Bristol suggested the newspaper was in league with the Greek government, and he wanted to know why the
Monitor
had not published the findings of his report on the Greek landing at Smyrna. Mrs. Danos had no answer. (As a correspondent, she was not in a position to know. Those decisions were made by her editors.) Annoyed with her, Bristol handed her off to an assistant and noted in his diary, “Mrs. Danos was typical of the races in this part of the country. She is obsequious and cringing and says she wants the truth but she probably couldn’t write the truth if she knew it.”
Afterward, Bristol had lunch at the Constantinople Club with Irving Thomas, who asked Bristol for a ride to Smyrna to check on Standard Oil’s property. A ride on a destroyer was a courtesy Bristol was happy to provide, and he suggested to Thomas that he go on the
Edsall,
which was leaving that afternoon. But when Bristol learned by radio later in the afternoon that the
Lawrence,
unexpectedly, was on its way back to Constantinople, bringing Merrill and his report on Horton’s leak to the press, Bristol delayed the
Edsall
’s departure. This information would have to come first. He and Thomas went down to Therapia at day’s end, had a big dinner, and waited up late for Merrill. The
Lawrence
arrived after midnight, and Merrill made the trip to Therapia by navy launch. Aboard the
Scorpion,
Merrill described the situation in Smyrna as stable and related the story of Horton’s attempt to focus press attention on Turkish cruelty by leaking information to Brown, the Chicago reporter. The three of them talked into the early hours of the morning. It now became imperative that Bristol not only maintain control of the narrative of Smyrna as the result of Greek and British fecklessness; he needed to do something about Horton, who obviously was intent on undermining him.
Merrill and Thomas were up early in the morning, September 13, and met the
Edsall,
which departed at 7
A
.
M
. for Smyrna with Merrill, Thomas, three other Standard Oil managers, and flour and bread. But first, they would steam north to Salonika, where Standard Oil had a facility. There was no hurry.
Back at work that morning, Bristol took the occasion of another British request for the Americans to help the refugees, this time from a British army commander, to send another cable to Washington thrumming
his favorite theme. Bristol wrote: “Allies and Greeks seemingly shirking all responsibility and assuming we will handle entire situation.” Bristol knew this was not entirely accurate: Three days earlier, a cable from the Greek patriarch in Constantinople to Jaquith in Smyrna passed through Bristol’s hands. It reported that the Greek patriarch was asking Near East Relief to help pay for coal to send the steamship
New York
to rescue refugees at Smyrna. Bristol described Rumbold’s request for American aid for the refugees and the more recent British request. “I informed him (the British officer) very frankly that I considered it [the] duty of Allies and Greeks to undertake this work, and when he stated no British organization existed for this purpose I told him it was time one was formed and that a short time ago we had not any either.”
This of course was not true—private American relief agencies had been providing relief for years. Bristol also reported to Washington, “Generally speaking conduct of Turkish troops of occupation extraordinarily good, discipline perfect . . .”
Bristol ended September 13, the day of the fire, with some pleasant exercise at Therapia: “In the late afternoon I took part in a Tennis Tournament at the French Embassy. I played a match which was very amusing. Madame Arlotta, wife of the Italian Counsellor of the High Commission, and myself played against General Pelle and his wife. They won the match and it required three sets to determine it.”
I
n 1904, when he graduated from the Naval Academy, Halsey Powell had made a reputation among his fellow midshipmen as “a fine soldierly lad of real old blue-grass stock.” Slightly built with freckles and alert brown eyes under gracefully arched, even feminine, eyebrows, Powell was descended from Kentucky pioneers. One of his forbearers had entered the Kentucky territory before Daniel Boone. The men in his family had fought in the Indian wars, the American Revolution, the War of 1812, and the Civil War. John West Powell, his father, a Union army officer and slave owner, was a doctor-turned-planter with 550 acres of sweet Kentucky farmland in McAfee, thirty miles southwest of Lexington. The senior Powell married twice; his second wife was Halsey’s mother, Margaret Halsey Powell. She too was Kentucky pioneer stock.
