The Great Fire (41 page)

On the fifteenth, the same day he had gotten Phillips’s cable telling him to get moving on a rescue plan, Bristol declined an offer of assistance from A. C. Ringland, director of the Constantinople office of the American Relief Administration. On September 16, he stiff-armed a request by two YMCA officers in Constantinople to transport more staff to help at Smyrna despite the pressing need in the city.

By September 17, Sunday, Hepburn and Merrill were back in Constantinople and they briefed the admiral. After meeting with them, he wrote, “It appeared to come clear to me that the burning of the city was an accident so far as the large area and great loss of property was concerned . . .” The roughing up and robbery experienced by Jacob and Trueblood, which Powell had protested to the military governor, struck Bristol as funny. He considered the briefing from his chief of staff with equanimity. “The actual destruction of life will not prove to be great,” Bristol wrote, “and later when one’s emotions are calmed will be considered on par with many happenings that have taken place in Ireland within the past two years. [In 1922, Ireland was engaged in a civil war over establishment of the British-backed Irish Free State.] There is no need to have any surprise over what the Turks did. In fact, I am only surprised when these different races out here do something to commend than when [they] do something that one condemns.”

He was back to his bedrock view—none of these people were worth a damn, but there was a hierarchy of worthlessness and the Greeks were the worst of the worst.

As Phillips in Washington waited for a response from Bristol,
The New York Times
ran a story with the headline:
WASHINGTON PREPARES BUT HAS RECEIVED NO REPLY FROM BRISTOL ON PLAN FOR INTERNATIONAL ACTION
. The story said, “The State Department is tonight without a reply from Constantinople to the American proposal that this government cooperate with the Allies for the relief of refugees in Smyrna and other points in Asia Minor. No dispatches of any character had been received from Admiral Bristol, American High Commissioner, up to a late hour this evening.”

Bristol’s relaxed attitude contrasted sharply with the emergency along the coast of Asia Minor. The Allied consuls in Smyrna cabled their high commissioners in Constantinople on the eighteenth, “About two hundred thousands totally destitute Christians still lying on seashore Smyrna awaiting help to leave. . . . Unless pressure or drastic measures be immediately taken no one will survive.”

Bristol finally responded to Phillips on September 18. In his cable, he reported Hepburn’s conference with the Allied naval officers in Smyrna
on the fifteenth in which they had decided to have the Italian admiral seek Kemal’s permission to allow Greek ships to carry away the refugees. He told Phillips that he planned to wait for an answer—yet another delay: “I am awaiting result of this conference before taking further steps to consult with Allied colleagues.” It was on the eighteenth that Kemal declined to admit the Greek merchant ships.

Phillips responded to Bristol the next day, September 19, with frustration. He wanted to know what relief stores were available and whether any provision could be made for the refugees on the Aegean islands. He asked for an immediate response, and with the American church organizations turning up the heat, he added this: “Advise Department frankly and fully of facilities which you need in order that this Government may dispatch its full part and more if necessary in helping to meet tragic situation at Smyrna as described by press reports received yesterday and today.”

Then Phillips sent Bristol another cable, asking for a response to the State Department’s order of September 15 to cooperate with the Allies on a plan. “If your answer is delayed by inability of Allies to agree with you on a general program of relief, submit your own views immediately as to plan of action to meet refugees problem.”

In the middle of this strained back-and-forth, Bristol presented the State Department with another headache. He had sent one of Constantine Brown’s news stories to the State Department in the navy’s secret code, asking the department to pass it along to the editors at the
Chicago Daily News
. The dispatch presented two problems: a comparison of the coded message with the text of the story could disclose the navy’s cipher; it was also a breach of State Department protocol. The State Department was not a messenger service for newspaper reporters—even reporters who were serving Bristol’s interests. Bristol’s request bounced around the State Department for several days and finally it was sent by Edward Bell, the department’s chief press officer, to Bristol’s friend Dulles with a note that Bristol’s request could embarrass the government: “I think it would be as well if you drafted this telegram as you know the admiral and how best to approach him.” Bell was more than a little sensitive to the matter of codes since he had been the American diplomat in London in 1917 to
whom the British had delivered the notorious Zimmerman Telegram—the telegram in which Germany had offered Mexico territories in Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico if it entered the World War I on the side of the Central Powers.

