Spirit in Action
Unsung Hero of the Armenian Genocide
A glimpse into the horror of one piece of the genocide that took place in Turkey in the early 1900's, The Great Fire, by Lou Ureneck, conveys the dark side and a few strands of silver lining amidst the disaster.
- Duration:
- 55m
- Broadcast on:
- 31 May 2015
- Audio Format:
- other
[music] ♪ Let us sing this song for the healing of the world ♪ ♪ That we may hear as one ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world home ♪ ♪ And our lives will feel the echo of our healing ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark Helpes Me. Each week, I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, creative action, and progressive efforts. I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service. Hoping to inspire and encourage you to sink deep roots and produce sacred food in your own life. ♪ Let us sing this song for the dreaming of the world ♪ ♪ That we may dream as one ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world home ♪ Up today for Spirit in Action, we have a stroll down memory lane. Way back to 1922, that is. We have some great lessons to be learned with great implications for us today. My guest is Lou Uranick, and his book is The Great Fire, one American's mission to rescue victims of the 20th century's first genocide. Lou is a professor of journalism in the College of Communications of Boston University and Lou Uranick joins us by phone from Boston. Lou, thank you so much for joining me today for Spirit in Action. It's good to be with you. The Great Fire, what an adventure. I think you must have totally immersed yourself in and have lived and breathed this for the entire time you were writing it. There's so much detail, so much grasp. You followed the whole story down so many paths. Is that your normal approach to a book? How can you do that and be a professor of journalism at the same time? Well, I was a busy guy, but I can say that I thoroughly enjoyed the process. I did a very deep dive into this subject. I wanted to make sure that I understood it completely and that I had some mastery of the subject. I was very fortunate in that I was able to get access to the personal papers of many of the people who were principal characters in the story, people who were eyewitnesses to what had happened at Smyrna, including some who were actually part of the rescue that we're going to talk about. I drew on at least 20 libraries in five different countries. I made numerous trips to Greece and to Turkey, at least four trips to Turkey. Then another trip to the island of Lesbos, which emerges as an important part of the story. I did a lot of research, enjoyed it, and interestingly, the place that has the richest documentation. Most of the information from this story came from the U.S. archives in College Park, Maryland, and the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. for a variety of reasons, largely because we had such a large group of naval officers at Smyrna in September 1922. All of whom seemed to be very keen observers and good record keepers. I was able to recreate, sort of, knit together a narrative of what had happened in that city through naval documents, and documents like that, so complete and so forth, don't exist anywhere else in the world. Yeah, there is an amazing amount of detail. And again, the Great Fire really flows a bit more like a novel, although it's very clearly just telling the history. But with each person, I had the feeling of being inside their skin, really feeling, seeing, smelling, tasting, what they're tasting along the way. I'm so happy to hear that, you know, that was the intent. You know, I wanted to write accurate, factual history that stood up to rigorous scholarship. And so the book is footnoted and so forth, or at least endnoted. But I did wanted to read, you know, as a story, a story that engaged people's attention and held their interest over the course of all of those pages. So I was trying to figure out what about this story called to you. There's a whole lot of history to choose your stories from, but I was looking at your last name, Uranic. And I was trying to figure out if that had something to do with why Smyrna was important. Actually, Uranic is a Polish name. Years ago, I was visiting an uncle who had a great collection of books, and I from time to time would pull a book down at random, and I was visiting him, and I pulled down a book written by Marjorie House Sippian about Smyrna. She wrote it in the late 1960s. I read the book, I found it completely interesting. The main character in my book, A.C. Jennings, the hero of the story, made a very brief appearance in her book, a kind of cameo, really. At the time, I remember thinking, goodness, this is a very special guy, and what an achievement. I wonder who he is and how he came to do what he did. I carried the idea around for a number of years. I wrote a couple of other books, and I finally decided that I was going to go in search of A.C. Jennings, this very special guy, learn his biography, learn how he came to be at Smyrna, and understand better his motivations and the work that he did and how he managed to put together this incredible rescue that amazingly so few people know about. I think it is one of the great stories of an American hero that nobody knows about, so it was principally to learn more about A.C. Jennings, and in the course of following that trail, the story opened up and broadened, and I went down various paths and had lots of discoveries and surprises and so forth, but I always came back to A.C. I'm kind of relieved, Lou, that you didn't choose to write this book so that you could give us another bad guy, and even that is a bit equivocal, but so much of our news and what we try and sensationalize in this world. It's really about bad guys trying to find some, and there's certainly a lot of drama in this book, but to have it as the center of this, the work of A.C. Jennings is really quite amazing, and he's such an amazing guy because of his limitations, which he apparently, he somehow transcends them completely. One would not have predicted that he could have played the role that he did. He kind of comes out of nowhere. It's like Clark can't duck into a telephone booth, and I'll come Superman. And there is some of that. He was a unlikely hero. He was a small person. He was just about five feet tall, and he had these big round spectacles that magnified