The Great Fire (29 page)

About this time, Davis boarded the
Iron Duke,
a dreadnought battleship that was twice as long and wide as the
Litchfield
. At roughly twenty times the tonnage of the
Litchfield,
it carried a crew and officer corps of a thousand men. A serious floating edifice wrapped in twelve inches of armor, the battleship’s very presence was intimidating. It bristled with ten 13.5-inch guns in five turrets, and a secondary battery (for close engagement) of twelve 6-inch guns. It also carried antiaircraft guns and four torpedo tubes.

Davis asked to speak with de Brock. He was told that the admiral was sleeping but that he would be awakened. De Brock was not only the senior British naval officer at Smyrna—he was commander of the entire British Mediterranean Fleet, the biggest force in the British navy. A veteran of North Sea engagements during World War I, including the Battle of Jutland, where he had served as chief of staff to the fleet commander, de Brock had movie-star good looks: He stood tall and straight and had
a strong jaw, square face, thick dark hair. He had been a brilliant student and remained a voracious reader, fitting out a room on the ship as his private library. But he was not without his critics—most especially his chief of staff Captain Barry Domvile, who considered him moody, difficult, and mercurial. Davis went below and put his proposition to de Brock. As Davis and de Brock talked, they made their way to the ship’s deck from where they could see the fire, and Davis told de Brock that Turks had blocked the exits from the Quay with machine guns and that they were pouring kerosene into the streets.

Davis put the rescue request to de Brock—could he employ his motor sailers to bring the barges around to the Quay?

Like Hepburn, de Brock was in a tight spot—though a much more dangerous one. De Brock’s problem was that Britain might soon be at war with the Turkish nationalists. Only the day before, Mustapha Kemal had insulted Lamb when Lamb had called on him to protest the destruction of British property. After making Lamb wait to see him, Kemal had insinuated Britain and the nationalists were at war. The slight had been telegraphed to the Foreign Office, and de Brock had sent Domvile to Kemal that morning with a stiff note asking him to confirm or deny whether a state of war existed between Britain and the nationalists. In a note delivered to the
Iron Duke
only seven hours earlier, Kemal had retreated, saying it had been a misunderstanding. Nonetheless, circumstances pointed toward imminent hostilities between Britain and the nationalists. De Brock had been in regular cable communication with London about war preparations. The British cabinet had decided that British troops should be moved to Gallipoli to hold the peninsula if the Turks attempted to take it. (French troops were already garrisoned there, but the British had plenty of reason to wonder if the French would fight the nationalists with whom they had developed warm relations.) The cabinet had decided that the nationalists should not be allowed to cross the Dardanelles, even if it required sinking their transports. “The maintenance of the deep water separating Asia and Europe was a cardinal British interest,” London told de Brock, “and any attempt of the Kemalists to occupy the Gallipoli Peninsula should be resisted by force.” To add urgency, de Brock had just received a radio report from the battleship
Ajax,
positioned in the
Dardanelles, that Turkish cavalry and two divisions of infantry were approaching Chanak. The British were preparing to engage them. With all this on his mind, the admiral was not inclined to risk a rescue operation. It was not in his nature—nor was it a wise military decision. A rescue attempt would create an extended moment of British naval vulnerability. He declined Davis’s request.

Domvile was present and listened to the American, whom he had met earlier in the day aboard the
Iron Duke
and didn’t especially like. He considered him slovenly and fat, and he was irritated that the ever-earnest Davis had mooched his pipe tobacco at their earlier meeting. But Domvile was aware of the suffering on the Quay and he knew de Brock to take a painfully long time to make decisions though he would admit that those decisions usually turned out to be correct. Domvile also knew de Brock was a worrier, obsessed with the second-guessing of his superiors. Picking up where Davis had left off, Domvile made a passionate appeal to de Brock to save lives. The elder officer listened, and as he was listening, another officer came to him and declared, “My God, Admiral, they are throwing kerosene over the women and children. We have got to send in the boats.” As it happened, the officers and crew of the
Iron Duke
had been looking to shore through binoculars as Davis, Domvile, and de Brock were discussing the situation and witnessed the splashing of an accelerant on the Quay.