Finally on the nineteenth, Bristol, with his mind settled on how to proceed, called on two of the Allied high commissioners. He went first in his barge to the Italian high commissioner’s palatial summer residence at Therapia. Commissioner Marquis Eugenio Camillo Garroni, a seventy-year-old and sleepy-eyed veteran for whom Bristol had little respect, greeted him with high courtesy. “Garroni is always cordial, in fact very cordial,” Bristol wrote in his diary, “but like most old diplomats does not know much about what is going [on] in his mission.” Interestingly, British Admiral De Robeck, former British high commissioner, had a different view: “Leisurely, courteous, experienced in Turkish affairs . . . but withal a cunning old fox, who feigns a certain torpor, but is really wide awake.”

Bristol went through his oft-repeated points: the British and the Greeks had created the refugee problem, the Greek army had been guilty of civilian outrages, which prevented return of the Christian refugees to their homes and farms, and the Americans had already spent too much money in the region on refugee relief. The monologue seemed even too much for the Italian embassy’s translator who, without prompting from Garroni, interrupted and asked Bristol what he suggested should be done. Astonishingly, given Phillips’s requests, Bristol responded that he did not think it was proper for him to make suggestions. He asked what the Italians thought should be done. “We would look to America to come forward in her usual bountiful way and take care of the refugees,” Garroni told him. Bristol responded that Americans “were tired of putting their hands in their pockets” and that they “would like to see something done to stop this manufacture of refugees in the Near East.” The old and crafty Italian blinked sleepily and smiled. There was some small talk and Bristol departed.

Bristol then traveled to Yenikuey, down the Bosporus on the way back to Constantinople, where he met with his nemesis Rumbold, at the summer residence of the British embassy. Rumbold’s polished manners seemed to annoy Bristol more than usual. Bristol set the tenor of the
meeting by telling Rumbold that since it was close to lunchtime and he had a long trip back to the American embassy, he would get right to the point. He described the cabled directions he had received from Washington and repeated his discourse on Greek guilt as he had delivered it to Garroni. Rumbold listened and replied that London had not passed the American message about joint action along to him. Neither man chose to pursue the matter further, and Bristol departed. The next day, Bristol cabled Washington about his two meetings: “I met with no encouragement for drawing up a joint plan for Smyrna emergency.”

The volley of cables between Washington and Constantinople continued.

On September 21, Phillips informed Bristol that Harding had requested $200,000 from Congress to help naturalized Americans displaced by the war in Turkey. Phillips said also that the American Red Cross, Near East Relief, and the YMCA would double the amount. “Success of Department’s efforts will depend largely upon full information from you. . . . Department is still hopeful that you will succeed in drawing up with Allies a general plan for relief but in absence of such a plan you will submit as specific information as is possible as to what you need to cope with the situation.” (This was never done.)

In the morning of the next day, Bristol fired back with some testiness of his own. “Department is being promptly, fully and frankly advised as it is possible under the present ever rapidly changing conditions. I sympathize with Department’s anxiety for news and desire that our Government take its part to relieve this tragic situation. The situation changes so rapidly and completely from day to day that it is practically impossible to give any comprehensive plan for relief. Thus we have attempted to meet the situations as they have arisen and have done so with much success.”

This of course was nonsense: the “situation” had been on a steady trajectory toward disaster for weeks, and resources at Smyrna fell far short of the need. At the moment Bristol was sending these messages to Washington, Jennings was struggling without adequate medical supplies to treat the wounded women and children in his safe houses, and the relief committee lacked sufficient food to feed the refugees.

As this diplomatic cat-and-mouse game continued, Bristol met with
Hamid Bey, the nationalist representative in Constantinople, flattering him and appealing to the honor of Turkish troops not to harass refugees in Smyrna. Hamid Bey, according to Bristol, said the “Turks were always brought up with the ideas of the French revolution before them and with the fundamental idea of that revolution, namely that each man had a right to live, and he only wished that the Christian minorities were given a little of the same instruction.” Bristol noted in his diary, “I agreed with him entirely as to the latter point.” Bristol renewed his request for newspaper correspondents to travel to the interior of the country to tell the story of the Greek atrocities.

