by Lou Ureneck
On Sunday morning, September 10, his second morning in the city, he drove with Lieutenant Knauss to Paradise to evaluate the danger at International College. The road passed through the Armenian Quarter, and the two officers saw streets littered with bodies. Hepburn counted thirty-five, including two old women, one of whom was still kneeling, though lifeless. They saw a man lying on the ground who had been shot in the back but was still alive. They did not stop. Turkish civilians and soldiers were looting Armenian homes and shops, often with the body of the shop owner lying across the doorsill or on the pavement just outside the shop. There was no attempt to hide the looting as the American officers drove by—it was being conducted casually and out in the open. Carts were being loaded with rugs, furniture, pots and pans, and bolts of cloth.
As the two American officers passed over the Caravan Bridge at the back of the city and entered the countryside, they saw empty carts tipped over without animals, unwanted goods scattered on the road, and the bodies, presumably of the owners, lying nearby. There was the body of a man who had been shot while trying to climb out of a steep ditch beside the road, and in a farm enclosure, they saw several Turkish boys throwing stones at a refugee man who had been shot in the head but had not yet died. And through all of this, the refugees continued moving along the road toward Smyrna.
At Paradise, about a thousand refugees had gathered inside the college grounds. Many more refugees were camped in a field adjacent to the college. Hepburn and Knauss passed through the college gate, where American sailors were posted with a machine gun and entered the college grounds as a church service was ending. Hepburn spoke to MacLachlan and the school’s staff and many of the town’s residents, including the Jennings family, in the central courtyard as gunfire popped in the nearby fields and hills. Turkish troops had passed by the college all night, and in the morning, Hepburn learned, the college’s staff had awakened to looting of some of the empty houses and closed shops in town. MacLachlan praised the American guards and assured Hepburn that the situation at the school was tense, but there was no need to evacuate. The American guard consisted of twelve men, eight from the Lawrence and four from the Litchfield. A twenty-nine-year-old chief gunnery mate named Louis Crocker from Everett, Massachusetts, was the lead guard. Crocker had been particularly reassuring to the American wives and daughters at Paradise. “His name,” Hepburn noted, “seemed to be on the lips of every woman.”
The situation at the college soon would turn more dangerous, and MacLachlan’s confidence would prove misplaced.
On their return to Smyrna, Hepburn and Knauss heard more frequent rifle fire coming from the hills and fields between Paradise and the city and saw fresh bodies on the way back. They lay in groups of three or four along the roadside and in the adjacent fields. Knauss had been keeping count, reached forty, and then for the purpose of his ship’s diary gave up counting and concluded only that “great numbers” had been killed. The man whom they had seen on the way out—shot in the back but still alive—had been shot in the head and now lay dead along the roadside. They returned to Smyrna over the Caravan Bridge and upon entering the city managed to get lost in the maze of narrow streets. As they blindly navigated the Armenian district trying to find their way back, they heard more rapid shooting and saw that Armenians were no longer just being robbed and shot in the street. Turkish civilians and soldiers were breaking down doors, killing people inside their homes, and pulling out household goods. The bodies of families—victims of all ages, men, women, and children—had been dragged out of the houses and were strewn about the streets. Every shop had been broken into and where steel shades had been drawn against looters, the shops showed signs of battering and forced entry. Bales of rugs, dry goods, and store merchandise were lying along the street and sometimes blocked the officers’ car until a smiling looter pushed some of it aside for their passage. Hepburn and Knauss finally wended their way back to the Quay through the Turkish Quarter and the bazaar.
AT THE THEATER, Hepburn found relief committee members anxious about the brazen street killings, lootings, and disorder. The captain received reports of killings throughout the city. One officer reported eight bodies at the two railroad stations, at either end of the city, and another officer, in a different neighborhood, had counted fifteen bodies. Altogether, his officers had seen fifty-eight bodies in the streets on Sunday. Hepburn did not realize that these body counts were low. The Reverend Dobson of the Anglican parish near the Point had been removing bodies of refugees from the streets for burial—some of them children and naked women with bloodied genitals. Many of the dead were also left inside the houses, and Dobson had pulled them out of hedges and abandoned carts. Working with an Orthodox priest who administered rites, Dobson (with the help of others) saw that the slain refugees received decent burials.