De Brock was moved and assented to a rescue, but he judged that even the
Iron Duke
’s motor sailers were inadequate to the task of moving the barges. He would try to bring boats directly to the seawall. It would be impossible to evacuate all the people on the Quay—Brock knew this, of course—but he and his officers and men would attempt to bring off as many as they could. At 2:40
A
.
M
., he gave the order: “All boats over.” It was immediately transmitted to the other British ships in the harbor, and then spread to the crews by the blasts of the bosun’s whistles.

In minutes, British boats—a few with motor power, most with oarsmen—were in the harbor moving toward the Quay. It hadn’t taken long to launch the boats—nearly all the British sailors had been out of their hammocks and on deck watching the fire. The commanding officers of the British ships also boarded the boats and joined the rescue.
Captain Thesiger, the officer who had halted the column of Turkish cavalry on its entrance to Smyrna and commanded the battleship HMS
King George V,
was among those in a picket boat sent to the Quay. At the same time, Domvile went ashore with forty British marines and a crew of stretcher bearers to evacuate a British maternity hospital between the Point and the Aydin Railroad station that had been missed earlier in the day.

Watching from the
Litchfield,
Hepburn admitted that the alacrity with which the British boats were launched and the vigor displayed by the oarsmen made a “stirring spectacle.” The British sailors had their hearts in it—as undoubtedly the American sailors would have if they had been allowed to participate. Within minutes of Davis’s return to the
Litchfield,
the first British whaleboats and power launches reached the Quay. The warships aimed their searchlights on the Quay to help with the work, though the fire provided plenty of light.

The British boats were met by frantic men and women, and the rush made the loading dangerous. The boats tried different techniques and found that the best approach was to put armed men ashore to separate out a single boatload of people at a time; then a boat would come to the seawall and board the refugees who had been separated. Each boat was loaded to its full capacity and sent off. Sometimes the refugees on the Quay could not stand the disappointment of being left behind and jumped into the water and attempted to hold to the sides of the boats. Fearing that the boats might capsize, the sailors had to beat their hands loose from the gunwales.

Lieutenant Commander C. H. Drage of the HMS
Cardiff,
a battle cruiser, approached the Quay in a whaleboat when a cutter (a larger power boat) came alongside and made first contact with the seawall. The men in the boat jumped to the Quay but were swept back by a wave of terrified people who ended up in the boat on top of the sailors. Drage, twenty-five years old, brought his bow to the seawall and put ashore a sailor, who continued to hold the boat’s painter—the short rope attached to its bow. A woman took the painter from him, and she and others jumped in the boat. The sailor was left onshore as the boat pulled away. (The woman had also taken his pistol.) He was picked up by another boat.

As Drage and his men took their first load of refugees to a Swedish merchant ship anchored in the harbor, they met a motor sailer from the
King George
circling a capsized caique, searching for survivors. Drage and his men joined the search, and Drage spotted a woman in the water. Her throat had been slashed, though apparently not enough to kill her. She had drowned. A baby was bobbing next to her just below the surface. He pulled it from the water by one leg and shook and slapped it. “Look out, sir,” said one of the oarsmen. “That baby’s alive. It’s crying.” He took it aboard the
Cardiff,
where the men cared for it, and eventually it was deposited, on a subsequent sea cruise, at a Russian monastery.

On yet more trips to gather more refugees, Drage went ashore with his men and a few stretchers at the hottest part of the Quay, where there were few or no refugees, reducing the likelihood of people jumping into the boat. He found them “stupid with fear.” He and the men held the stretchers between them, cutting off the ten or so people that they could safely load and pushed them along the Quay until they reached the boat, giving them one final push over the seawall and into the boat.

