by Benny Morris
gust 1914, as the Turks were preparing to enter the war, they contemplated
burning down Smyrna so that the British would be unable to take it. Vali
Rahmi Bey told the London Times’s Erle Whittall that he “would destroy the town rather than let it fall into enemy hands.” Burning Smyrna, Rahmi said,
was “a most natu ral mea sure,” and he “had all his plans ready.” Such plans
Mustafa Kemal and the Nationalists
included removing the inhabitants to the interior. Moukhtar Bey, former
Turkish minister in Athens, made a similar statement. At about the same
time, Morgenthau learned of developing Turkish plans to destroy Beirut and
Mersin. Talk of this sort caused panic, which was exactly the point. In Oc-
tober 1914, days before the Ottomans joined the fray, Talât informed Mor-
genthau that the threat to destroy Smyrna was intended above all to alarm the
Greeks. Talât told the ambassador he wanted the Greeks to “leave the city . . .
and [to] make it a Moslem instead of a Christian city.” Some well- to-do
Christians did indeed leave Smyrna in response to Rahmi’s comments.407
The Greeks and Armenians also reportedly threatened to torch Smyrna
if the Turks retook it.408 An American missionary said “ there had been a de-
termined effort . . . by the Greeks to or ga nize a band for the burning of
Smyrna, should the Greek troops . . . leave.” He also “heard several of the
Greek officers make the statement that the Armenians would burn the city if
the local Greeks [lacked] the courage.”409 After the Greek military collapse,
Horton cabled, “When demoralized Greek army reaches Smyrna serious
trou ble more than pos si ble and threats to burn the town are freely heard.”410
On September 8 Bristol told Max Aitken, the British press baron, that “ there
was a danger the city might be burned.”411 The retreating Greek army report-
edly had already burned Aydın and Nazili.412
The first fires were set on the morning of the 13th. The Turks had entered
the city four days earlier and were just then beginning to clear the streets of
the dead. They piled up the bodies and burned them.413 Around noon fires
were spotted at “several points” in the Armenian Quarter.414 The fires gener-
ated a mass “stampede” toward the dock, with thousands of Christians evac-
uating the cellars, churches, and Western institutional buildings they had
holed up in. As of four o’clock in the after noon “it was evident the city was
doomed,” Post wrote. The fires had coalesced and “a terrific wind” was
carry ing it toward the quay.415
By eve ning “the quay was . . . congested” with evacuees, and by midnight
“the broad waterfront street appeared to be one solidly packed mass of hu-
manity, domestic animals, vehicles and luggage.” At this stage, “the appalling
nature of the catastrophe began to make itself felt.” Hepburn wrote that, “sep-
arated from the crowd by a few short unburned blocks, the city was a mass of
flames driving directly down upon the waterfront before a stiff breeze.
Turks and Greeks, 1919–1924
Mingled with the noise of the wind and flames and the crash of falling build-
ings were the sounds of . . . rifle fire or the explosion of small- arms ammuni-
tion and bombs in the burning area. High above all other sounds was the
continuous wail of terror from the multitude.”416 Arthur Maxwell, a British
officer watching from the Iron Duke, later testified that he saw Turkish troops dousing refugees on the quay with “buckets of liquid” and then igniting
them. Other Turks threw kerosene on a raft crowded with refugees.417
In some places Turkish troops prevented Christians from escaping the
flames and reaching the waterfront.418 But tens of thousands made it to the
quay. There they were trapped. The routes north and south were blocked by
Turkish positions and machine guns; those east by the conflagration and west
by the sea. Some threw themselves into the water. Post watched the scene from
an American destroyer, binoculars in hand:
The volume of shrieks and wails [that] rose from a quarter of a million
throats was heart- rending, and could be heard above the roar of the fire
and the constant rattle of what sounded like machine guns. . . . It seemed
as though the mass of people on the quay would certainly perish be-
tween the fire and the sea. But as though by a kindly act of providence, as
the flames approached the water’s edge a counter current of air seemed
to carry them vertically upwards, so that comparatively few people were
burned. . . . Suddenly we were horrified, as we looked through our glasses,
to see groups of soldiers gathering embers together along the sea front . . .