Despite the Turkish occupation of the city, the cascade of refugees into Smyrna showed no sign of abating. The people arriving did not know of the brutality that was occurring within the city limits, and most were still reassured by the presence of the Allied and American warships. Thousands had converged on the YMCA and YWCA and attempted to force their way into the buildings. About two hundred were admitted to the YMCA and twelve hundred at the YWCA, where there was a gated courtyard. Hepburn, meanwhile, was puzzled and annoyed that the Turkish liaison officer that General Murcelle had promised at the previous day’s meeting had never appeared. He soon would learn why. Murcelle was out, and a different man was now in charge.
The relief committee was making modest progress, but its resources were hardly sufficient to the magnitude of the problem. Jennings continued to bring injured and pregnant women to his safe house, and he had begun to investigate other abandoned mansions along the Quay that he might put to use as shelters. The spread of the killings was also creating yet more orphans, and Jennings had begun to collect children too.
Charles Davis, the Red Cross chief of the relief committee, sent the YMCA’s Ernest Jacob and others on an inspection tour of the city. They left the YMCA building near the American consulate and drove to the northern end of the city at the Point, where they counted about two thousand refugees who had congregated near the American Tobacco Warehouse, one of their feeding stations. They then turned inland to the Panonios Football Field, which the committee had designated as a collection point for refugees. Collection points, they had reasoned, would provide safer locations for the refugees and make it easier to feed them. The committee members arrived at the football field to find that the two thousand refugees who had been there the previous day were gone, but their baggage remained. It was an eerie sight of rifled trunks and scattered belongings. The relief workers knew the tenacity with which the refugees had held on to their possessions, and they knew also that the refugees could not have been separated from their belongings except by force, or the threat of it. Turning south on their inspection tour, they encountered the looting of stores and homes in the Greek Quarter, and farther south, toward the Basmahane train station in the Armenian district, there was more looting and bodies were lying in the streets. Jacob and the group then moved back in the direction of the consulate, crossing Frank Street, where they saw more looting and bodies. They turned toward the Quay and traveled south to the Turkish and Jewish sections, where excited crowds gathered in the streets but there was no looting or trouble. Jacob and the others then traveled inland to a refugee camp that had been established at Balchova, not far from the base of the pass at Nif, but it also was empty. They turned back toward the city and stopped at the Greek hospital to deliver medical supplies and found that the Turks had taken over the hospital and put its patients in the street.
In the meantime, Davis had gone to the Quay to evaluate the condition of the refugees who had boarded the harbor’s lighters—barges used to load and unload larger ships in the harbor. People had fled to the lighters when Turkish patrols of the city had begun the previous day. Most of them were inside the breakwater of the Passport Pier, taken there two days earlier by the Brit
ish who wanted to give its destroyer, HMS Tribune, a clear field to fire its deck guns toward the city if necessary. The Turks had initially given the British permission to bring food (boiled potatoes) and water to the people on the lighters, after men between eighteen and forty-five years old had been weeded out, but the order had been later rescinded and the British were not allowed to deliver food or water. One lighter had capsized from the weight of the refugees, resulting in several drownings. Another lighter had become untethered from the pier and floated haphazardly in the harbor with people and luggage aboard. The British offered to take the refugees ashore from the barge, but they refused—preferring hunger and thirst to the brutality onshore. From time to time, refugees would leap into the water from one of the lighters and try to swim to an Allied or American navy ship, hoping to be picked up. Turkish soldiers shot them in the water, bracketing their gunfire by observing the splashes until a bullet struck its swimming target.
The relief committee had been able to provide bread only to ten thousand people per day, less than 5 percent of the refugees. On Sunday, the Turks had inexplicably closed the bakeries, and Davis was working furiously to get the order countermanded. Also by Sunday, Jacob had taken responsibility for the orphanages, and Jennings was walking the city in the places where refugees congregated. He was shaken by what he saw. “No one can ever describe the sensations of those days,” he later wrote. “I have seen men, women and children whipped, robbed, shot, stabbed and drowned in the sea.”