his eyes, giving him kind of a strange look, and he was a little motor of a guy. Lots of energy, very cheerful, despite what was really a life of very bad health. When he was in his 20s, he caught tuberculosis, and that morphed into something called pot's disease, which is an infection of the spine, and he suffered terribly. His spine collapsed. He was in a full body cast for almost two years. The doctors said he was going to die. His wife, Amy, a person like Asa of great faith, refused to accept that diagnosis and worked very hard to save Asa's life. They spent a lot of time reading the Bible together and talking about the future and trying to be positive, but Asa, you know, he did survive, but he came out of it badly damaged. He had an enlarged heart. He had a crooked back, as well as kind of a hump on his back, which he hid by wearing a jacket that was a little bit too big for him, and he had a fever almost every day of his life, and, you know, often terrible pain in his thorax and back from the pot's disease, but he didn't complain. He went about being useful. This seemed to be at the center of his life. Faith and this idea of being useful, and he definitely made himself useful at Smyrna. And, you know, when he arrived at Smyrna, he was a kind of a disappointment to the people who ran the YMCA there in the sense that, you know, they were trying to raise money. They were trying to make a good impression on the community at Smyrna, and they were hoping to get, you know, some big strapping American who, you know, had athletic prowess or whatever, and who steps off the boat, but this little minister who wasn't making that kind of impression. So, he certainly proved everybody wrong over time, that's for sure, but he is not the person you would have cast. He's not Hollywood's idea, at least first idea of a hero, that's for sure. Yeah, more Clark Kent than Superman. You bet. Let's set the stage here. This takes place in Smyrna, which is what we now call Turkey. It's 1922, so this is just a couple years after the end of World War I. And Turkey, during the Great War, was one of the compatriots along with Germany, you know, the bad guys. And so Turkey was a bad guy. Fill in a little bit of that historical backstage. Yeah, absolutely, because it's important to what happened at Smyrna. Turkey was the Ottoman Empire, and the Ottoman Empire, through the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries, was a very powerful empire. It stretched from essentially what we think of as Saudi Arabia, all the way up to Austria, in Europe, southeastern Europe, down along the edge of the Levant to Egypt, and then North Africa as well. It was a very powerful, it was the caliphate, and the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire was Muhammad's representative on Earth. But, you know, it beginning probably in the late 18th, early 19th century, the Ottoman Empire began to decline. It was a slow decline at first. It was inefficient and corrupt and was broke from all of its wars and so forth. But that decline speeded up at the beginning of the 20th century. It lost a lot of territory in Europe. It lost two wars in the Balkans, Italy seized Libya. And it was a great deal of paranoia among the Ottoman elite about the future of the empire. And that paranoia went looking for a scapegoat. And it found a scapegoat in the Christian population of Anatolia, Anatolia being the big Turkish peninsula, you know, that place that we think of as Asia Minor. Most people don't realize it, but Anatolia had a large Christian population. Twenty percent of the population was Christian. And of course, Anatolia, Asia Minor is where the Christian church really got started, that, you know, the church is named in Revelation, are there Ephesus, Smyrna, Philadelphia, and so forth. It's where St. Paul walked and preached, you know, he preached at Ephesus. And so, you know, there's a long history of Christianity in that part of the world. And there were a lot of Christians who lived there. And they were principally Greeks, Armenians, and what we call the Syrian Christians. Well, they were scapegoated by the Ottoman elite and a religious cleansing of that part of the world was begun. It was a genocide. And, you know, we think of the Armenian genocide in 1915 and 1916. There was an intensification of the slaughter of Christians in that period. But really, it was a ten-year religious cleansing that lasted from 1912 to 1922. The burning of Smyrna was the final episode. So, the war breaks out. The Ottoman Empire lies itself with Germany, counting on Germany's militarism to succeed in the war. And it hopes that it will be able to restore lost glory by being among the victors. Well, it didn't work out that way. Germany and Bulgaria, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, were defeated. As a consequence, everybody hoped that the persecution and the killing of Christians would stop with the defeat of the Ottoman Empire. And it did briefly. But Britain very quickly lost a grip on Turkey, on the Ottoman Empire. It's a big place. It did not want to occupy the area with large numbers of troops. And so soon, what we had is the rise of a nationalist movement that sought to eject Britain and reject the treaty that had been put in place after World War I and so forth. And the leader of that nationalist movement, who really set himself in opposition to the Sultan and the government at Constantinople, was a man named Mustafa Kamal. He later adopted the name Attaturk, and that's how most people know of him. He was a brilliant general, a ruthless person. He had a burning vision for what he wanted Turkey to be. He assembled a provisional government in Ankara. He put together an army. Basically, he built it out of bandits and militias and peasants. And it was the army under Kamal that eventually occupied Smyrna, which is an important part of the story that I tell. But anyway, sort of getting back to the big picture, the killing of Christians continued. After a brief pause, it continued in 1920 and 21 and 22. The Armenians, the Assyrians, the Greeks along the Black Sea coast in particular. They were deported and they were executed. They were taken on long marches. So there was this sense, first among the Ottoman elite, and then later among the nationalist Turks, that Turkey should be a place for Turks. And to be a Turk meant to be a Muslim. What they were basically engineering was a new country with a thoroughly