The next day, September 22, was a busy day for Bristol—and the day when events began to seriously run ahead of him. He had a number of visitors at the embassy, and he called on the French high commissioner Pelle, who was back from Smyrna and his meeting with Mustapha Kemal, the previous night—the meeting that Powell had accidentally happened onto. Pelle invited Bristol to a conference of the Allied high commissioners to discuss a refugee relief plan but, unbelievably, Bristol declined. Despite Washington’s prodding, he was sticking to his decision to let the Allies first develop a plan of their own, then he would decide on his response.

In the meantime, Bristol had some advice for Washington—a little PR was in order. Bristol cabled Phillips and suggested that the State Department issue a press release assuring the American public that the reports they were reading in American newspapers and hearing from the pulpits of their churches were exaggerations.

So there the relief and evacuation effort remained, stalled, at least among the high commissioners in Constantinople with Bristol applying the brakes whenever possible. Meanwhile, as Bristol’s proposed press release moved on the wires back to Washington, Jennings was boarding the
Litchfield
at Mytilene with news that Greek ships were available for transporting the refugees, and Powell was eagerly awaiting his return.

On September 23, the State Department cabled Bristol that it wanted someone else to take charge of the relief effort for refugees who were U.S. citizens, and it picked a person who could not have been more different from Bristol, Oscar S. Heizer. A consul in Constantinople, and as such Bristol’s subordinate, Heizer had served in Trebizond on the Black Sea during the Armenian deportations in 1915 and had provided Morgenthau with some of the most detailed accounts of Turkish brutality, including the deliberate drowning of a boatload of Armenian orphan children. Phillips told Bristol that Heizer was to begin immediately and would handle the money appropriated by Congress for the relief and repatriation effort. Phillips added, “He should also telegraph fully his views and suggestions.”

Phillips’s patience with Bristol had run out.

J
ennings had been as eager to return to Mytilene on Friday, September 22, as Powell was to send him back, but Jennings was worried about General Frangos’s tepid commitment to provide ships for the evacuation. Jennings wanted something substantial he could carry back on his second trip to ensure that he would be taken seriously and get the ships. He asked Powell for a written order bearing the imprimatur of the United States Navy, which he could present to Frangos as a demonstration of his bona fides.

Powell agreed, and he directed Lieutenant Commander Rhodes to compose a letter for Jennings. The letter was written, though exactly when is unclear from the record. It probably was composed on the ship on the way to Mytilene, given Powell’s push to get Jennings back to the island and the
Litchfield
back to Constantinople. Neither a record of the conversation between Powell and Rhodes aboard the
Litchfield
nor the order as Powell gave it to Rhodes appears to exist in the Navy or State Department archives. Rhodes was not a diligent record keeper—he alone among the commanders at Smyrna did not keep a ship’s diary. But the letter was written—dictated by Jennings and signed by Rhodes. It was a masterpiece of ambiguity and inference, conveying
authority and implying more American protection than was actually present in the words.

It is difficult to comprehend how Rhodes could have signed the letter. Its text exceeded what Powell had agreed to in granting Jennings a letter stating his mission. Powell had no authority to order Greek ships anywhere, nor did he make any promises of safe transport connected to an American escort. He had no authority to assure it. Powell—and all his commanders—were still under strict orders by Bristol to make no displays of naval force. This “no-displays” policy was a directive that the president himself had approved during his exchanges with Acting Secretary Phillips in early September. There is no question that protection of Greek ships against Turkey, while Greece and Turkey were at war, would have been taken as a demonstration of American naval force.

To a person unfamiliar with the American position as articulated by the president, State Department, and U.S. Navy, the letter could easily be interpreted as a guarantee of American protection, especially in context of the proposition Jennings had put to Frangos less than twenty-four hours earlier. Jennings had asked Frangos if he would make Greek merchant ships available for the evacuation if American destroyers protected them. The suggestion of American protection was the factor that had moved Frangos to offer the six ships in the first place. Clearly, Jennings had intimated that he was returning to Smyrna to get the assurance Frangos wanted. Taken together—Jennings’s proposition on his first trip
to Mytilene and the response implied in Rhodes’s letter—a reasonable person could conclude the American navy was declaring its willingness to protect Greek shipping during an evacuation.

