on September 6. It focused on the problems presented by the Greek army—not on the refugee problem: “Smyrna situation most alarming. Greek troops in panic and pouring into city. Population fears violence between time Greek troops ordered to evacuate and temporary arrangements of Turks. Repeated threats by Greek officers to burn town.” Nothing about refugee hunger or homelessness or the prospect of trouble for the Christians in Smyrna at the hands of the Turkish army appeared in the cable. The next day, September 10, Bristol sent another cable reporting Turkish forces had occupied Smyrna and Turkish celebrations had erupted in Constantinople.

ON THE FOLLOWING DAY
, September 11, Dr. William Peet, the missionary administrator in Constantinople, was back in Bristol’s office at the embassy with Jeannie Jillson, a fifty-three-year-old missionary teacher from Boston who operated a Mission Board school in Broussa, a city in the Marmora region southwest of Constantinople.

Broussa had a lineage reaching back to ancient Greece and Bithynia, the kingdom of a warlike tribe that had crossed the Sea of Marmara from Thrace in the sixth century BC and held the region until about the first century, when it had become a Roman province. Broussa, or “Bursa” in Turkish, had powerful historical resonance for the Turks. It was an early capital of the Ottoman Empire, and many of the early sultans were interred there. In 1922, it was a city of eighty thousand people and the center of Turkey’s silk trade. The fertile plain that stretched from the Sea
of Marmara to the snow-capped mountain Asian Olympus, on whose slopes Broussa was partially built, was densely cultivated with mulberry trees, which fed the all-important silkworms. Broussa was principally a Moslem city, but Greeks and Armenians who had survived the deportations of the previous ten years remained a presence, and it had long been an important missionary station.

Miss Jillson wanted permission from Bristol to travel to Broussa to check on the mission school and Christian refugees who (it was being reported) had gathered at Mudania, the city’s port. Bristol approved her travel aboard a navy sub chaser, a vessel smaller than a destroyer, which was leaving that day. It was a short trip by boat from Constantinople.

On approaching Mudania, the captain of the sub chaser, Lieutenant Andrew H. Addoms, noted that three destroyers, one British and two French, were lying off the harbor and flying battle flags. He went up alongside the British ship, and the captain told him that Turkish artillery had fired on him. The British destroyer had taken aboard a hundred Greek soldiers who had swum out to the ship. They were standing on deck naked, and fifty more were in the water attempting to reach the ship. Lieutenant Addoms retreated offshore with the sub chaser and sought permission to land, which was given. Addoms was thirty years old and from Kansas City, where his father had been in the cattle business. He had thick dark hair and eyebrows and a cleft chin, and he was powerfully built. At the Naval Academy, where he had been a gymnast, he had impressed his classmates with one-arm chin-ups. Ashore, Addoms and Miss Jillson found the situation at Mudania similar to that at Smyrna. Forty thousand refugees had fled to the waterfront hoping for evacuation or protection. They were without food; sanitary conditions were bad.

Miss Jillson and Addoms were discovering what others soon would learn: Smyrna’s suffering was not an exception; it was the rule. Along the Sea of Marmara and down the west coast of Anatolia, Greeks and Armenians by the hundreds of thousands had fled, and were continuing to flee, toward the coast, where they met rough treatment—or worse—from Turkish civilians and the nationalist army.

Two hundred French troops were ashore in Mudania, protecting a French railroad terminal at the port. The refugees had crowded close
to the soldiers for protection. “The Turkish soldiers have told them,” Addoms reported, “that they are all going to be massacred and that everything is going to be stolen from them. The result of this is that all of the refugees are now in a terror stricken state, so that it seems that something must be done at once if they are to be saved.”

Miss Jillson and Lieutenant Addoms managed to hitch a ride on a truck driven by a French soldier. They made slow progress on the fifteen-mile road from Mudania to Broussa. It was littered with the bodies of naked Greeks, and from time to time they encountered columns of Greek prisoners, stripped to their underwear, being marched down the muddy road. In Broussa, they found the streets empty except that Turkish women had come out of their homes to watch the passage of Greek prisoners of war. The Armenian Quarter had been ransacked but it was not burned. They went to Miss Jillson’s school, saw that it was undamaged, and returned to Mudania, where they found some of her students among the refugees at the harbor. After much searching, she and Addoms located a boat that she could charter, and they arranged through a Turkish official for the refugees from her school to depart for Constantinople. The next day, Addoms received orders to return to Constantinople. Miss Jillson wanted to remain at Mudania, so he put her aboard the French destroyer until she and the refugees could leave on the chartered boat.

BACK AT THE EMBASSY
, Bristol, on September 12, was berating a correspondent for the
Christian Science Monitor
for its coverage of the Greek-Turkish war. The reporter, Chrys Danos, a Greek woman based in Athens and graduate of America’s Constantinople Women’s College, had told Bristol she wanted him to give her the facts about the current situation in the country; he replied he was glad to hear that because the
Monitor
’s coverage so far had been inaccurate and slanted. The
Monitor
had written extensively on the situation in Turkey and singled out Bristol for criticism, accusing him of covering up Turkish abuses against Christians: “He thinks that in that way there can be obtained concessions and other business advantages.” The
Monitor
had been especially forthright in its coverage of the deportations of Greeks along the Back Sea.