McAfee was a place of gently rolling farms that naturally grew the smooth meadow grass whose flower pods turned blue in late summer. As a boy, Halsey would have stepped out the door of the family’s white-frame farmhouse and seen “bluegrass” pastures enclosed by rough plank fences and fields of tobacco and corn. The nearest neighbors, a half mile away, were the Dunns, the family of his father’s first wife, in their Greek revival plantation house, Lone Pine. Halsey lived in the woods and fields of Mercer County—hunting fox or raccoon and fishing in the nearby Salt River. Young Halsey grew up as the son of a prosperous and
aristocratic family in a place where racial lines were strictly observed but where river trade with northern and southern states had created an atmosphere that was neither Democratic Deep South nor Republican North. Mercer County had its racial haters, but it also had men and women of broader views, and it had come through the Reconstruction period following the Civil War without the hard-edged resistance to slavery’s abolition shown by its Confederate neighbors. Halsey’s father possessed a reputation as intellectual and courteous. He was a gentleman in a place that reared gentlemen. Halsey’s older sister went to Vassar College. The uncannily prophetic letter his mother’s uncle sent her upon Halsey’s birth shows the sort of family that Halsey came from: “This my hope and prayer that your son may be worthy of both his parents; that he may be heir to the best qualities of the best of the Halseys and Powells combined; that he may be healthy, strong, good, brave and generous; that he may be a lover of truth, a friend to the unfortunate, a defender of the oppressed, and a strong friend of his country in war and peace . . . and that he may leave a good record of himself as citizen, a patriot and a Christian.”
And so he was stamped as a young man. He emerged from his boyhood at Dunlora, as the family plantation was called, with a strong sense of duty and an impulse toward helping others—and ultimately a choice of career that would provide him opportunities for both.
From the beginning, Halsey was bright and independent. At seventeen, he went off to Centre College, a Presbyterian School in nearby Danville, where he won the entrance prize for the highest score on the admission tests in English, Latin, Greek, and mathematics. The next year, he entered the Naval Academy, where he was successful in his course work and sports and well liked by his fellow cadets. (One of whom was his cousin, through his mother, William “Bull” Halsey, who would go on to command the Pacific Fleet in World War II.) Halsey was comfortable with himself, and this made others comfortable with the athletic young Kentuckian who friends called “Tuck.”
In his first fifteen years of naval service, Powell logged only eleven months of shore duty. As an ensign in 1908, he joined the USS
Yankton
and the around-the-world cruise of America’s Great White Fleet, dispatched
by President Theodore Roosevelt to demonstrate America’s new sea power. (The
Yankton
was a converted double-masted steam yacht that had once belonged to the French actress Sarah Bernhardt.) In December 1908, a giant earthquake struck Sicily, killing 125,000 people. The fleet was in Egypt, and the
Yankton
steamed to Italy, where Powell got his first taste of rescue work, digging survivors from the rubble. In 1914, the navy assigned him to command the destroyer USS
Reid,
an event brought about by the American occupation of Vera Cruz during the Mexican revolution—an act of gunboat diplomacy, which had been triggered by threats to an American oil-drilling district around Tampico, Mexico, and further escalated by worries about a German arms shipment to Mexico’s dictator, Victoriano Huerta. Before the incident was over, seventy American warships were in Mexican waters. (Many of the officers at Smyrna had served there, including Bristol. It was a formative experience for a generation of naval officers.) Mexican oil had become crucial to the American economy—drilled in Tampico, refined in Texas, and consumed by factories in the Northeast. President Wilson had taken no chances on an interruption of its flow. Halsey Powell was thirty-one when America put marines ashore at Vera Cruz and he got a close look at the navy’s role in protecting American commercial interests in a foreign country—not the last time in his career.
Several commands followed the
Reid,
and in 1916, Powell was assigned to command the USS
Jouett,
another destroyer, which was at the Naval Shipyard in Norfolk, Virginia. By then, Norfolk was already a navy town, though the giant naval station at Sewall’s Point had yet to be built. For naval officers stationed in Norfolk, there was a lively social life ashore of dances and parties at country clubs and the homes of its leading residents. Halsey met Virginia Perkins, the daughter of a prominent Norfolk doctor, and they were married in June 1916 in her father’s home on York Street, a gracious but eccentric wood-frame home with a turret. Virginia’s family was present for the simple ceremony. Halsey was granted twenty-five days’ leave, and he and Ginger, as he called his bride, traveled to Hot Springs, Virginia, for a honeymoon, then to McAfee, where Halsey showed her Dunlora, and she met his family.