completely Muslim population. And so that idea infused the army, the government, and so forth. When the Turkish nationalist army entered Smyrna, and Smyrna, I should say here kind of parenthetically, it was a very special place. Smyrna was a majority Christian city. It was a very prosperous place. It had a big tobacco trade. The American cigarette industry would not have been possible without Turkish tobacco. It had a big dried fruit, especially the Smyrna fig trade. Nearly all of the carpets out of that part of the world, Turkish carpets, Pershing carpets and so forth, came through the Oriental carpet company that was in Smyrna. Opium, leather, there were all sorts of products. It was an extremely rich place. Mansions, private clubs, a golf course, a racetrack, a yacht club, you name it. It was really something. It was also a place where people of different faiths had managed to live together for quite some time. There were Jews, Christians, and Muslims living in Smyrna more or less peacefully together. Even during the worst part of the Armenian genocide in '15 and '16, the Armenians were mostly safe in Smyrna. It was a different place. The Turkish Muslim residents and other parts of Turkey referred to it as Gevauer Ismir, which means infidel Smyrna. It had this kind of reputation for tolerance and liberality and so forth. Smyrna was always busy having fun, music, food, you name it, horse races. The Turkish army enters this city in September 9, 1922. In a very short order, the army begins a massacre. It moves into the Armenian Quarter, a large back section of the city, kills people in their homes, rape, looting, really, just horrible. Then the worst parts of the Turkish population of Smyrna joined in. They began robbing and killing people as well. Soon that slaughter and these people, this army out of control, spread to the rest of Smyrna and other Christian groups were killed. On Wednesday, September 13, a very important day, the Turkish army set fire to the Armenian Quarter of the city. On that day, coincidentally, a very stiff wind from the south. A desert wind came up, hot desert wind from the southeast and blew that fire toward the waterfront. Fire lasted for three days. It destroyed about 90% of this beautiful city that many had called the Paris of the Orient. Now, to make matters even worse, ahead of the Turkish army, as the Turkish army was moving towards Smyrna, the Christian residents, the peasant farmers and the villagers and so forth, not that they would be safe at Smyrna, bad, bad miscalculation. One of the reasons they thought they would be safe there is because the navies of the great power as the United States, Britain, France were present in the harbor. They just thought, "Well, these Europeans in the United States won't let bad things happen to us." At the time, there were half a million people living at Smyrna, and then another 300,000 refugees from the countryside. These were people who had come in with a little bit of food wrapped in a piece of cloth. They brought their goats and their water buffalo and their donkeys and so forth. They were sleeping in the railroad stations, on the streets, in the churchyards and cemeteries. Wherever they could find a little place and they were carrying what possessions they could carry. Many times it was a singer sewing machine. You see these photographs of people carrying their beloved singer sewing machine into the city. And then there were also just heart-rending scenes of old women carrying old men. Of course, many of these people, they couldn't make the trip to Smyrna. They died along the way. There were corpses all along the trails leading down from the mountains and into Smyrna. The fire breaks out on Wednesday, September 13, late in the morning, and drives the Christian residents of the city toward the waterfront, away from the fire, and also all of these refugees. And so on the night of Wednesday, September 13, we have this spectacle where hundreds of thousands of people, literally, are caught between this enormous fire. It was a fire that was two miles long and a mile deep. An entire city was ablaze. It was so hot that the ships in the harbor had to keep dropping further and further and further back, because the heat was igniting the canvas and the ropes and so forth on their decks. And yet, there were people there on the K, the K being the kind of promenade along the harbor edge of Smyrna. The packs on the backs of the animals caught fire. The animals were stampededing back and forth. People were being killed. They were jumping into the water, trying to avoid igniting their clothes, catching on fire. And they drowned. They were not dressed for swimming. The water was deep. Many couldn't swim. Some tried to swim out to the ships that were in the harbor. And all of the ships, all of the navies there, had very firm directions from their governments to remain neutral. Don't get involved. These refugees are Ottoman subjects. They may be Christians, Armenians, Greeks and so forth, but they're Ottoman subjects and each government refused to get involved. So, at least initially, the people were not picked up and they drowned as they beat on the hulls of the ships and tried to hold onto the anchor chains and so forth. It was a horrible, horrible scene. Harbor was full of floating corpses. So, the fire burned for three days and when it went out, devastation. Very little food in the city. The water pipes had melted, so there was very little water. You can imagine how bad the sanitary conditions were. I mean, there was no bathrooms or anything like that. And so, disease broke out. There was typhus and dysentery. It was a hell on earth. Hell on earth. I can clearly hear your passion about this. I somehow have the suspicion, Lou, that when you were little and you were first exposed to brothers, grims, stories or something, you probably went on a telling spree and you elaborated incredibly. Well, maybe you're right. No, really. The passion here is incredible. I'm going to try and make a couple points because there's things I have questions about throughout the book and we are working up to where we're going to encounter Asa Jennings. So, you mentioned the caliphate. And I'm pretty sure our listeners have heard the word caliphate recently because that's what Isis is seeking to establish. And this desire to get back to the good old days of the caliphate, that has ramifications for today. Did that have any