Did Powell deliberately frame his directions to Rhodes in such a way as to go right up to the edge of Bristol’s orders, communicating an assurance of American protection without actually breaching the admiral’s orders? Or, did Rhodes, whose record as a navy officer had shown a certain degree of laxity and sometimes drunkenness, let the letter pass into Jennings’s hands without a careful consideration of its contents? With the passage of time, it seems an impossible question to answer, though Powell would eventually supply some clues later in the week. In any event, the letter became a powerful lever for Jennings in dealing with Frangos and the Greek government.

The
Litchfield
arrived back at Mytilene just after midnight on September 23. Rhodes asked the Italian destroyer
Sulferino
to send a boat to pick up Jennings, and Jennings was quickly ferried into the port on an Italian motor launch. The
Litchfield
proceeded to Constantinople. Jennings was ashore by 1:30
A
.
M
. He immediately roused his relief group—Ernesto Aliotti, Captains Argyropoulos and Hodgkinson, and Captain Cardos, the harbormaster—and together they called on the island’s governor Bakas and General Frangos.

As Jennings had feared, Frangos now balked about his earlier offer to release the six smaller ships. His new position was that he had to consult with Athens, and he offered no timetable for getting permission. Jennings produced the letter and pressed him hard, as did the others, but Frangos held firm, and the meeting broke up.

Jennings’s group decided to look for a way around Frangos’s caution. Jennings was sure that the Greek government did not want to abandon the refugees, especially if there was a means of evacuation backed by the Americans. He decided he would try to get permission from Athens without the help of the general, which meant he needed another communications conduit to the highest level of the Greek government.

One of the ships anchored outside Mytilene harbor was the Greek battleship
Kilkis,
a heavily armored two-stack battleship. In its former life, it had been the USS
Mississippi,
built for the American navy in
1908 as a scaled-down and less expensive version of its Connecticut-class battleships. The navy was disappointed with it—it was a rough ride in high seas and difficult to stabilize for accurate gunnery. Battleship technology had been roaring ahead in the early years of the twentieth century, and the American navy abandoned the design and sold the
Mississippi
and its sister ship, the USS
Idaho
to Greece in 1914, recovering most of its eight-million-dollar investment. The Greeks had wanted it as a counterweight to a Turkish naval buildup. Turkey and Germany had bitterly opposed the ship’s sale, and the German ambassador to the Ottoman Empire had made a personal appeal to U.S. Ambassador Morgenthau to stop it. Nonetheless, the sale went ahead, and the
Mississippi
and the
Idaho
(renamed
Kilkis
and
Lemnos
) steamed from Newport News to Piraeus soon after the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand. The
Kilkis
had not seen action in the big war—the French had commandeered the Greek navy during Greece’s neutral period prior to its entrance into World War I and removed the
Kilkis
’s gun blocks. After the war, the ship had patrolled the Greek coast, and it had been called upon to watch over the Greek landing at Smyrna. So, ironically, its two main employments had been to cover the landing of the Greek army in Asia Minor, then three years later to cover the army’s exit from Asia Minor. In the week after the nationalist entrance into Smyrna, the
Kilkis
had laid down a barrage of artillery along the peninsula to Chesme to impede the Turkish cavalry as it pursued the retreating Greek army. After the Greek army’s evacuation, the
Kilkis
had stayed for a few days at Chios, then moved to Mytilene. It had been the distant guns of the
Kilkis
that Captain Hepburn had heard on first entering Smyrna harbor.

Jennings had guessed correctly that, while General Frangos was the nominal military leader on Mytilene, whoever commanded a battleship with twelve-inch guns was not without rank and influence of his own. Jennings and his committee went out to the
Kilkis,
and Jennings introduced himself and the others to the ship’s captain—a thin and severe figure with a receding hairline and dark mustache. He was dressed in his white Greek navy uniform with upright collar and brass buttons. His name was Ioannis Theophanides. He was forty-five years old and had served twenty-five years in the Greek navy, distinguishing himself
as a tactician and gunnery expert against the Turkish navy in the First Balkan War. Born in Heraklion, Crete, Theophanides was a Royalist officer with a proud navy (and Greek) pedigree. Two of his ancestors had served as admirals in the Ottoman navy in the early nineteenth century, before Greece had won its independence, and he was married to the granddaughter of Theodoros Kolokotronis, the George Washington of the Greek War of Independence. Theophanides was both an electrical engineer and a classical pianist.

