by Lou Ureneck
As Hepburn absorbed the important news, Horton explained to him that the British action would require closure of the British consulate, and Lamb was requesting that Horton handle British interests in the city as he had done during the early years of World War I. He felt it was his duty as a State Department employee to inform Washington of the request. Once again, Hepburn and Horton found themselves in conflict. Hepburn objected to the British request on principle, but he also told Horton (falsely) that he should decline the British request because the American consulate too could be closed at any moment. Hepburn, in fact, had received no instructions about closure of the consulate, nor had he previously considered it. There was no reason to expect the Turks to demand it.
The situation now was tightening around Hepburn. The prospect of war between Britain and the nationalists—along with the accumulation of Turkish provocations and other indications he was receiving that morning—confirmed for Hepburn that an evacuation was the prudent decision. He was persuaded that he needed to bring it off this day, or very soon. Without having resolved Lamb’s request, Hepburn ordered Horton to prepare for departure from Smyrna by packing his personal possessions for transport to a destroyer. Hence forward, as he had been doing for the last several days in his meetings with Turkish authorities, Hepburn would work with the young vice consul, Barnes, the barely experienced twenty-five-year-old Grinnell College graduate from Minnesota. The request took Horton by surprise, and he replied that he was reluctant to exit Smyrna if it would leave the impression he was abandoning his post. Hepburn, soft-pedaling his reasons, told Horton it was his duty as consul general to ensure the safe landing of Americans in Athens. Hepburn said he would personally explain the necessity of Horton’s departure to the State Department. Horton had no choice but to assent. No mention was made of Hepburn’s anger over Horton’s leak to the press.
Hepburn initiated the practical details of an evacuation. He gave orders for the Simpson to move from the Standard Oil dock to the Quay, and for both the Simpson and Litchfield to prepare to lower their whaleboats at his command, perhaps later in afternoon. Then, with Vice Consul Barnes, he called on the city’s latest vali, Abdul Halik Bey, with two requests, the first a mere formality—permission to keep the American consulate in Smyrna open on an informal basis until the United States could establish diplomatic relations with the nationalists; and (more urgently) permission to evacuate Americans, which both he and the vali knew included naturalized Americans who formerly had been Ottoman subjects. Hepburn tried to finesse the issue by pointing out that the naturalized Americans were in the same condition as the refugees in the streets, and he had already had been told by Noureddin that all refugees should go. To demonstrate good faith, he also said that he had waited until the Turkish command had established civil order in the city before deciding to evacuate Americans so as not to provoke fear among other foreign nationals. He wanted to leave the vali with the favorable impression that the United States had concluded civil order had indeed been established. The vali said he would consult with Ankara.
Just as Hepburn returned to the theater to check on evacuation preparations, one of his officers came back back from Paradise and reported that, en route, he had seen fires burning in houses in the city’s Armenian neighborhood. He’d seen no effort by the fire department or the Turkish army to extinguish them. The freely burning buildings posed a danger to the rest of the city, the officer said, noting that a hot south wind was blowing, and it was bound to push a fire in the direction of the main part of the city. The houses in the backstreets were mostly of one or two stories, with frail walls of thin, sun-dried bricks, sustained with wooden posts and beams, which easily caught fire. A second officer then appeared and reported that fires had been set near the American Girls’ School. He said he thought the fires had been set to smoke out the refugees who had taken shelter in the school. By the time Hepburn received these two reports, at about noon, the fires had grown sufficiently large for smoke to blanket the back section of the city near Basmahane station.