influence on your passion for looking at what happened 100 years ago? No, actually, it took me by surprise. It's a medieval idea. And it's shocking, really, that it's resurfacing. You know, there are many peaceful Muslims in the world, of course, and Christians and Muslims can live together. We saw that at Smyrna. But there is this thread, this strain of violence that runs through Islam and, you know, it's there. I think all religions sort of evolve. But there is something about Islam that has this, I think of it as a kind of a violent strain. And the faith, so-called, Islamic faith was spread in the early years, you know, in the 15th and 16th and 17th centuries by the sword. I mean, that's how it was done. But that was a long time ago. And, you know, the Ottoman Empire sort of settled into something else. But it was indeed a caliphate. You know, it was a Sunni theological state. But to see those old ideas resurface the way they are these days where, you know, we see these horrible images of human beings, Christians, people being beheaded. You know, it's just horrible. And it's such a sickening sort of medieval throwback to an earlier era. And I was shocked when I was writing the book, you know, I was learning about the early Ottoman Empire and so forth. And I mastered a lot of that just so I could understand the modern Ottoman Empire. And then when I started reading about what was happening more recently in the Middle East, it was just completely shocking to me to see these old impulses resurface. And of course, you know, these members of ISIS, it's a stateless group of radical people who, you know, have this kind of medieval fantasy that they're returning to and they're being absolutely ruthless about it. It's really a very discouraging development in that part of the world. You did mention that some of your sources come from what is now called Turkey, as well as all the stuff from the US and the other countries, all the other people who are part of the Smyrna fire. One of the maxims that we know is that history gets written by the victors. So I imagine if one wrote the history of North America from the point of view of the indigenous people who were here before Europeans came over, genocide, genocide, genocide. I'm pretty horrible, I'm pretty sure. Right. Did you get any hint of that alternate story from the Turkish side of what went on? Well, you know, it's interesting that you draw the American parallel in a rather chilling way. We had an ambassador, a really sort of a moral and ethical giant looking back on him, Henry Morgenthau, who was there in Turkey, in Constantinople during the early years of the war before the United States had entered the war against Germany. We never did declare a war in Turkey for a variety of reasons. And Morgenthau was appalled at what was happening in Turkey. And he was getting reports from the various consulates at Smyrna and Aleppo and Trepsand and all of these various outposts about the brutality and the killing and so forth. And he engaged the Turkish leadership in a conversation about it. And from time to time, they would say to Morgenthau, "Well, what about what the Americans did to the Indians, the Native Americans?" They would reference that killing. And in fact, in the Smyrna story, the cruelest of the cruel generals, the Turkish general there, Noradian Pasha, the person who is a most often blamed for letting the army do what it did and for the fire breaking out and so forth, is reported to have said to one of the translators who was working for the US Navy there. You know, you have a saying in America, "The only good Indian is a dead Indian." We have a saying here in Turkey, "The only good Armenian is a dead Armenian." So they were aware of that element of the history of North America. You know, in terms of how would the Turks write this history, the Turkish government has a very firm grip on the way history is taught and discussed in that country. And the government has made it a project to deny that there was a genocide. I think we all are aware of that. When I was in Turkey, I talked to many Turkish people, and I was doing my reporting and trying to find various places. I need people's help and translation and so forth. So I engaged a fair number of Turks. And what I found was that they were uniformly hospitable. I was warmly welcomed in Turkey. Number one, number two, even the well-educated people had a general sense of what had happened, meaning they knew there was a fire. And they knew there had been some trouble with the Greeks and the Armenians. But that's about it. This period of Turkish history really is kind of a black hole. And I think most Turkish people, at least educated Turkish people, are curious. They would like to know what happened. I'm not necessarily saying that they would admit to genocide. Maybe they would. But they have a different attitude than the government. The government takes a very rigid position that there was no genocide. I think that among the population, there is more openness to understanding what happened and that there is a sense that there is a tremendous lack of information. It simply isn't taught in the schools. We'll get back to more of this story. The book is "The Great Fire, One American's Mission to Rescue Victims of the 20th Century's First Genocide by Lou Uranick." But first I want to remind you that you are listening to Spirit in Action, which is Northern Spirit Radio Production. I'm Mark Helpsmith, your host, and we're on the web at northernspiritradio.org. At northernspiritradio.org, you'll find about 10 years of our programs for free listening and download. You'll find links to our guests, so you can follow the link to lose site smirnoughfire.com. Follow the link from northernspiritradio.org. You also find a place to post comments. We love two-way communication, so please post comment when you visit. There's a place to support us. Click on support to donate to Northern Spirit Radio. But even more important than that, I ask that you support your local community radio station. The kind of stations that carry this program, and which provide you a slice of news and music that you get nowhere else on American airwaves. Really, there's a vital need for alternate news sources, and community radio station is a place to do it. So reach out your hands, open your pockets, and please support local community radio stations. Again, Lou Uranick here smirnoughfire.com, the book "The