Concentrating his energy on the worst cases, Jennings (his pain ever present, his peculiar gait, jacket, and straw boater a now-common sight in the city’s backstreets) picked up wounded children and pregnant and injured women in the Chevrolet and took them to the Quay. He and the American sailors who, without authorization, helped in these rounds, did their best to provide medical care with the scant supplies that had arrived on the Lawrence. The house at No. 490, despite its many big rooms, soon was full, so Jennings collected the orphan children on the apron of cobblestones out front. He asked the American sailors at the American Theater—about a quarter mile distant in the direction of the Passport Pier—to keep an eye on them, and they eagerly agreed. The sailors soon began bringing to Jennings women and children they found on the streets.
Greek and Armenian girls from the American Girls’ College, fearful of remaining in the district where the killings were most flagrant, also began showing up at 490, seeking protection. Soon five hundred people were crammed into his house. Faced with these numbers, and the extent of their injuries and illnesses, Jennings had taken several nearby mansions along the Quay that had been abandoned by their wealthy owners and turned them into safe houses. The people were spread on the floors, in the rooms and hallways. There was hardly space to pass among them. Jennings had to step over them as he moved through the houses. The American sailors continued to bring him more.
Jaquith reported back to the Near East Relief office in Constantinople: “Thousands of exhausted refugees, the majority of whom are women and children, are blocking all the roads leading into Smyrna. The city is terribly crowded, and the refugees who fled with only what they could carry on their backs are exposed to famine. The lack of shelter is causing intense suffering and misery. Many deaths have been caused by starvation, and the local hospitals, which are overflowing, need doctors, nurses and medicines.”
The Times of London, which published his cable, reported: “All accounts, nevertheless, agree that Smyrna has been turned into a charnel-house. Several streets were so littered with mutilated bodies that it was impossible to pass for the sickening stench.”
Less than two full days had passed since the Turkish cavalry had entered the city, and already Jennings and other relief committee members were beginning to sense that the worsening situation would require more than the arrival of food and medical assistance. The growing ruthlessness that was being visited on the Armenian Quarter and the impunity with which stores and homes were being looted and Christians were robbed, beaten, and shot suggested that there was no safe place for the refugees in Smyrna. There was an emerging sense that the only way to save lives was an evacuation. It was a realization that was both inescapable and inconceivable. Smyrna was far too dangerous for Christians to remain there, and a return to their farms and villages was impossible. Yet, a decision to evacuate meant removing hundreds of thousands of people from the place that was their home and taking them somewhere else—and that somewhere else was unclear. There was no alternative to departure. Yet there also appeared no way to take them away. The numbers of people were too big; the means of escape unavailable.
THE SITUATION WAS SEVERE all along the western coast of Anatolia and the Sea of Marmara. Refugees—Ottoman subjects but Christians—had abandoned their farms and villages with the retreat of the Greek army and were gathering on the beaches hoping to find passage on Greek or Allied ships to Greece. (Most were people who had never been to Greece, and most would be accounted as strangers when they arrived. Many would not be understood when they spoke.) Villages from Vourla, just south of Smyrna, to the tip of Chesme peninsula were emptying out. People were attempting the crossing to Chios or other islands in their small fishing boats even as the Greek navy continued its artillery fire to cover retreating soldiers. Sixty thousand people waited for rescue on the southern shore of the Sea of Marmara, and twenty-five thousand people huddled on the beach at Mudania. The Morning Post in London reported: “Five hundred thousand starving Christian refugees are awaiting shipment at Smyrna, Aivaly [Ayvalik], Mudania [Mudanya], Dikili, and Ghemlek [Gemlik], and the Greek Government is without available money or ships.” The paper’s correspondent added, “The scenes on the roads from Brussa to the coast are reminiscent of those in France and Belgium during August, 1914.” The London Daily News called for the intervention of the League of Nations to rescue the refugees.