The British boats took the refugees to all ships in the harbor that would take them—merchant ships, British warships, the British hospital ship, the
Litchfield
. In the early hours of the morning, British whaleboats, motor launches, and a picket boat crisscrossed the harbor. (The picket boat, a substantial steam-powered vessel, had been lowered from the
Iron Duke
.) In many cases, the motor launches towed a line of British pulling boats.

Once the refugees realized the warships would take them aboard, they didn’t wait for the boats to pick them up—they used every means possible to get out to them, overloading small fishing boats or lying on floating wood and paddling with their hands. Refugees swam to the
Litchfield
and begged to be brought aboard. The crew dropped lines, and they were hauled up. One American sailor went over the side of the ship with a rope and hung in the water to help refugees climb to a metal ladder that had been lowered but did not quite reach the waterline. Drage and his crew brought a load of refugees to the
Litchfield
that included an old woman who could not walk. She had been carried on her sister’s back to the Quay. With difficulty, the men carried her up the metal ladder.

At the same time, the French and Italians were continuing their ill-planned evacuation, and the motor sailers from their ships were also pulling whaleboats to and from the Quay with their nationals and protégés. Near the Point, not far from Jennings’s house at No. 490, where Turkish soldiers were posted, British sailors saw soldiers pouring more kerosene on the pavement. Shots were fired, and a British officer was wounded in the leg.

“One of the saddest cases I met,” a British sailor remembered, “was that of a little girl of nine who was with her father, mother and baby in arms were making their way to the (British) boats when their parents were shot dead. This little girl picked the baby up off the ground and dashing through the flames reached the boat. She was attended for burned legs.” A British officer described an “Awful scene with hysterical women as they crept up the ladder to the quarter deck, embracing every sailor and officer they could see, kissing the deck, etc. Water was provided for all. Some women wouldn’t let anyone near them and moaned and yelled in terror that we were Turks.”

Before daybreak, about twenty thousand refugees had been taken off in the British effort, and the
Iron Duke
had departed for Chanak to face the mounting crisis with the nationalists. HMS
Cardiff
and HMS
Serapis,
a destroyer, remained at Smyrna to assist in further evacuation of refugees.

Hepburn had limited the American participation to clearing the propeller of one of the British launches (debris and corpses were a problem) and serving coffee to British sailors who had worked themselves to exhaustion. The refugees aboard the
Litchfield
were fed, but Hepburn—still conflicted—faced the question of whether he should return them to shore after the fire had died down.

At about 4
A
.
M
., the captain called together Davis, Jaquith, Barnes, and the others to discuss options. The relief workers strongly opposed returning the refugees to the Quay. Hepburn decided he would put the refugees on board the USS
Edsall
when it arrived and send them to Salonika with enough flour to last several days. (The
Edsall
had been dispatched from Constantinople with more relief supplies for Smyrna.) Hepburn knew he was taking a fateful step by transporting Ottoman
subjects. He had already composed his defense: under the extreme circumstances, it was a necessary act of humanity. (That had also been Commander Houston’s justification.) As Hepburn met with the relief committee, the
Edsall
was steaming through the Dardanelles at an “economical speed,” as ordered by Bristol, with four hundred bags of Near East Relief flour and eight thousand loaves of bread—a fraction of what would be needed. It expected to arrive in Smyrna at 8
A
.
M
. Merrill and four men from Standard Oil were aboard. Hepburn radioed the
Edsall
’s commander, Lieutenant Commander Halsey Powell, with a message directing him to steam more rapidly—he wanted the ship in the harbor by first light.

On its way to Smyrna, the
Edsall
passed several Greek steamers ferrying refugees across the Sea of Marmara, and as it reached the Dardanelles, the crimson glow of Smyrna appeared in the night sky. The smoke from the giant fire, carried on the south wind, soon reached Constantinople, and the Smyrna catastrophe would be revealed there as an acrid smell in the back of the nose.