Great Fire." The place you want to go to find out about "The Great Fire" is smirnoughfire.com. Again, for the spelling challenged, like me, come via northernspiritradio.org. Let's go back to talking a bit about the personages of this drama that you so aptly render in "The Great Fire." Again, a couple of the major characters in this. There is Admiral Mark Bristol. He's the head point person. Yeah, he had two positions. He was a very powerful guy. He was the high commissioner, which essentially was the ambassador. He wasn't called ambassador because we didn't have diplomatic relations. But he was the state department's representative, the American government's representative in Constantinople. He was also the chief naval officer in that part of the world. He had a detachment of destroyers that he commanded. So he had both a diplomatic staff and a naval staff that he ran out of the American embassy in Constantinople. So Mark Bristol is high commissioner. I think he made this disaster a lot worse, at least as the book relates. But there are some other people who are under him who are receiving orders through or from him and have held back from doing relief efforts until they didn't have any moral choice otherwise. Halsey Paul is one of those folks. That's right. The thing we need to remember about Bristol is that Bristol was, in many ways, a despicable character. Sorry to have to say that, but it's true. He didn't like Greeks. He didn't art like Armenians and he didn't like Jews. He sort of grouped them together. He called them the commercial races. He said famously, "If you put them in a bag and shake it up and pour them out, you can't tell one from the other." And so he had this bias against these people in Turkey. He was considered to be pro-Turkish. The missionaries in Turkey were always fighting with Bristol over his attitudes toward the Turkish persecution. He was ignoring it, basically. And he was sending reports back to the State Department that was downplaying the persecution of Christians and killing, especially along the Black Sea and so forth. And Bristol had a group of commanders who commanded the destroyers. And when the problems broke out at Smyrna, it was clear to everybody very rapidly that there was going to be an enormous humanitarian problem at Smyrna. The American Consul General there, George Horton, reported it. Other people reported it. It was very obvious. But Bristol deliberately dragged his feet in terms of making a rescue or at least making a relief operation. He had no desire to save Greeks or Armenians. In fact, when he finally sent destroyers to Smyrna, it was to protect the tobacco warehouses and the tanks of the standard oil company. They sold a lot of kerosene down there. And so he was protecting American property and that was the mission. Now, among the first officers who went down with someone named Arthur J. Hepburn, he was a captain. He was the naval chief of staff for Bristol. And then he was followed by a naval officer, Halsey Powell. And he's a very interesting guy. He's among the most interesting characters in the book. And I really liked learning about Halsey Powell. He was a very independent guy, first of all. Very capable naval officer. He had an instinct for rescue. He had been given high honors by the British government for a rescue that he executed of people who had been aboard a British hospital ship that was sunk by a German U-boat. It was amazing. He was being chased by German submarines and a gale, and he still picked these people up. So he was quite a guy. He got there and he wanted to help. You know, he was always looking for ways to provide relief, to support the relief effort, and he partnered with our hero, Asa Jennings, to eventually remove people from the city. And is he either disobeyed orders or skirted the very edges of his orders from Bristol in order to participate in the evacuation and support Jennings in the rescue of all of these people from Smyrna? I came away from the story with a lot of admiration for Halsey Powell. And he is one of the silver linings in a very dark cloud. You know, as you go through the story, Lou, when you're sharing it as part of the Great Fire, I keep having the idea. It's kind of like when I read in the Bible when the Israelites, when the Hebrew people are going into the area of Canaan, and they go in and they wipe out everyone and kill every woman child and goat right down there. And then in the next chapter, there's always a lot more of them to be killed or God has problems. I had that sense as the fire and the looting and the killing and the pillaging and the rape and all that happens. I'm kind of figuring, there can't be anybody left, but now there's still 150,000 people there. How do they survive? When out on the ships, things are melting. There's people on the cave there who are somehow surviving at much closer proximity to that heat. That's exactly right. And, you know, I have among the many documents that I reviewed for the research are some documents that I had from British officers who were President Smyrna, who assisted the Americans in the loading of refugees onto merchant ships and at the end of September. And they are all marveling at the strength and the perseverance of these old Greek women and Armenian women who have come through this terrible thing. They were tough people, you know, I guess by virtue of having lived that way and survived and so forth. But it really is quite amazing what humanity can survive when it has to. Now, many, many people died and we can't discount that. But those who did survive, they were a very tough and resilient group. And it's interesting to read the commentary from both the American and the British sailors about what a lot of strength that they found among those who survived. The word hysteria gets used a lot among the sailors who described. You know, the women were so, there was so much rape that went on that the many, many of the women along the cave, they were either speechless, they no longer could talk or they were constantly screaming and couldn't be calmed down, many committed suicide. So it was a horrible thing to have lived through. Yeah, those stories are absolutely horrible. Of course, you talk about how bad it is for the women. The issue for the men was that they could just got killed or they got marched away to the interior essentially, which is like being marched off to the concentration camps or to the Gulag or to