The Great Fire (39 page)

Jennings and Aliotti went first to the harbormaster and woke him. He gave them the names of the people to whom they needed to talk to get permission to disembark refugees—the island’s governor, the city’s mayor, and General Athanasios Frangos, the commander of the First Infantry Division who had attempted to pull together the shattered forces at Dumlupinar for evacuation at the coast. In addition, Jennings and Aliotti found others who could help, including Percival Hodgkinson, a retired British intelligence officer and septalingual Smyrna businessman who had been vacationing at Mytilene, and Panos Argyopoulos, a Greek naval officer who had been cashiered by the Royalist government in 1920. They turned wherever they could for assistance. By 7
A
.
M
. Friday, Jennings and Aliotti had arranged for a doctor to board the ship to inspect the refugees for disease, and soon thereafter, tugs were provided to take the people ashore to join the crowds who were already there.

Jennings, with Aliotti’s help, spent the day meeting and making arrangements. The island’s authorities welcomed them and reported that a Home Defense Committee already had been formed to assist refugees, but it had exhausted its funds. The authorities deferred to Jennings and
his new now-forming committee, and they were willing to accept more refugees on the island if food could be provided to feed them. Jennings learned there were already about 75,000 refugees in the city, and 35,000 soldiers. The supply of flour was expected to last only three more days. Jennings made an executive decision—he promised deliveries of Near East Relief flour to the island. The governor said he would open the city’s hospital to refugees and provide warehouse space for supplies, and the mayor said he would ask the island’s residents to open their homes to the refugees; it was acknowledged by all that most refugees would sleep in the open, but as Jennings noted, “Any place would be better than on the Quay at Smyrna.”

These meetings occurred near the city’s harborfront and within view of the Greek merchant ships that had evacuated the Greek troops. They lay at anchor offshore in the same vicinity as the
Constantinopoli
. Their presence raised the obvious question of their use to evacuate more refugees from Smyrna. The refugees he had just landed were the first to make a plea to Jennings to put them to use. He counted ten empty ships quietly at anchor in the offshore haze. He took the proposition to Frangos who declined it, saying he feared their seizure by the Turks. Jennings asked him if he would release the ships if the American navy guaranteed them protection, a proposal Jennings had no authority to offer, and nor had he discussed it with Powell.

Under those circumstances, American protection and a guarantee of safety, Frangos said, he could release six of the smaller vessels, which had a capacity of about six hundred persons each. (Frangos, it would be learned later, had only nominal control over the troops on the island. A revolution was brewing in both the officer corps and the ranks.)

At about 6
P
.
M
., Rhodes and the
Litchfield,
back from Salonika, arrived at Mytilene to pick up Jennings, as Powell had arranged the previous day. Rhodes went ashore to find him. He brought with him Cass Reed, the International College professor who had accompanied the college staff and orphans to Salonika. The two men had no idea where Jennings was, so they walked to the Grand Bretagne Hotel, a waterfront landmark with an impressive neoclassical façade and steeply sloped tile roof. It was a meeting place of the city’s prosperous business class. There,
Rhodes and Cass Reed met several people Reed knew from Smyrna—Griswold’s partner in the fig business and some of the Whittals and Patersons, two wealthy Levantine families. Paterson owned the warehouse that the Smyrna Committee had drawn upon to feed refugees. Paterson had been on his yacht
Cleo
when the troubles had broken out. Rhodes also met an American Tobacco Co. agent, but he didn’t find Jennings.

Rhodes and Reed waited in the hotel about an hour, then began walking back to the ship when they spotted Jennings in his straw boater and loose jacket near the harborfront. Jennings said he wanted to stay longer at Mytilene—he had set up a final meeting before his departure. Rhodes told him the
Litchfield
was leaving and he needed to be aboard.

On the way back to Smyrna, sometime after 6:30
P
.
M
., Friday, September 22, Jennings prepared a summary of his visit for Powell, reporting that four to six ships were available to transport refugees if they were assured protection and if flour was sent along with the refugees. The
Litchfield
’s telegraph operator tapped it out to the
Edsall
.