T
he sun rose Thursday morning, September 14, on a city that was still burning and a harbor whose surface was pocked with the bobbing bodies of refugees. A British ship spotted the body of a Greek soldier who had been nailed to a wood door, in the manner of a crucifixion, and set adrift. A burlap bag containing the form of a standing body unsettled the crew of another British ship when it became fixed against the ship’s hull. Some of the sailors added weight to sink the bag and remove the gruesome sight.

The fire had turned the line of waterfront buildings along the middle section of the Quay into a charred carcass, and the flames now were chewing their way north and south of the American Theater, though they remained at least a quarter mile from Jennings’s first safe house. New fires were being lit, and areas that had seemed spent roared back into flames.

It was not to be a one-day fire. It was a natural thing for the people to hope that the inferno would have exhausted itself in the fury of the previous night, and that somehow the fire would fit itself into the comprehensible unit of a single day and night—one turn of a wheel of suffering, beginning and ending with the rising sun. But the morning of Thursday, September 14, did not dawn on a blaze that had gone out. The fire would last another two days, and after new fires were started
this day, the fury of the fire on Thursday night would surpass the previous night.

The only solace for the refugees was that they had gained new places to hide from the flames. In distressed and fatigued packs, they moved down rubble-strewn streets to burned-out areas, where they sought safety in the interstices of collapsed buildings. Not all of them left the Quay. From the ships, sailors watched women who walked up and down the promenade, laughing; one was fully naked, holding her child. They had gone mad, broken by the night of fear and panic.

The British rescue effort of the previous night started up again in the morning, fitfully, and on a more modest scale now that the refugees could get out of the way of the fire. Until midmorning, the British boats continued to take refugees to merchant ships. British sailors, in their white pith helmets, hauled them up ladders; sometimes the refugees were naked, and the sailors placed them half dead on the decks of the vessels. Some refugees attempted to gain the ships on their own. A woman and her young son approached the merchant ship SS
Sardegna
in a small boat and begged to be brought aboard. With the ship full, the captain refused. Exhausted, she threw herself into the water to drown. The crew fished her out and brought her and her young son aboard.

AGNES EVON, DEFYING ORDERS
and feuding with the
Winona
’s captain over his unwillingness to take more refugees aboard, went ashore in the early morning and found more than fifty orphan girls in their black-and-white blouses and aprons who had been lost on the previous day’s march from the orphanage. They were huddled on the southern end of the Quay with Miss Morley. As it happened, Miss Morley had arrived at the Quay the previous night without knowing the evacuation plan; she intended to spend the night with the children on the waterfront. Vice Consul Park also was apparently confused by the evacuation planning, and seeing her on the Quay with the children, told her to bring them to the Passport Pier where they would be put aboard boats and taken to the
Winona
. Miss Morley had fought her way toward the pier, unsuccessfully, losing children along the way. The crowd made it impossible for her
to reach the pier. So she turned back in the direction of the consulate, where she saw the space cleared by Hepburn for late arrivals, and she was taken aboard the
Litchfield
but without many of the children, who had become lost in the chaos. “Those in the crowd I could find were taken,” she later wrote, “but I could not see many.” In the morning, she had gone ashore, weaving through the mass of people rounding up the children she had lost, and now she had them gathered by the pier.

Hepburn sent navy boats to the seawall to fetch her and the children, but the wind had come up, and waves in the harbor made the job difficult. The boats rose and fell and slapped against the seawall, making the footing dangerous and everyone wet. Nonetheless, the sailors, working carefully, loaded them all one by one and took them to the
Winona
.

By now, Hepburn had acknowledged, at least to himself, that Bristol’s orders were obsolete. The situation that had unfolded before him overnight mocked those orders. Either through naïveté or the admiral’s unwillingness to acknowledge the consequences of a nationalist occupation of Smyrna, the orders had proven to be destructive—to human life as well as American property. The Standard Oil docks had been spared, but tens of millions of dollars of American property had gone up in flames.