Siberia. The men got killed, the women only got raped, tortured, and punished in the worst possible ways. That's right. So as bad as was for the women, I don't want to discount what the men had to go through. The women got to survive, at least some of them did, in order to share the story of how bad it was. Yeah, and you know, the men were separated out by age. Basically, anybody over 16 and under 45 or 50 was pulled out and marched out of the city for execution or for labor gangs and then later execution. It was really a horrible situation. In fact, at one point, the Navy officers, the US Navy officers, they can't understand why the numbers of people on the K is getting smaller. And then they realize that the deportations have begun. At that point, they think, geez, you know, we really have to speed this rescue up. Something has to happen rapidly, or there won't be anybody left to rescue. In fact, the Turkish military gave Powell seven days to get everybody out. And if they weren't out in seven days, you know, which seems like an impossible deadline, it was, but he met it. I know we're going to run out of time, Lou, because there is so much rich history and rich experience. And I think lessons for our time in this story, the Great Fire, I do want to get to the silver linings, but first I want to consider a couple of the potential blots on history. You mentioned already oil and tobacco. And when we're dealing with the fact that Admiral Mark Bristol likes to curry favor with, I'd say, likes to treat the Turks as our friends. And he turns blind eye to genocide of Armenians and Greek and Italians, everyone else. Even the English, he seems to have real distaste for. He turns an eye to that because he says it's in the US's interest to have a good relationship with Turkey, because they've got the oil and they've got the tobacco. So if I start favoring these people who are being killed in the genocide, then we're going to lose that privileged position with respect to them. Part of me is absolutely stunned that any person could be so unfeeling. And part of me says, well, that's probably from governmental point of view, a wise decision. How did you react to that kind of calculus? Well, great question. I think that every government must look after its own self-interest, for sure. And it needs to consider the strategic implications of decisions that it makes and so forth. But those decisions need to be balanced by morality and ethics. Now, you know, many people in government, including Morgenthau and George Horton, in our American Consul, down in Smyrna, they did what they could to help American business and American industry in that part of the world. But they didn't do it in such a way that it was so reprehensible. And I think this is what went wrong with Bristol. Bristol not only had a pro-business, pro-oil agenda. He worked that agenda in such a mean-spirited way that were repulsed by it. And, you know, I don't think it needed to be done that way. He certainly could have responded more quickly to the rescue needs and the relief needs at Smyrna without endangering any American self-interest. What he seemed to be doing there is simply kind of getting even with a group of people he didn't like. You know, it was a personal agenda in some ways rather than a national agenda. So, absolutely, you know, a country, the United States included. It needs to look out for its self-interest, but it should not do it in the way that Bristol did it, which is to be callous toward human life and to be willing to do whatever is necessary to get the oil or to get the railroad concessions or the mineral rights and so forth. Maybe that's enough of the dark side. Let's go over to the forest, the good side right now. And I want to talk about a couple of the silver linings. And maybe one that you already mentioned is Aceh Jennings. Early on, he arrives there. He's an employee of the YMCA. And says we tend to think of YMCA as just places where you go to play basketball or work out or something like that for kids programs in towns. That vastly under represents what it was at that time, which is really a revolutionary, a young man's Christian association, where they're serious about what they're doing. It's not just sit at home in small town America at that time. So, it's a very different thing that he's doing there. So, he arrives and he is a minor function area. Most people are ignoring him. And he is not a physically impressive person. As you said, it kind of collapsed spine. And somehow, when things collapse, he turns into Superman. You don't really see it. When he ranges all the safe houses, you get some idea that something's going on. And how is he doing that, this little guy running all around? It's not like he has bulletproof armor on either. He hasn't got anything like that. But then, the part where it really blew my mind is where he ends up essentially kind of scripting all of these Greek merchant vessels and promising the US military protection for them, which he doesn't have, because Bristol certainly is not going to do it. It's counter Bristol's orders in any case. And somehow, he does this turnaround. And pretty soon, some people are calling him Commodore Jennings, which is not a real title for him. But it's amazing. What happened to this man? Well, you know, it's a great question. I don't know that ultimately I can give the absolute answer to it. But I've thought about it a lot, and I looked at his biography and so forth. Looking back on it, Jennings said that he felt a hand of God placed on his shoulder. So what does that mean, really? Jennings was a pious guy. He was cheerful, and he liked to sing and have a good time and so forth. But religion was the center of his life. And he grew up in a religious tradition that stressed service, the so-called social gospel. I think he was a man of great empathy as well. He felt the suffering of others. And I think that empathy of Jennings finally was sort of inflamed when it encountered this just unbelievable suffering. And he was, in a sense, transformed. He decided that he was going to not be a follower and not be somebody who just worked hard for others in carrying out the mission. He was going to take the lead. And that's when he said about, first with the Italian ship captain and then with the Greek battleship captain at Mitalini and then with the Greek government and on and on and on. It was this combination of faith, service, and powerful