and pouring some kind of liquid on them, apparently kerosene, deliber-
ately set fire to the unconsumed houses along the water front. I saw at
least twenty such fires started all along the quay. It looked like a delib-
erate effort to burn the Christians, but as the soldiers could more easily
have fired into the crowd, or forced them into the water, their action may
perhaps have been instigated merely by the desire to leave nothing of the
Christian and foreign quarters.419
The crowd dockside was “demented by fright. Some ran aimlessly about
clutching their bundles despite the fact that these were alight; some fell or
jumped into the water; the majority made no effort to escape, being literally
petrified by terror. A few had escaped in small boats.” Some reached the Iron
Mustafa Kemal and the Nationalists
Duke, where “ every effort [was] made to quiet the women, who were very hys-terical; most of them had lost their husbands and children.” Eventually,
Brock and other American, Italian, and French naval commanders ordered
small boats to shore to rescue the Christians.420 As Davis tells it, an aide came
up and said, “My God, Admiral, they are throwing kerosene over the women
and children; we have got to send in the boats.”421
By morning on September 14 the quayside stank like “a reeking sewer. It
was the smell of burning buildings and burning flesh, feces and urine. The
smell grew worse over the following days as the crowd, waiting for their sal-
vation, relieved themselves on the quay or into the sea. The stench was ac-
companied by a continuous wailing and moaning. Sailors on the gunboats
turned up the volume on their gramophones to drown out the noise. The gun-
boats raked the quayside with their searchlights, perhaps hoping to deter the
Turkish troops from attacking the refugees.422
“Many thousands” were saved that day. HMS Serapis took aboard a large
number of women and children, but there were almost none between the ages
of fifteen and thirty- five.423 Turks had been plucking out girls and young
women from the mass on the quay. Many were never seen again.424 That night,
according to an American officer, “separate fires were observed to start in loca-
tions distant from the general conflagration, plainly indicating incendiarism.”
Hepburn was told that “ every able- bodied Armenian man was being hunted
down and killed wherever found; even small boys . . . armed with clubs were
taking part.” He also “witnesse
d from the ship . . . a man in civilian clothes
being . . . bound and thrown over the seawall and shot” by soldiers.425
In short, between September 9 and 12, the incoming Turkish troops shot
and killed thousands of Christians, raped hundreds if not thousands of girls
and woman, and pillaged the Christian suburbs and quarters of town. Thou-
sands of Christians were led away under guard to the interior. Then, on
September 13, as tens of thousands of Greeks and Christians rushed to the
quayside in hope of maritime salvation, fires were set in vari ous parts of the
Christian quarters and among the buildings along the quayside, while bands
of Turkish thugs murdered stray Armenians. Joined by soldiers, they raped
Christian women and girls plucked from the mass of humanity on the
crowded, noisy, stinking quay.
Turks and Greeks, 1919–1924
Remarkably the Turkish government filed insurance claims in an effort to
receive compensation for Christian- owned properties destroyed in the Smyrna
fire. The Turks argued that the occupants had fled their homes before the fire
had started, and because the properties were “abandoned,” title automati-
cally passed to the government.426 NER pressed its own claim, asking the U.S.
State Department to take steps to assure that Armenians’ property titles be
secured for surviving orphans and NER itself, which was expending huge
sums on their upkeep.427 Nothing came of either legal maneuver.
Almost immediately, a controversy sprang up about the origin of the fire,
which completely obliterated the Christian quarters of the city, though left its
poorer Turkish neighborhoods intact. Who was responsible? Turks, Greeks,
and Armenians all seemed to have reasons for setting the town alight, and all
had, in one place or another during the previous years, committed large- scale
arson.
Paul Grescovich, an Austrian- born engineer and head of the Smyrna Fire
Department, apparently told an NER worker that on September 13, the day
the fire started, the Turks had reported killing a number of young Armenian
men “setting fires.” According to this account, some were disguised as women
or as Turkish soldiers or irregulars. Grescovich claimed he had found
petroleum- covered rags and bedding in buildings evacuated by Armenian ref-
ugees. Smyrna’s new military governor, Kâzım Pasha, said he ordered his
soldiers to prevent incendiarism, and Turkish officers uniformly denied having
torched the town. They said that burning Smyrna was contrary to their inter-
ests. Grescovich criticized the Turkish military for failing to prevent the fire
and for responding to it negligently and in effec tively. But he found no evidence that Turks— soldiers or civilians— had started it.428 On September 15 Kâzım
told Lieutenant Merrill and a journalist that he had arrested twenty- two Ar-
menians who had confessed to “belonging to a [secret] society of 600 Arme-
nians who had planned and executed the burning of Smyrna.” He promised
to pres ent the arsonists, but he never did.429
Bristol, too, saddled Armenians with responsibility, explaining that they had
“set fire to their churches and some of their houses with the idea of preventing
these buildings and houses getting into the hands of the Turks.” This led to
the big fire, but Bristol did “not think that the Armenians intended to burn
Mustafa Kemal and the Nationalists