In the meantime, French admiral Henri Dumesnil had summoned Charles Davis aboard his flagship to discuss the refugees. Davis found it a gruesome ride through the harbor. The shootings may have diminished, but the number of victims floating in the harbor was appalling, and the launch that carried him to the French vessel had to steer around them. “The whole harbor was strewn with the most ghastly looking corpses floating out to sea,” a crewmember of the Iron Duke wrote to his parents on the thirteenth. Hepburn’s reluctance to coordinate with the Allies required Davis to serve as a go-between. The Italian admiral Guglielmo Pepe was present at the meeting and said the Italians were guarding seven buildings with six thousand refugees and sanitation was very bad. Dumesnil reported two thousand refugees were sheltered in the Catholic cathedral, also with intolerable sanitation. Neither the French nor the Italians had formed a relief committee; they were concerned solely with their own nationals and protégés. As Davis talked with the French and Italian admirals, two columns of smoke rose from the back of the city, from the area near Basmahane, where the officers had reported the fires to Hepburn. When Davis returned to the consulate, Hepburn informed him that he had made the decision to evacuate Americans and ordered him to stay at the consulate. Davis would remain there until the very last minute.
Clayton of the Chicago Tribune, meanwhile, had scored a scoop: an interview with Mustapha Kemal. He immediately sent his story via a merchant ship departing for Alexandria, Egypt, where it could then be relayed by telegraph to his editors. “You can say order has been completely restored from today,” Kemal told Clayton. “We do not wish any acts of revenge. We are not here to regulate past accounts. For us past acts are finished.”
JENNINGS HAD SPENT THE NIGHT in Paradise with his family and returned to the city on the train in the morning. He got off at a stop before the Aydin station, and as he walked toward the YMCA office through the Armenian Quarter he encountered an armed Turkish mob moving up the street. The poorest and roughest elements of the Turkish population, from the edges of the city, and even from outside the city, were roaming the Greek and Armenian Quarters in search of loot and victims. Jennings took an American flag from his pocket and pinned it to his jacket, hoping it would offer some protection. As the mob passed him, he was absorbed into it and it carried him along like a cork in a stream. He made his way out, flattened himself against a wall, and escaped without harm. At that hour, the fires were still small and widely dispersed, and the fire department was making a modest effort to extinguish them. Soon, however, more had been lit, and they had spread along several blocks. Jennings by then had limped his way back to the YMCA building, which the sailors continued to guard.
By early afternoon, the city generally was becoming aware of the fires. The smoke was visible, and the acrid smell and the fine dust from the tchatma—the local building material, a mix of plaster and wood—filled the air.
People ascended to high places where they could get a look—Colonel Reginald Maxwell of the Royal Marines looked from the roof of the Oriental Carpet Company on the Quay; George Helzel, the Czech manager of the Hotel Splendid, watched from the hotel’s roof, also on the Quay but several blocks north; Dimitrios Marghetti took his view from atop a carpet factory in the Mortakia neighborhood, in the industrial north end; Haralambos Spanoudakis, an accountant for the Aydin Railroad, looked from his second-floor office near the Point; Rene Guichet, a French engineer for the Casaba Railroad, watched in the north center of the city from the roof of the French hospital where his wife was a patient; Lieutenant Heaton Lumley of the Royal Marines gazed from a warehouse, nearer the Quay, which was being used as a semaphore station next to the British consulate. Each observer had a different line of view, but it was clear to all of them that the fires were spreading, and Smyrna was in danger.
By midafternoon, the smaller fires had joined together—fires spreading through adjacent houses, crawling over the cotton fabric commonly stretched between roofs and over narrow l
anes to provide shade, then jumping streets and lighting still other houses—to create three distinct bigger fires. They were distributed in a quarter-mile arc across the outer boundary of the Armenian neighborhood.
Under the force of the south wind—shifting sometimes slightly east or west—the bigger fires, after sweeping through the Armenian district, would soon merge and roar as a single mass of flame into the southeastern flank of the Greek Quarter, begin to consume the European district, and press along a broad front toward the Quay.