empathy coming together in a very potent way. Well, it is a really amazing thing that he did. And he certainly couldn't have done it. Had he not been able to essentially recruit the help of a number of people? How's he, Paul, one of them? I kind of see those two as the ringleaders of what goes right at a certain point. One more piece of dirt we need to serve up. And that is about Bristol. Admiral Mark Bristol is doing everything he can to serve his prejudices or maybe his judgments about what's good for the future of the U.S. in the region. He's ignoring his superiors who are sending him cables and saying, "Do this. You must do this." They're giving him explicit orders. And he delays and pretends and ignores and sends them back false information. One of the things I was looking for, because you referred several times in the book to court records or part of the things that you drew up on. I was wondering if at some point he wasn't going to get court marshal or some other such thing. Because he certainly, I mean, I would lay hundreds of thousands of deaths at his feet. Yeah, you know, he never really explicitly paid a price for what he had done. This is intuition on my part and I'm going out on a limb here a little bit. I think Bristol was a very ambitious guy. And, you know, I don't know whether he wanted a political career when he left the Navy or not. But, you know, he spent several more years at Constantinople than he was transferred to China. And then he retired. I don't think he ever achieved the ambition that he had set out for himself. I think there was a sense in Washington that Bristol had overplayed his hand and that his judgment was not to be trusted. Certainly William Phillips, who was the acting secretary of state through this whole period, and who was dealing with Bristol. And first sort of just tolerating him, but then later you can sense Phillips's impatience with Bristol's unwillingness to volunteer anything, to participate in this rescue. And so I think that, again, this is sort of both combination of sort of judgment from the materials as well as intuition. I think finally Washington sort of had Bristol's number, so to speak, and he was not going to achieve whatever great ambition he had had for himself in the Navy or in the world of politics. But you're right, he never received any punishment or reprimand or even a stiff word from the president following what had happened. Well, I think Harding should have given him a big spanking at the very least. You know, Harding didn't want to get involved in all of the things that were happening in Turkey, but Harding was sympathetic. You know, he had concern for what was happening there. He was just unwilling to send the troops in to do anything, and probably in retrospect that was not a bad decision. You know, we should have done more than we had done for sure, I think, as a nation and as a government, but probably sending in the infantry was not the answer. There's another bit of silver lining that I want to illustrate. It surprised me, at a certain point, I think a lot of people are tempted to say, there's no working with them, I just bomb the hell out of them. So one of the things that we encounter throughout the Great Fire in the story of Smyrna back in 1922 is the negotiating that happens. It's like the Turks are controlling the nationalist Turks party. Those folks are controlling the cities, and so if you're going to go in there and do anything, you have to work it out so that you don't get shot. Oh, that's absolutely right. You know, once things had reached the point that they had reached by September 1922, there was no choice but to work with them. They were an occupying army, they were a victorious army, they had essentially pushed the British out. So this is one of the things that Powell seemed to do so well. He seemed to be able to negotiate with the Turks. There also seems to be this kind of respect that they had for him. Powell was a very capable officer, and in his own way he was a tough ombre. And I think that they picked up on that. Here's a competent officer who knows what he's doing, and there seemed to be a respect for that. He seemed to know how far he could push them. One of the things that was quite amazing to me is, and I didn't pick this up from the US records, I picked it up from British records. At one point during the evacuation, the Turks army brought machine guns out onto the pier, and it looked like they were threatening the British ships and the Brits who were helping the Americans in the evacuation. And Powell brings a destroyer, broadside, to the pier, and uncovers the cannons. It makes it clear that he's going to return aggressive action, and the machine guns are taken down, and the evacuation continues. Now, that was a very bold move, and it was something that really wasn't even sanctioned from the president on down. The Navy had been directed no show of force, but Powell in that particular instance, he was the guy on the scene, and he made a decision that this is what he needed to do in order to carry this forward. And I admire that he had confidence in himself when he had to make a decision. And he used the force, or the appearance of force, or his leverage. He used it surgically. Good word. Yes. He didn't go stomping in there and saying, "You're going to do what I'm saying, because I'm the US or any such thing." To me, it echoed a little bit of the evolution that was happening with the formation of the League of Nations, and how we're going to use diplomacy, and how we're going to go tit for tab. We're going to work things out piece by piece, and so sometimes he had to take some really deep swallows and say, "Oh, my God, I hate what I'm seeing, but the alternative is going to be worse, and so I have to sit on my hands here a moment." That would be a horrible position to be in. Right. I think you're very perceptive, and you've put it into language very well. He did seem to be able to do that, and there were times when he had to do things that he really didn't want to do, and he never did anything evil, but he had to work with the Turkish military in order to continue the evacuation. You're absolutely right about that. Let me talk about one more silver lining. Already, we've got so many silver linings, we've got so much history here that it's not all going to fit in this 55-minute broadcast. Folks, you're going to have to go out to nordonspiritradio.org, and you're going