WHILE JENNINGS HAD BEEN AWAY
, Powell had continued to meet with the Allied naval officers, though no progress was being made toward an evacuation plan, mostly because of stalling by the French admiral. Powell, Admiral Pepe, and Admiral Tyrwhitt had met again with Admiral Dumesnil whose obfuscations left the three baffled; the Frenchman was making no sense.

Powell continued to put requests to the Turkish authorities on behalf of the relief committee but with even less success than before. The Turks had begun to insist that the refugees present visas even to buy bread, which Turkish residents were peddling. Most of the concentration camps had been closed, which created another frustrating dispersal of the people, and conditions at the Balchova camp remained bad. He met with Nadja Bey, the military governor, to arrange the concentration of refugees at the city’s football field and Greek cemetery, but he said he had to check with the civilian governor before agreeing to Powell’s proposal. And so it went, nodding heads, promises, and more delays. In the meantime, the wind had shifted back to the north and picked up speed, restarting the fires, and
threatened the Paterson warehouse, the committee’s larder, but they soon died down again and the warehouse remained unburned.

On the same day, September 22, Powell, Davis, and the teacher J. Kingsley Birge drove to Bournabat late in the afternoon, the soft time of day when the plain and hillside behind Smyrna took on its red glow. They wanted to meet with Halide Edib, the nationalist propagandist who had traveled with the army to Smyrna, to enlist her help with gaining the cooperation of the Turkish command. They met a petite woman, thirty-six years old, with thick brown hair, who Kemal had promoted to the rank of sergeant in the army. She met them cordially, and in the conversation that followed, blamed Greeks and Armenians for the fire and described the Greek army’s devastation of towns and villages in the interior. Davis responded with an offer to send food aid to the devastated districts and asked permission to visit them. She was noncommittal about his access but sent her “very kindest” regards to Admiral and Mrs. Bristol. She hoped to join them soon, she said. The Americans returned to Smyrna without having made any progress toward Turkish cooperation.

In a cable, either late on September 22 or early September 23, by which time Jennings had returned from Mytilene, Powell informed Bristol of the evacuation of two thousand refugees on the
Constantinopoli,
but he left out Jennings’s name and adroitly backed into the sequence of events:

It would be almost a week before Bristol was fully informed about how Powell and Jennings were negotiating with the Greeks to bring off the evacuation for far more refugees.

In Jennings’s absence, Powell also had been trying hard to get a reliable answer on whether the Turks would allow Greek ships to evacuate refugees. As early as Wednesday, September 20, Powell had gotten informal
information through a Turkish liaison officer that Greek merchant ships would be allowed into the harbor if they did not fly the Greek flag. It was a breakthrough, if it was true, and Powell was cheered by the news, but he wanted confirmation. Too many promises had been made and never kept for him to trust the liaison officer’s information. Late on the same day, under State Department pressure, Bristol had given Powell the okay, if he had Turkish permission, to use destroyers to embark refugees to vessels chartered by Near East Relief or the Greek Patriarch. The next day, Thursday, September 21, the day Jennings had departed for Mytilene, Powell, with Davis, had called on the military governor to get confirmation of the permission and ask for an extension of the evacuation deadline. Powell got the usual answer: the governor said he would take up the questions with his superiors. So he had been right to be cautious: nothing had been settled.

The next afternoon, September 22, Captain Hepburn arrived back in Smyrna on another destroyer, the USS
MacLeish,
the fifth to call on the city. He was focused on making arrangements for the SS
Manhattan Island
to pick up American tobacco whose shipment had been arranged by Archbell and Griswold and to take away refugees if it had room. Hepburn met with Powell and Barnes over dinner aboard the
MacLeish,
and they made a plan to have the
Manhattan Island
come first to Smyrna, pick up the tobacco and refugees, and then sail to Kavala, a city in northern Greece, where it would deliver the refugees and pick up more tobacco, before returning to the United States. Tobacco was the priority, and refugees would be taken aboard only if the cost of carrying them was guaranteed by someone in a position to pay, most likely Near East Relief.

Soon after dinner, Hepburn received a telegraph calling him back to Constantinople. Bristol wanted him to return with two destroyers. He departed at 9:30
P
.
M
. on the
MacLeish
. Charles Davis joined him for the return. Hepburn told Powell to send the
Litchfield
back to Constantinople when it returned from Mytilene later that night.