By late afternoon, the crowds along the Quay grew denser and more chaotic as Italian, French, and British nationals assembled for loading on naval launches. The French and Italian efforts were poorly planned and confused. Guards from the two countries were having difficulty moving their nationals through the crowds, which were packed along the waterfront and made even more alarmed by the sudden decision of the French and Italians to evacuate. These were the two nations that had been counseling calm and the good intentions of the Turkish authorities. The refugees wanted desperately to be taken aboard the ships, asking for mercy and claiming false French and Italian national connections, but they were denied passage and pushed back.
The British showed better preparation, and their officers had even rehearsed a smaller evacuation earlier in the week. Turkish soldiers mustered British nationals in batches at the British consulate, marched them down Galazio Street past the American consulate to the Quay and then along the waterfront to the Passport Office. The Turks checked their identification a second time before allowing them to embark on the British ships.
For the present, Hepburn decided against bringing American boats to the Quay. He was waiting for permission from the vali and for the other navies to clear some of the Quayside congestion.
THE SPEED OF THE FIRE forced Hepburn to pick up the pace of the American evacuation. Jennings and Lawrence had driven out to Paradise at noon and spread word that all American women and children should be ready by 3 P.M. to travel to the city so sailors could take them aboard a destroyer. Hepburn had decided only Americans would be evacuated, not servants or staff at the school, and only hand baggage could be brought along.
Many of the families at Paradise counted housekeepers and cooks as members of their families—these were often long and close relationships—and they protested against having to leave them behind, fearing for their safety. Knauss had arrived at Paradise to supervise the transportation of the Americans into the city, and the American women pleaded with him to bring along their household staffs. Knauss weakened. He said he could not give permission to the non-Americans to join the evacuation, but he would not object if the American women happened to bring them along without asking his consent. (This loosening of his orders would infuriate Hepburn.) The American women ended up bringing their servants, members of the servants’ families, and Greeks and Armenians attached to the college. There were about 125 Americans, and they brought along at least 60 others.
Jennings drove his family back to the city in the Chevrolet, which he had draped for protection with the American flag. He steered around refugee corpses in the road and refused to stop when a group of Turkish irregulars—bandits, really—stepped in front of the car. He swerved to avoid them and continued toward Caravan Bridge and then the movie theater. The route took him past the fire, and near the Quay, the car had to pass slowly among the crowds. He dropped off Amy and the children and returned to Paradise for others. The sailor driving the car with the Jacob family and their servants told his passengers to look at the car’s floor or close their eyes to avoid seeing the bodies, some of which had been stripped naked. The sailor swerved sharply several times to avoid bodies, but occasionally the passengers felt a bump when the tires rolled over one. The stench of decomposing bodies was sickening.
The Paradise Americans (and their entourage of servants, friends, and families of friends and younger students from the college) waited nervously inside the theater for Hepburn to decide when they should depart for the whaleboats that would carry them to the ship. After Jennings, Jacob, and Kingsley Birge (a teacher at the college) had finished ferrying the people from Paradise, they stayed at the theater to reassure their families and help with the evacuation. Jennings, who had been moving between his safe houses, Paradise, and the YMCA, then decided to make one quick check of the YMCA before his family departed. He hurried back to his office there. The fire had not yet reached the building, but he found an Armenian employee inside, frightened and unsure how to save himself. He was reluctant to leave the building. He appealed to Jennings for help, and Jennings decided to take him to the theater with the others that were being evacuated. Together, they made their way through the crowds to the theater. Jennings told the guard at the theater door that the young Armenian was a servant he had employed in Paradise, and the guard allowed him to join the people being evacuated. “As long as I live I shall never forget the gratitude, almost devotion, that lit up his face,” Jennings later remembered.
The American sailors sorted the people into groups of ten, which were the limit for each whaleboat, and each group was set apart and assigned to a boat.