When they returned to Norfolk, Halsey resumed his command of
the
Jouett,
and they lived in the big house on York Street. The following June, three months after the United States had declared war on Germany, Lieutenant Commander Halsey Powell was sent to Europe as commander of the USS
Parker,
another destroyer. Ginger remained at Norfolk. The
Parker
was assigned to protect troop convoys against German submarines. On August 3, Powell’s thirty-fourth birthday, the
Parker
engaged and damaged a German submarine, an action that won him the Navy’s Distinguished Service Medal. A year later, he and the crew of the
Parker
staged a hazardous rescue of survivors of a British hospital ship, HMHS
Glencart Castle,
that had been sunk by a German sub. The rescue was a display of seamanship and courage in rough seas and gale-force winds that brought Powell praise in the British Parliament and a letter of commendation from the assistant secretary of the navy, Franklin D. Roosevelt. (Many years later as the nation’s president, Roosevelt would remember the bold young officer with an important and much bigger reward—a promotion to rear admiral.)
After the war, Powell returned to the United States, and he and Ginger visited his parents again in McAfee—he would be drawn back to the Kentucky countryside throughout his life. Then, with new orders, the Powells traveled to Newport, Rhode Island, and the Naval War College, where Halsey became an instructor, mostly marking up the correspondence course exams of officers who were far from Newport. The Powells rented a small wood-shingled cottage in nearby Jamestown, a pleasant small town amid old New England farms with a view of Newport and upper Narragansett Bay. Halsey planted a garden and commuted on a ferry to the War College across the bay. At Jamestown, trouble entered the couple’s happy life with the slow deterioration of Ginger’s health. She had an undiagnosed wasting disease and lost a dangerous amount of weight. In April, Halsey sent a note to his mother that Ginger was down to one hundred and six pounds. In September 1920, she grew more desperately ill and slipped into a coma. She died in Rhode Island on September 22, 1920. She was twenty-eight years old; they had been married only four years. Halsey traveled with her body back to Norfolk, where she was buried. His sister Mary joined him there, at the house on York Street, caring for him during his grief.
Powell soon left Newport and returned to sea, and in June 1922 he took command of the USS
Edsall,
which was assigned to steam to Constantinople. He was thirty-nine years old. The
Edsall
was identical to the other “flushdeckers” in the Turkish detachment—the
Litchfield, Simpson, Lawrence,
and
MacLeish
. Like the other destroyer commanders working under Admiral Bristol, Powell patrolled the waters of the eastern Mediterranean and Black Sea, ferried oil and tobacco executives around the Near East, and supported the American famine-relief effort in southern Russia.
But unlike others, Powell was a genuine war hero—a boast not even Bristol could make. In looking back for an explanation of his future conduct at Smyrna, the status that his war record had conferred on him might offer a clue. Maybe it gave Powell the confidence to operate from a sense of right and wrong without the blurring considerations of rank or career. The scant record that he has left—crisply written naval reports and detailed ship’s diaries that show not the slightest turn of self-aggrandizement—suggests a man who was supremely capable on the bridge of a ship or in its engine room. He took his own counsel. Surely that had been the case, during World War I, when he had picked up the distress signal from the
Glencart Castle
and steamed to its last-known position and circled the survivors clinging to debris in high seas and a February gale, always moving his ship to avoid German submarines, while he sent five of his crew overboard to make the rescue. His report back to the navy was brief and without adornment or drama. It said, essentially, the
Parker
answered a distress call and rescued eight men from the sea. Nonetheless, so daring had the operation been that members of Parliament had sought an adequate way to acknowledge the American commander and his crew. He received Britain’s Distinguished Service Order cross.