At some point on September 22, probably very late, Powell got the message he had been waiting for. It came as a memorandum signed by Noureddin: “Your commission is informed that Greek steamers can come to Smyrna, but not under their own flag, and provided they do
not tie up to the Quay or piers. The embarkation of the refugees is to be under the control and protection of the government of Great National Assembly.”

It’s not clear from the record whether he received the message before or after Hepburn departed for Constantinople, but it seems likely that it came afterward since Powell doesn’t mention it as a topic he discussed with Hepburn while he was in the city, which they most certainly would have done. In any event, this was what Powell wanted—written confirmation from the Turkish command granting permission to Greek ships to enter the harbor. It was the real breakthrough, not flimsy hope of a breakthrough. Events were unfolding out of sequence: Jennings had managed to get the promise of ships before Powell had gotten permission to bring them in, but now Powell had both permission and ships, and the way was cleared for an evacuation. This is what mattered, and it was an even simpler version of what he had envisioned at Salonika when he had discussed possible evacuation scenarios with the Greek officers. It was beginning to look like a single U.S. naval officer and a Methodist minister who had felt the hand of God on his shoulder were pulling off the entire operation.

The
Litchfield
arrived back in Smyrna with Jennings at 10:30
P
.
M
. Powell directed Lieutenant Rhodes to bring the ship alongside the
Edsall
. He did not want it to drop its anchor; he wanted a quick conference with Rhodes and Jennings so he could slingshot them back to Mytilene. He heard them out—Jennings confirmed the availability of ships, Rhodes described the conditions on the island—and ordered Rhodes to return with Jennings, then proceed to Constantinople as ordered by Bristol. Powell told Jennings to bring the six Greek ships to Smyrna as fast as he could. The commander wanted to lose no time in pressing the evacuation.

The
Litchfield
departed, and Powell waited for Jennings to radio him when he got to Mytilene. It had been a good day—except for one thing. The day, September 22, was the second anniversary of Ginger’s death.

A
t the police station in the Turkish Quarter, Dr. Hatcherian and Aram were being held as prisoners of war.

A policeman led them upstairs to a small dark and airless room. There were about eighty Greek and Armenian prisoners in it—there was not room for another person. The men were squeezed inside, all standing, with no room to sit. So Dr. Hatcherian and Aram were placed on a bench in a hallway, and a policeman stood guard over them and the men in the dark room. In time, more men were brought upstairs, and soon about forty men were standing in the hallway. Soldiers beat the new men who were brought into the hallway and searched their clothes for valuables. Other soldiers came up the stairs with loot and traded among themselves. Now and again, Dr. Hatcherian or Aram was asked his nationality, and each time Aram answered “Thank God we are Moslems.” Late at night, the station became quiet except for the shuffling of the men’s feet and their coughing. Aram put his head back against the wall and fell asleep sitting on the bench. Dr. Hatcherian was wakeful—listening, watching, and reproaching himself for the stupidity of returning to his house. He later recorded in his diary:

After a period of silence, Dr. Hatcherian heard the voice of a second Turk, and again pleadings from the woman. She was raped again, and the child was still crying. There was a third soldier, then another, and the rapes continued until sunrise.

The next day, soldiers brought more men to the hallway where Dr. Hatcherian and Aram sat, but they removed other men. A policeman came upstairs and checked the documents of Dr. Hatcherian and Aram and wrote down their names and ages. Unfortunately, Dr. Hatcherian’s military document listed him as forty-four years old, not his actual age of forty-six. After waiting several hours, they were summoned to speak with the police chief on the floor below. Dr. Hatcherian did not hide his Armenian name, and they pleaded their cases. Dr. Hatcherian’s military papers showed that he had served with honor as a physician in the Ottoman Army. He asked to be released, saying he had done nothing wrong, but the police chief said it was impossible. He told them that his duty was to turn them over to the army, which would make the decision.

