by Lou Ureneck
In contrast, Hepburn had no intention of destroying his career to take a chance on saving refugees. He nursed ambitions of rising even further in the navy; and if he were to choose to retire, he had only to wait four more years to qualify for retirement at three-quarters pay, at which time he and his wife, Louisa, could return to their town house in Washington and enjoy their lives. He was taking no risks.
After putting the rescue request to Hepburn, Davis stood before him on the Litchfield’s deck and awaited an answer. Again, Hepburn struggled with his conscience. He was there to protect American lives and property and gather information. Those were his orders: protection and surveillance. From the time he had arrived, he had been presented with circumstances that had seemed to him to be slowly slipping toward disaster—and it was clear that Bristol’s orders were fully insufficient to the situation Hepburn was now confronted with. Already, he had put Greeks and Armenians aboard the Simpson and Winona. Davis’s request was a bigger proposition—a combined American-Allied rescue effort in defiance of the Turkish authorities. It was a step too far, and he would not do it. But he saw a way out: alluding to his situation as “delicate,” he asked Davis to approach Admiral Dumesnil on an “unofficial” basis to explain the inadequacy of the Litchfield’s boats and ask the French admiral to undertake the rescue operation with the bigger French boats. Hepburn’s plan may not have had the virtue of candor, but the gambit would take full advantage of what Hepburn knew to be Davis’s rapport with the French admiral. It was not, strictly speaking, a violation of Bristol’s order—it was an adroit way around it. Davis immediately agreed, and Hepburn provided the motor sailer to take him to the French ship.
While Hepburn waited for Davis to return with the French response, a message came from the captain of the Winona—the refugees he had aboard needed emergency medical care. Miss Evon and Miss Corning were aboard the Litchfield. Hepburn sent them to the Winona, which was anchored farther out in the harbor. The nurses found that many of the two hundred people who had been brought on board had bayonet and bullet wounds. The two women had only rudimentary first aid kits, and the problems of sterilization and bandaging were severe. Making matters worse, the Winona’s captain was in a foul mood, cursing the loss of cargo space and the delay caused by the refugees. The Winona had come to Smyrna to load tobacco and figs, and he wanted to know who was going to pay for the ship’s losses. Agnes Evon told him the Near East Relief would pay passage for the refugees.
At about 11:30 P.M., while Davis was on his errand, the wind shifted strongly out of the east, and like the breath from a bellows it pushed the fire more rapidly toward the waterfront. The baggage that the refugees had deposited along the Quay’s edge caught fire, creating hundreds of bonfires in a long line along the Quay. The people now had to contend with the fires breaking out among them. “The spectacle was magnificently terrible,” a British seaman wrote in a letter home. “The stench of human flesh burning was appalling.” With the smoke blowing almost directly into the harbor, the waning moon, now only a half disk in the southern sky, came in and out of eclipse.
The only reporter left in the city was Ward Price of the London Daily Mail, aboard a British ship. “What I see as I stand on the deck of the Iron Duke,” Price wrote, “is an unbroken wall of fire, two miles long, in which twenty distinct volcanoes of raging flames are throwing up jagged, writhing tongues to a height of a hundred feet. Against this curtain of fire, which blocks out the sky, are silhouetted the towers of the Greek churches, the domes of the mosques, and the flat square roofs of the houses. All Smyrna’s warehouses, business buildings, and European residences, with others behind them, burned like furious torches.”
Another British observer, a twenty-nine-year-old seaman aboard the Maine, the hospital ship, described an even more horrible sight: refugees hanging in the water from the piers along the Quay and “Turkish soldiers coming along and deliberately severing the victims’ arms resulting in hundreds of bodies falling to the their death in the sea.”
Within the hour, Davis was back on the Litchfield and reported that Dumesnil was still ashore, directing the French evacuation, which like the Italian effort was a mess. After talking with Hepburn, Davis got back into the launch and went to the Iron Duke to appeal to Admiral de Brock. Again, Hepburn distanced himself from the request and remained on board the Litchfield. His principal worry was the safety of his guards at the Standard Oil pier and at Paradise. It was now past midnight, and he had been out of communication with them for about twelve hours. At 1:30 A.M., the fire breached the line of buildings along the waterfront just south of the American Theater near a second smaller movie theater, the Cine Pathe. It burst into a ball of flame and sent the fire moving north along the Quay. It reached the American Theater, and the sailors aboard the Litchfield who had been inside it only hours earlier watched the flames wrap around the theater’s marquee. Referring to the final dance scene in the film El Dorado, the sign advertised, LE DANSE DU MORTE, THE DANCE OF DEATH.
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 t
he 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.
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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.