By midafternoon, Hepburn had directed the Litchfield to tie up, stern-to, at the Quay. Its anchor, at the bow, was dropped, and the stern was swung around so that it was only thirty yards off the seawall. The ship was made fast to the Quay with two lines as big around as a man’s arm, both tied with knots that could be slipped in a hurry. The Simpson was brought to within fifty yards of the seawall and anchored, and it swung naturally with its bow pointing south, into the wind. The plan was to bring the Americans to the Simpson. He planned to have two motor sailers (each destroyer was equipped with one) tow the whaleboats, two at a time, from the Quay to the Simpson. Given the numbers of people the Paradise families had brought along, Hepburn, who thought he was evacuating 125 Americans, estimated it was going to take maybe nine trips to get all the people, Americans and non-Americans, aboard the destroyer. He was not pleased, and he demanded an explanation from Knauss for his failure to follow his order to bring back only Americans. Knauss said the Paradise Americans must have misunderstood his directions, and some of the Americans, seeing that Knauss’s concession to them had landed him in trouble, told Hepburn that Knauss had conveyed an Americans-only order but they had chosen to violate it. Anna Birge had brought along four boys who were students at International College and when challenged about them said they were her sons. There was nothing Hepburn could do at this point. The fire was approaching, and the Americans were supporting Knauss, and everyone was already in the theater. He agreed to load them all.*
Both ships were in position by 4 P.M.
THE SITUATION AT THE AMERICAN Girls’ School had grown even more desperate. The building, which wrapped around a gated courtyard, was in the neighborhood where most of the looting and killing had taken place. The school had twelve American sailors as guards and was directly across the street from the Basmahane station, though its front door opened onto a side street, Tchinarli Street. The teachers had witnessed shootings and stabbings since Saturday when the Turkish cavalry had first arrived, and the streets outside the buildings had become impassable, piled high with rummaged goods, broken carts, and bodies.
Minnie Mills was the school’s director. She had deep experience in Turkey. Born in Magnolia, Iowa, and a graduate of Olivet College, a small religious school in Michigan, she had been a missionary teacher in Smyrna since 1897—this was her twenty-fifth year since arriving at the Girls’ School. She was fifty years old.
That morning, she had seen Turkish soldiers break into nearby homes, light fires, and spread them with petroleum they poured from tins. The fires flared under the accelerant and drew close to the school, but Miss Mills had decided to remain with the students and her colleague Annie Gordon, a fifty-five-year-old missionary teacher from Canada.
On that Wednesday, the two missionary teachers had responsibility for the school’s students and staff as well as twelve hundred refugees, mostly
from the neighborhood, who had taken refuge in the gated courtyard. Some were also inside the school. Miss Mills had given them sanctuary when they began arriving the day of the Turkish cavalry’s entrance into the city. The people were all women and children. (Hepburn had ordered the men removed earlier in the week.) The school’s staff had counted eight new babies among the refugees—one woman had given birth while at the school—and several women were expected to deliver on this day. Many of the refugees were camped in the courtyard; the locked iron gate separated them from the soldiers in the street. The school had been feeding them as best it could with soup and bread. Turkish soldiers had tried several times to enter the courtyard but were frustrated by the gate and the American sailors.
At about 3 P.M., Dana Getchell arrived at the school. Getchell, as a member of the relief committee, had been moving between the American consulate, the Armenian orphanage, and the Girls’ School. He arrived as the fire was moving along Tchinarli Street toward the school, and new fires were breaking out in nearby streets. He saw the city’s fire department attempting to put out some but without success. Getchell and some of the sailors brought water buckets and wet carpets to the roof, hoping they could prevent blowing sparks from setting the building on fire, but a Turkish soldier on the street pointed his rifle at them and ordered them to desist. When the building next door was set afire by a group of Turkish irregulars, Getchell decided his effort was futile and the situation too dangerous to carry on. He descended to the courtyard below and told the refugees that he and the teachers would stay with them awhile longer, but there was nothing more that the school could do for them. The Americans would soon have to abandon the building. For the refugees, this meant either staying inside the courtyard as the building caught fire—or attempting to leave and enter the streets where they were likely to be killed by the soldiers.