The enormity of the relief operation that would be required was apparent to Hepburn. So was the need to evacuate the entire Christian population of Smyrna—in fact of all Asia Minor. It was an extraordinary thing to contemplate, removing an entire population, but an unavoidable conclusion for an officer who considered himself a realist. If these people remained, they would die of starvation or disease or be killed by the hostile population around them. An undertaking of such magnitude was far beyond the capacity of the relief committee—maybe even of a single foreign government. Even after a decade of slaughter, there were more than a million Christians remaining in Anatolia.

“It appeared to me now,” Hepburn later wrote, “that the fire had entirely changed the aspect of the matter.” The only feasible path forward was cooperation between the Allies and the United States. Still, Hepburn was reluctant to act on his own. In the morning, he sent Charles Davis to the other senior naval officers aboard the Allied ships to convey his view that an international effort was needed and they should meet for a
conference to discuss the proposition. Always proceeding with caution, Hepburn would later note in his report, “My instructions forbade any joint action with foreign naval forces, but I felt sure that they did not contemplate inaction in the face of a purely humanitarian emergency almost without parallel in history and which, in my opinion, could be met in no other way.”

The USS
Lawrence,
returning from Constantinople, steamed into the harbor at 10
A
.
M
. It had passed Greek merchant ships moving toward the Turkish coast of the Sea of Marmara to pick up the tens of thousands of refugees who were stranded there. Hepburn directed the
Lawrence
to the anchorage by the Standard Oil pier, where it was able to report to him that all was well with the navy sailors who had spent the night guarding the facility. He was relieved at the news.

At noon, Davis returned from his meeting with the Allied admirals with disappointing news: they had declined a joint conference for now and suggested instead that each of the officers forcefully present the case for a coordinated relief effort to his respective government and wait for directions before initiating a relief plan. The Allied admirals had also concluded that it would be necessary, before proceeding, to obtain assurances from the Turks that a relief effort would be allowed and relief workers and sailors from the three nations would be given unmolested access to the city and the refugees.

The relief committee members who had spent the night aboard the
Litchfield
returned to shore. Jennings, who had remained on the Quay looking after the women and children in his safe houses, was exhausted and tormented by his pain and fevers, but he was safe. The fire had not traveled as far north as No. 490. The medical supplies that had arrived on the
Lawrence
would be put to good use there. Jennings was more or less operating these homes on his own. He was a member of the relief committee, but his work, as the days wore on, grew more detached from the work of the committee. He was feeding the women and children in his shelter bread and water, and access to the food would have come through the committee, which was the principal contact with the navy, but Jennings had assumed management of the safe houses on his own. The gap between Jennings and Jacob, the boss who didn’t want him
from the start, seems never to have closed. Jacob remained a leader of the relief committee, but he seems to have had little contact with Jennings in the days leading up to the fire and immediately afterward. In a detailed memo that he later sent to YMCA headquarters describing events in Smyrna, he never mentioned Jennings’s safe houses or his walking circuits of the city to find and rescue women and children. Jennings appears to have made the best of Jacob’s indifference. “We gathered in here [the house at 490] also many children left alone without protection on the streets as the result of the death of their parents, many of whom were massacred in the presence of their children,” he later wrote. “It became evident that one house could not hold all who expected our protection so we also assumed the supervision of several other houses along the Quay . . .” In all this, Jennings had the help of a prominent Greek resident of Smyrna, a lawyer, who joined him at the safe houses after Jennings had rescued him following the Turkish entry into the city. The lawyer took control of one of the safe houses and served as a translator for Jennings. (Few of the people in his houses spoke English.)