They went back upstairs and waited, and while they were waiting soldiers brought an Armenian man in a brimmed railroad cap upstairs and forced him to undress. The soldiers beat him with the butts of their guns. Writhing on the floor, the man tried to explain that the cap was for the railroad, and he was not a revolutionary. When the soldiers were done with the man, he crawled to a corner of the hallway. Later, more Armenians in railroad clothing were brought upstairs, and the soldiers
began a rant against the prisoners, mocking the Armenians and telling them they were finished. Eventually, they departed and the hallways became silent again.

The next day, Dr. Hatcherian’s third as a prisoner, a soldier called out the names of all the men under forty-five, and Dr. Hatcherian’s name was among them. They were taken outside, formed into a column, and marched through the Turkish Quarter, taunted along the way by Turkish residents, and taken to the Turkish military barracks at the southern end of the Quay beyond the Konak. The soldiers placed the men in the barracks courtyard. The officer at the barracks acknowledged Dr. Hatcherian’s status as a physician, calling him “effendi,” a respected person, and apologized that he did not have a place suitable for him. The officer sent him to stand against a wall where there seemed to be people of higher status—a priest, another doctor, others. The barracks smelled of human filth—there were no toilets. Dr. Hatcherian looked around and recognized other Armenians from the city.

The courtyard contained about five hundred people. Soon, they were all marched out, leaving just the people against the wall including Dr. Hatcherian. He wrote:

In the afternoon, a soldier took the men to a wall with a hole that opened on to the harbor, and they were told to go out to the beach and take care of their needs. Toward evening, Dr. Hatcherian went out but quickly returned—the beach was covered with filth, and corpses floated in the water. As Dr. Hatcherian came back through the hole, a soldier demanded that they trade shoes. Dr. Hatcherian refused, saying the man’s shoes would not fit him, and he showed the soldier his military papers with his rank of captain. Dr. Hatcherian summoned the courage
to tell the soldier he wanted to see his captain to settle the matter, and the soldier, confused about what to do, let him go.

Before sunset, another soldier, a man with a whip, ordered all men over forty-five, into another line, and Dr. Hatcherian moved to the older group. The man with the whip checked some of the men’s papers in the line but passed by Dr. Hatcherian, satisfied that he looked to be over forty-five. The men were left to wait until dark, and then they were sent back to their places. Dr. Hatcherian sat with a group of Armenians that he knew, and they made a pact to protect each other. They hid the money they had among then under stones. Soon soldiers reentered the courtyard and began searching prisoners for money and valuables.

In the night, the raping of the women began again.

Another day and night passed. More men were brought in, some were badly beaten and half dressed; others, between the ages of eighteen and forty-five, were marched out. Dr. Hatcherian continued to pass for over forty-five. His documents were not checked.

The next day about two thousand more people were brought into the barracks, bringing the total in the courtyard to about ten thousand. The stench from the filth was so strong that Dr. Hatcherian vomited and grew dizzy, leaning against a wall not to collapse. Periodically, soldiers passed through and searched the men for valuables and kicked them in the legs, demanding money.

Toward evening, after several repetitions of the beatings, some of the men in the barracks began to raise their voices. The protest brought a Turkish officer into the courtyard and he asked the prisoners what they wanted. There was no answer. Then, in an angry voice, the officer said to the prisoners, “You have burned down Moslem cities and villages, you have plundered and massacred the people, you have spared neither children nor elders, you have tarnished Islamic honor and you have raped our virgins. Now that you are sitting quietly in the barracks, enjoying every kind of protection, instead of being pleased with your situation and instead of moving our compassion, you are staging rebellious demonstrations. You deserve all of you to be crushed and to be burned.”

Then, soldiers pulled about fifty men from the courtyard, to what fate Dr. Hatcherian did not know. The pillaging began again.

The next morning, September 21, the men over forty-five were called to line up, and a Turkish officer walked up and down the line and examined them, pulling out any man he considered under forty-five based on his appearance. After he was done, younger soldiers were permitted to go up and down the line doing the same, but also questioning the men as to whether they had ever done harm to a Moslem. Once this was complete, the men were left to stand in the sun for several hours, before finally being brought into the street. They were then marched toward the remains of the Passport Pier on the Quay.

Soon Dr. Hatcherian and the shouting men noticed that the guards who had brought them to the pier were gone. He hurried up the Quay, toward the house where had left his family six days earlier, hoping they were still there.