the whole of Smyrna.”430 He added, “All the diff er ent races took a hand in
this work. The Greeks and Armenians when they found they had to leave
their homes set fire to them. . . . The Turks in many cases burned buildings
to cover up murders and crimes, or just for the sake of wanton destruc-
tion.”431 Hepburn, possibly influenced by his superior, wrote that individual
Turkish soldiers may have set some of the fires, but this did not indicate “an
or ga nized plan to burn the city.” He dismissed as “far- fetched” the argument
that burning Smyrna was part of a Turkish policy to “rid the country of all
non- Moslems.”432
British Army headquarters in Constantinople largely agreed with Bristol
and Hepburn. Basing its conclusions on a report from an unnamed agent, the
British determined that both Turks and Armenians had started fires, neither
with the intention of torching the city. The fires got out of control and “the
whole town was soon embraced by the conflagration, in spite of all the efforts
of the Turkish troops.”433
But an overwhelming number of eyewitnesses told a completely diff er ent
story: of deliberate Turkish authorship and responsibility. The Armenian
memoirist Abraham Hartunian said he saw Turks “driving wagonloads of
bombs, gunpowder, kerosene, and all else necessary to start fires” through the
streets on September 11.434 Anita Chakerian, who taught at the women’s col-
lege in Smyrna, saw Turkish soldiers drag sacks into buildings in vari ous cor-
ners, suggesting some sort of plot afoot.435 Missionary Minnie Mills, inside
the Armenian quarter, saw on September 13 “a Turkish officer enter a house
with small tins of petroleum or benzene . . . and in a few minutes the house
was in flames. Our teachers and girls saw Turks in regular soldiers’ uniform
and in several cases in officers’ uniforms with long sticks with rags at the end
which were dipped in a can of liquid and carried into houses which were soon
burning.”436 Missionaries said the fire began in four diff er ent locations more
or less si mul ta neously, indicating deliberation and organ ization. Post reported that firefighters in the Armenian quarter “seemed” to be “playing with the
fire, rather than actually trying to put it out.”437 One witness related that after the fire was well under way, “Turkish soldiers came . . . [to] the waterfront
and poured kerosene . . . all along the street.” This witness also claimed “fires were helped along by the troops in the Armenian quarter . . . and Turkish officers said that it was a good idea to clean it all out.”438
Turks and Greeks, 1919–1924
Hole thought “the conflagration was encouraged to spread to the Eu ro pean
quarter by the liberal use of oil. The street that runs parallel to the consulate
building was saturated.” He noted that the bundles refugees carried to the sea-
front “must also have been sprinkled with petrol.” Hole, too, witnessed clear
signs of arson. “In the quarter at the back of the harbor, I saw a number of
buildings take fire in the same manner, there being no fire which could pos-
sibly have been communicated to them in the ordinary way.” It was obvious
to him that Turks were responsible. They “wished to drive out any stray
[Christian] fugitives who had succeeded in evading them or merely to cover
up their tracks.”439 Rumbold, perhaps basing himself on Hole’s reports, con-
cluded, “ There seems no doubt that Turks . . . burnt the Armenian and
Eu ro pean quarters of the town.”440
Post, who believed that the Turks had started the fire to cover up traces of
their misdeeds, was prob ably wrong to condemn the whole of the Smyrna
fire brigade.441 Some— Greeks and Turks— vigorously tried to douse the
flames. But other Turks who should have been battl
ing the flames, or at least
working to rescue civilians, were witnessed doing the opposite. According to
Sergeant Tchorbadjis (Çorbacı), a Turkish member of the fire brigade who
testified at an insurance trial in London two years after the destruction of
Smyrna, said he saw Turkish soldiers igniting fires as he and his fellows put
them out elsewhere. He said he “found bedding on fire” on the roof of an
Armenian church. “Then I went down into one of the rooms and saw a
Turkish soldier . . . setting fire to the interior of a drawer.”442 Another fire-
fighter, Emmanuel Katsaros, was hosing down the Armenian Club when two
soldiers entered carry ing tins of petroleum. He saw them dousing a piano
with the liquid. “We are trying to stop the fires, and . . . you are setting
them,” he told the solider, who replied, “You have your orders and we have
ours.”443
Prob ably the strongest indication of Turkish culpability is that Turkish
quarters of the city were completely untouched by the fire.444 It is no won der
the missionary Peet saw the fire and massacres in Smyrna as proof of
Turkey’s “deliberate purpose . . .
to exterminate the Christians within
their borders.”445
Mustafa Kemal and the Nationalists
Expelling Greek Men, Women, and Children
In the days after the Turks retook Smyrna, they deported inland many thou-
sands of Ionian Greeks. Along the coast and in the inland villages, they
detained all men aged eigh teen to forty- five, and sometimes older. Many
were executed immediately. Some were sent inland and then executed. And
some were marched into the interior as prisoners of war destined for labor
battalions.446 The Greek government estimated that more than 100,000 men
from Smyrna were driven inland, perhaps an exaggeration.447 But without
doubt “practically all males between 18 and 45” who were not immediately
executed “ were removed to concentration camps” and formed into labor
battalions.448
After the signing of the Greco- Turkish armistice on October 11, League
of Nations High Commissioner for Refugees Fridtjof Nansen— a famed