Davis and Jaquith made arrangements to feed the refugees, but they intended to set up feeding stations only on the Quay. The roaming bands of irregular soldiers and rough civilians made it too dangerous to venture away from the sight of the ships and into the smoldering ruins, even though that’s where many of the people had drifted in search of safety. The committee had flour but insufficient bread—the supply had been exhausted.

Fear of the Turkish soldiers had not subsided, and some refugees sought to hide in wrecked buildings or the basements of homes that had burned. Those who had family or village connections had tried to stay together, and the Americans searched along the Quay for those who had been under their protection before the fire. Incredibly, the Paterson warehouse on the Quay, which the committee had used to store flour and other items, had not been destroyed, and Hepburn placed guards at its entrance to protect its contents.

The situation was more than discouraging. It was a monumental calamity without any semblance of an adequate response—or even the plan for an eventual response or a path toward a plan. Jaquith told Hepburn
that the Near East Relief would pay the costs of evacuating Greeks and Armenians who had been associated with the American charitable organizations in the city. The problem was finding ships to charter. The job was given to Vice Consul Barnes, who would be singularly unsuccessful. He seems not to have sent any messages to Bristol requesting transports.
^*
The captain of the
Winona
agreed to take more refugees on board, but he demanded a letter from Hepburn justifying his deviation from orders. He also wanted to be paid. Hepburn provided the letter, and children who had an American connection, through the school or the orphanage, were taken to the
Winona
. The Turks did not interfere. The
Winona
departed at 4:30
P
.
M
. with two thousand refugees aboard.

Jaquith radioed a message to the Near East Relief office in New York: “The survivors perhaps 250,000 must be removed. Turkish officials forbid repatriation. Fifty thousand should be removed immediately.” He said he needed at least a million dollars for relief and repatriation. “Bring all possible pressure,” he advised his New York colleagues, who had repeatedly demonstrated an ability to raise large sums of money from the sympathetic American public. The condition and treatment of the refugees appalled Irving Thomas, the managing director of Standard Oil in the Near East now back in the city, and he cabled the Laura Spellman Rockefeller Foundation for financial assistance. His anger over the Turkish actions at Smyrna would open a split between him and his close friend Bristol. Charles Davis, for his part, pressed the American Red Cross for additional help—beyond the $50,000 that Bristol had sought.

It seemed impossible that the situation could worsen, but the relief committee brought Hepburn the message that the murderous attitude among the Turkish soldiers and civilians had grown even more ugly. “The impression they had,” Hepburn wrote, “was that every able-bodied Armenian man was being hunted down and killed with even twelve-year-old Turkish boys joining in the killing with clubs.” It was not hard for him to believe: aboard the
Litchfield
Hepburn himself had watched
through binoculars as a man was searched and beaten by Turkish soldiers on the Quay, then bound with rope and thrown into the harbor and shot. Walking on the Quay with a private personal guard, Barnes saw groups of Turkish civilians circulating among the refugees in search of Armenian men. They found one and clubbed him to death. “The proceeding was brutal beyond belief,” Barnes reported. “We were within ten feet of the assailants when the last blow was struck and I do not believe there was a bone unbroken in the body when it was dropped to the edge of the Quay and kicked into the sea.” Unsettled by what he had seen, Barnes decided to return to the
Litchfield
and saw three Armenians shot on the way back.

Merrill also went ashore—to get a closer look at the burned city and retrieve from the Washburn house, his former lodgings, Washburn’s Victrola and two bird dogs (puppies) that Washburn had given him. The intelligence officer maintained his inexplicable disdainful attitude toward the refugees and their plight. In his report to Bristol, Merrill scoffed at estimates that put the death toll from the fire at more than a thousand and officially dismissed as a false rumor the report that Turkish cordons had blocked the Quay’s exits on the first night of the fire. But he was clear on the fire’s source. He cabled Bristol, “Am convinced the Turks burned Smyrna except Turkish section conforming with definite plan to solve Christian Minority problem by forcing Allies to evacuate Christian Minorities.”