Greek merchant ships serving as troop transports carried some of the refugees across the Sea of Marmara to Thrace, and the Greek patriarch in Constantinople was attempting to charter ships to evacuate Christians at Smyrna and other Aegean ports, but he lacked the money even if he could find the ships. He appealed to the British government and American relief organizations, and he issued an encyclical to the Greek community, enjoining prayer, calm, and abstinence from all provocative conduct and language.
CAPTAIN HEPBURN MET through the day on Sunday with Davis and Jaquith, who were pessimistic about Turkish intentions. The looting and intimidation on the streets had created an ominous feeling of a looming massacre—on a greater scale than what was already occurring in small family-sized groups. The relief committee was painfully aware that Turkish command showed no interest in stopping the disorder. It was as if the nationalist generals—in the old Ottoman tradition of warfare—were giving poorly paid soldiers and camp followers three days to sack a conquered city. Turkish soldiers, initially respectful of the Americans, were growing belligerent, and it was dangerous for a British citizen to be on the street. A Turkish guard was posted outside the British consulate, preventing British citizens without papers from getting near the building.
Then Hepburn received additional unsettling news: military executions had commenced. Ottoman Greeks and Armenians who had cooperated with the now-departed Greek administration of the city were being shot or hung near the Konak. A hanging was accomplished with a makeshift gallows: three long poles fastened together at the top, teepee style, and a rope dropped with a loop to fit around the neck of the victim. Hepburn saw Turkish soldiers marching Greeks and Armenians in groups of twelve to fifty along the Quay, with two abreast bound together at their wrists. Pulled from their homes, or other places of hiding, they were being taken toward the Konak and the military prison. The Turkish army also had obtained a list of the names of the members of the Asia Minor Defense League, and its members were being rounded up. Executions were swift, bodies often mutilated. The Turkish commander of the city also called on Turkish civilians to come forward with grievances about individual G
reeks and Armenians, who were then brought before tribunals for swift judgment. Reporter John Clayton saw the execution of sixteen men who had been rounded up. Accounts were being settled with murderous speed.
“We watched our soldiers pass with bayonets,” a Moslem woman later recalled, “leading desperate Greek men with their hair on end, their beards grown. They took them in a column, their hands tied behind, and then shot them in the mountains. Every evening.”
In the afternoon, Hepburn, troubled but strangely conflicted about how to evaluate what was happening around him, sent a reassuring radio message to Bristol. There had been scattered killings, he reported, but the victims were “all Armenians and Greeks of the peasant class.” As for the relief work, he wrote, “Government control not sufficiently established to make much progress.” The message contained no request for additional food or supplies, but he included this important bit of news: “Mustapha Kemal expected to arrive hourly.”
AT ABOUT 5 P.M., Mustapha Kemal rode into the city in the backseat of a 1911 Mercedes-Knight 1640. It was sixteen feet long with deep leather seats, and the top was down. A detachment of cavalry carrying flags and lances marched ahead of the car. With Kemal were Fevzi Pasha and Salih Bozok, his aide-de-camp. Salih’s loyalty was so deep to Kemal that years later, on learning of Kemal’s death, he shot himself out of grief.
The army had advertised Kemal’s entrance, and his route was decorated with red Turkish flags hung from windows. Like the cavalry the day before, he came into the city from the northwest, turned onto the Quay and traveled along the harborfront, passing (among the clubs, cafés, and other mansions) Jennings’s safe houses. He stopped at the Hotel Splendid, which would serve temporarily as his headquarters, then continued to the Konak, where he met with Noureddin and discussed the military situation. Afterward, he returned to the hotel and still later descended to the hotel’s bar where the waiter did not recognize him and apologized for not having an open table. But there were patrons in the bar who knew the face and the uniform. They were astonished at the man now among them. Kemal joined them at their table. He ordered a drink and threw it down, the first since the great offensive had begun on August 26. There were Greeks in the bar, nervously watching him, and he turned to them and said, “Did King Constantine ever come here to drink a glass of raki?” They said no he had not. “Then,” Kemal responded, “why did he bother to take Smyrna?”