IN AUGUST 1922
, Powell took the
Edsall
to several ports on the Black Sea. He called on Varna, Bulgaria, where Standard Oil had a terminal and American tobacco agents bought tobacco leaf, and Novorossisk, Russia, another Standard Oil depot, where he picked up Miller Joblin of the
Standard Oil Co. And then the ship made a clockwise cruise of the Black Sea, stopping at Batoum, the port from which Russian oil from Baku was shipped, then to Trebizond, on the north coast of Turkey, where an American destroyer was often positioned to watch the port, important to American tobacco companies. In that last week of August, it became clear to Powell that something big was afoot inside Turkey. He was denied permission to land at Trebizond. The
Edsall
then moved west to Samsun, another Turkish Black Sea port.
He would soon learn that the nationalist army, opening its offensive against the Greeks at Afyon Karahisar, had closed the country’s northern frontier, including Trebizond and Samsun. From the
Edsall
’s deck at Samsun, Powell, with his officers and crew, watched the city celebrate the nationalist advance with fireworks, a parade, and machine gun and artillery fire, some that came too close to the
Edsall
for Powell’s comfort. He demanded the shellfire near his ship immediately cease. The Turkish battery complied.
After three days of waiting, the Turkish military governor allowed Powell to come ashore, and he learned that the nationalist army had advanced as far as Ushak. A Turkish officer showed him nationalist communiqués that alleged Greek army atrocities in the line of its retreat. Powell made an inspection of the city, toured the Near East Relief orphanage and hospital, met the Turkish governor, and went pheasant hunting with two Americans in the city. During the day afield, Powell upheld Kentucky’s reputation for producing marksmen: the day’s bag was twelve birds. Powell had a navy commendation for small-arms proficiency. (McAfee, Kentucky, is only a short ride from Pall Mall, Tennessee, home to Sergeant Alvin York, the most famous marksman of World War I.)
The
Edsall
departed Samsun on September 7 (a day after the
Litchfield,
the first of the American destroyers, had arrived in Smyrna) and, delayed by a broken steering cable, arrived in Constantinople late the next day at the Standard Oil docks where it took on 104,000 gallons of bunker oil. On September 9, the
Edsall
moved to the buoy opposite Dolma Bahtche palace, and on September 10 it steamed fifty-five minutes to Prinkipo Island, one of Bristol’s favorite destinations for recreation.
The ship loitered at Prinkipo on Sunday, September 10 (the day Kemal entered Smyrna), as Bristol and a party of eighteen, walking and riding on mules, went on a picnic and climbed to the picturesque St. George Byzantine-Greek Monastery. By his own account, Bristol enjoyed the day, though he was disgusted with a Greek priest who had related the legend of an ancient priest who had been directed in a dream to discover a lost icon on the island. Bristol bristled at anything Greek: “It makes you rather angry,” he noted in his diary, “to have these Greek priests tell you such stories with a straight face and think you are fool enough to believe it.”
The next morning, the
Edsall
ferried Bristol and his group on the short trip back to Constantinople, took aboard flour and stores from the Near East Relief pier, then, early on September 13, headed to Smyrna, by way of Salonika, with Merrill and the Standard Oil men aboard.
After getting Hepburn’s urgent radio message early in the morning of September 14, as the fire raged at Smyrna, Powell increased the
Edsall
’s engine speed and arrived in the city at 6
A
.
M
. By then, Hepburn had already made his decision to send the refugees he had on board the
Litchfield
to Salonika. The
Edsall
came alongside, unloaded flour and bread, and took aboard the
Litchfield
’s 671 refugees as well as Mark Prentiss, the publicist from New York, Dr. Post, and nurse Sara Corning. They departed for Salonika at 8
A
.
M
. A careful record keeper, Powell noted the ethnicity of his bedraggled passengers: 500 Greeks, 170 Armenians, and one Jew. The refugees were crammed on the narrow deck of the ship. Powell had his men string lines fore and aft along the ship’s rails and stationed sailors at the lines to make sure none of the children went overboard. “During the trip,” he noted in the ship’s diary, “the refugees were easily handled, obedient to instructions and caution about keeping back from the rail, and about keeping their children off the forecastle.” He gave them two meals at sea—the first food many of them had eaten in days.