to find a whole lot more interesting things that Lou, Uranic, and I have been talking about, but one more silver lining, and that is kind of surprisingly, I'd say, Mustafa Kamal, who is not pictured necessarily as a good guy there, but what comes out of Mustafa Kamal and the Nationalist Party, and the expulsion of all of the Christians, anybody who's not Muslim is out of there. What comes out of that is the Turkish state, and as for Muslim countries, I suppose that's probably one of the ones that the U.S. has most trusted for the last 50 years, that somehow, out of having 100% confidence in themselves, because they're only Muslims there, we got a secular state, which was Muslim, which I think was not one would expected. The Nationalist, therefore, turned it into more caliphate or something like that. But instead, what we get is the most reasonable or modern of, it's the next step in evolution for perhaps a Muslim state. That's the way I'm seeing it. Your comments. I agree with you. You know, one of the things that's really astonishing about Mustafa Kamal was the power of his personality and the strength of his vision. You know, he was really the only person who had this secular vision. The generals around him, the army, they weren't thinking about a secular government. It was Kamal who idolized the French Revolution and the way things operated at some level in Europe. And it was by virtue of his personality and his record of success. You know, he was worshipped as a warrior. He was called a gauzy. You know, it was a term of very high military respect. His reputation, his personality, he was able to impose on Turkey his secular vision. Now, what's interesting to me is we are now beginning to see how many years later now, you know, what, 80, 90 years later, it's beginning to crack. It was a kind of shellac in some ways. You know, he vested this secular idea in the army now in modern Turkey with the new President Erdogan and his party and so forth. We see a kind of nostalgia for automatism and we see the symbols of Islam returning to the public spaces and to the government and so forth. Kamal remains a hero, a demigod in Turkey, but we do see Kamalism kind of fracturing and an older Turkey kind of breaking through. Which is sad news because there was a point I would have said 50 certainly 70, 80 years ago, one could have fully imagined a United Nations across the world that would have included Muslim countries and Christian countries and Jewish and secular countries all working together. And there's been a polarization that's happened over the last particularly 30 years, I would say, certainly since founding of Israel. So my point to anyhow, that surprisingly this conquest by Muslims actually led to a secular state, which was kind of unthinkable in a Muslim country. That's right. And you know, he faced a lot of opposition. I mean, there were riots. He wanted people to take off the Feds and not wear the old Turkish costumes and so forth. He wanted men to wear hats the way they did in Europe. He wanted women to put away the veil and to walk with their husbands on the sidewalks and so forth. This created riots in Turkey. You know, this went down very hard among a lot of people. But Kamal was ruthless in his demand that these reforms be put in place and he saw them through. He didn't moderate in that regard. He insisted on it and he used the power that he had to enforce it. Well, there's much more we could go on to one last question for you, Lou. And of course, as I commented earlier, Victor's write the history books. We all write with a certain prejudice. Prejudice isn't necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes it gets us through a lot of situations when we don't know a lot else. Religiously, spiritually, if you had been a Muslim, would you have written this story differently? Or maybe you are. You haven't actually told me. I'm an Episcopalian and my wife is an Orthodox Christian. And so we sort of alternate between those two churches. I tried to look at this material as a historian or as a journalist. I really wasn't trying to take sides. Of course, I had to assess the material and make judgments and so forth. But I was trying to let the information speak for itself. From time to time, I would ask myself, you know, here's a question. If this were put to a fair-minded jury, how might that jury decide? And that's how I navigated some of these questions. But I didn't set out to write a Christian history of Smyrna or a Turkish history of Smyrna. I just took the values that I have learned as a journalist and as an aspiring historian to tell a true story. And I hope that it's a fair and accurate depiction of what happened at Smyrna in September of 1922. It's such a story, Lou. Again, the book, The Great Fire. One American's mission to rescue victims of the 20th century's first genocide about what happened in that area of Turkey as the Ottoman Empire is changing, morphing, following World War I. History is so rich and you bring it so much to life in this book, Lou. Thank you for doing that and thank you for joining me today for Spirit in Action. Thank you for such a great conversation and some room and time to really talk about these matters. And so, folks, remember go to Nordenspiritradio.org and you can find a link to Lou's site, SmyrnaFire.com. Also, remember that on our site we have some excerpts from this program, stuff we couldn't include in the broadcast. You'll find that at Nordenspiritradio.org and we'll see you next week for Spirit in Action. The theme music for this program is Turning of the World, performed by Sarah Thompson. This Spirit in Action program is an effort of Nordenspiritradio. You can listen to our programs and find links and information about us and our guests on our website, northernspiritradio.org. Thank you for listening. I am your host, Mark Helpsmeet, and I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit. May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light. This is Spirit in Action. ♪ With every voice, with every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ ♪ With every voice, with every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ ♪ And our lives will feel the echo of our healing ♪ You
A glimpse into the horror of one piece of the genocide that took place in Turkey in the early 1900's, The Great Fire, by Lou Ureneck, conveys the dark side and a few strands of silver lining amidst the disaster.