The Greek captain greeted Jennings and the committee warmly when they boarded the ship. It was still dark. Jennings produced the Rhodes letter and explained his mission. He asked Theophanides if he would make his radio telegraph available to send a message to Athens asking for use of the merchant ships at Mytilene to evacuate Smyrna’s refugees. Immediately grasping the situation, Theophanides agreed to help—and he would have some suggestions of his own to help Jennings.

Theophanides was another stroke of good fortune for Jennings. He had found an officer who, like Powell, was independent minded, capable, and sympathetic to the refugees. It would be this unusual lineup of men—Powell at Smyrna, Theophanides at Mytilene, and Jennings moving between the two places—that would conjure one of the most unusual and dramatic naval evacuations in history.

Unknown to Jennings, but probably suspected by Theophanides, a Greek military coup was taking shape at that moment at Chios and Mytilene. Republican officers of the Greek army, humiliated by the Asia Minor defeat, were making arrangements to overthrow the Royalist government in Athens. Frangos, as a Royalist officer, was not part of the planning—in fact, he would soon be in jail with the island’s governor.

The prime minister of Greece, Nikolaos Triantafyllakos, was serving on a temporary basis in Athens at King Constantine’s request because of the resignation of the Royalist government following the Anatolian debacle. Triantafyllakos also held the position of minister of military affairs. So it was to him that the request for Greek merchant ships was sent. The prime minister and Theophanides, both Royalists and well placed in the small circle Greek high society, most certainly would have known each other—another stroke of luck.

Jennings composed a message with Theophanides’s help, and the captain directed his radio officer to send it in code to Athens. Marked “very urgent,” it read:

Jennings was taking serious liberties with Powell’s orders and Rhodes’s letter. He had even inserted Bristol’s name—a flashing light to anyone with political savvy in Greece or Turkey.

The
Kilkis
’s radio operator received a quick response. He took it down on a sheet of paper and handed it to the captain. (It was a message that would make a non-Greek smile.) It said it was too early in the morning to conduct government business. Jennings and Theophanides were not amused. They responded with a demand for an immediate meeting of the Greek cabinet. If an answer were not forthcoming, the message would be repeated out of code. In other words, Jennings and Theophanides were threatening the government with embarrassment for failing to respond to an evacuation plan offered by the Americans. (Radio telegraph messages in those days could be intercepted by anyone with a receiver.)

Athens responded that it would call a cabinet meeting as soon as possible. Jennings and Theophanides responded by upping the ante. They wanted Greek merchant ships in Piraeus as well as in Mytilene for the evacuation. (This probably was a Theophanides touch given his familiarity with the Greek merchant fleet about which Jennings would have known little or nothing. Theophanides, of course, would have been familiar with it.) Athens responded with a series of questions: Would the
United States provide protection? Jennings attempted to finesse the answer to this questions by referring to the language of the letter signed by Rhodes, but the Greek text received at Athens was more categorical: Yes, there would be protection. Would Americans board the evacuation ships? The response: “American President of Committee Mytilene will embark on first ship.” This would be Jennings.

The messages continued to volley between the radio room of the
Kilkis
and Athens as the sun rose on the morning of September 23. Finally, Theophanides pressed Jennings to send an ultimatum: Acknowledge receipt of the demand and provide a favorable reply to the request for ships by 6
P
.
M
. or the
Kilkis
would follow through on its threat to broadcast the American offer and the Greek rejection. Theophanides—aware of the discouragement of the army and possibly suspecting trouble in its ranks—may have been trying to hurry the negotiations. He soon would be in danger, and if the government in Athens was overthrown—or if he himself was removed from command as a consequence of the coup that was brewing—the opportunity to marshal the ships might be lost and so would the evacuation. He insisted on Jennings taking a hard line.

Jennings later wrote: “In this ultimatum, we showed them that the sympathy of the world would be with the Turks and no amount of explaining would ever justify the Greek government for not permitting the Americans to assist to evacuate their own nationals when the lives of thousands depended on the Greek government for furnishing the ships. . . . We assured them that if they would not give their ships, the American Relief Committee after using the few ships that had been chartered would wash their hands of the whole affair and put responsibility on the Greek nation and tell the reason to the world.”