Robert Shenk - Americas Black Sea Fleet: The U.S. Navy Amidst War and Revolution, 1919-1923

AMERICAS

BLACK SEA

FLEET

This book has been brought to publication with the generous assistance of Marguerite and Gerry Lenfest.

Naval Institute Press
291 Wood Road
Annapolis, MD 21402

2012 by Robert Shenk

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Shenk, Robert, 1943-

Americas Black Sea fleet : the U.S. Navy amidst war and revolution, 1919-1923 / Robert Shenk.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-61251-302-7 (hbk. : alk. paper) 1. Black Sea RegionHistory, Naval20th century. 2. United States. NavyForeign serviceTurkey. 3. United States. NavyForeign serviceBlack Sea. 4. United States. NavyHistory20th century. 5. United StatesHistory, Naval20th century. 6. TurkeyHistory, Naval20th century. I. Shenk, Robert, 1943- II. Title.

DJK66.S54 2012

359.009730918229dc23

2012028104

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 129 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

First printing

AGAIN, TO PAULA

Not even a little chantey survives to tell of the children
carried in the arms of American sailors.

William Ellis

Maps

Illustrations

I t was while we were writing our biography of Admiral Dan Gallery that my friend, Herb Gilliland, discovered the admirals youthful diaries in the stacks of Special Collections at the Naval Academy. When I read those colorful accounts of Gallerys first four years of commissioned service, I became intrigued by the young officers description of his six-month tour of duty at Constantinople in 192223, this while serving aboard the old armored cruiser Pittsburgh. Clearly, most Navy people relished the uproarious highlife of Constantinoples European quarter, despite some of them having just witnessed enormous human tragedies only a couple of hours cruise away. Fascinated, I began looking into why America had sent that very small fleet to its four-year home in the Bosporus Strait to begin with.

Shortly I came across Marjorie Housepian Dobkins fine book on the burning of Smyrna, published in 1971. The story of Smyrna that she narrated was a very gripping one, resulting in the deaths of many tens of thousands and miseries beyond imagination. However, a successful evacuation of nearly 200,000 ethnic Greek and Armenian refugees did result, accomplished through the able coordination of the officers and men of the American destroyers in the harbor, even if, at one crucial point, an American civilian (rather than a naval officer) had to take the lead. I discovered in Dobkins account that an American Navy shore patrol of several dozen men along with a civilian relief team sent by the admiral had been ashore in the city before and after the fireand that the American relief team was the only one operating ashore.

I soon visited Dobkin in New York. Not only her encouragement but also her example of successfully searching for naval accounts beyond official reports were especially important in an early stage of this project. Her example would stimulate me to similar efforts.

However, in the beginnings of my research, I soon discovered that the Smyrna catastrophe was only one among several great humanitarian crises, tragedies, and atrocities that confronted the Bosporus-based American naval detachment in its four short years. A final evacuation of some 150,000 White Russians from the Crimea to Constantinople, this followed by a great famine in southern Russia, were late spinoffs from the Russian Revolution, for example, to which American naval vessels and naval personnel ably responded. About the same time, events were occurring deep in Anatolian Turkey (in the region known as the Pontus) that resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent Turkish minorities (chiefly ethnic Greeks). In the latter instance, two American destroyer captains recognized that they were witnessing something very terrible indeed and made fervent pleas for their admirals intervention. Since the Navy detachment commander, Adm. Mark Bristol, was not entirely willing to entertain this viewpoint, both of these officers risked their careers by doing so.

Increasingly, it seemed to me that someone ought to consider Americas Black Sea navy at book length. After all, the experience of the Black Sea Express (as Admiral Bristols small group of destroyers were sometimes called, in imitation of the famous trans-European train Orient Express) was in several ways similar to that of the Yangtze Patrol that America had maintained in China for decades, this in roughly the same period, though on the other side of the globe. I had studied the Yangtze Patrol in my work with the papers of Richard McKenna, author of the fine novel The Sand Pebbles. Moreover, as the great majority of the ships that served then in Admiral Bristols small fleet were destroyers (specifically, the type of destroyer called four-pipers or flushdeckers), it was perhaps not unimportant that I had once been a destroyer sailor myself. So, while I knew I certainly was not a novelist, and although I was a literature specialist rather than a historian (no doubt I write with more appetite for the sea story and colorful detail than some historians would appreciate), eventually I considered that I might be able to portray well the various events that took place in that long-forgotten age.

Having decided to write a book with this specific focus, I knew that it would have to include historical and political background and other discussion that reached beyond a narrow operational treatment.

One reason for a wider viewpoint than one might find in other naval histories is that early on in his assignment to Turkey, Admiral Bristol became Americas chief diplomat as well as the senior naval officer in the very large region under his cognizance (virtually all of what was then known as the Near Eastor what we now call the Middle Eastand southern Russia, too). Therefore, not only did Bristol head up a small diplomatic team in Constantinople in addition to his naval staff, but his ship captains also were rightly regarded as the admirals and Americas representatives in most of the Turkish, Russian, and other foreign ports they visited.

As for the admirals work at the embassy, virtually every prominent American visitor sooner or later called on Bristol, who frequently helped them in one way or another, although at the same time he did his best to correct their points of view. Beyond that, Bristol was always interacting both with Europeans and Turks in important ways (both Turks in the sultans pay, and, increasingly, those with Nationalist sympathies). Bristol also met with American and other journalists (including soon-to-be famous American novelists John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway) whenever he could and fed them suggested storylines that might promote his agenda. I have not hesitated to listen to these correspondents and report their opinions and descriptions when it seemed particularly helpful to do so. To a lesser extent, I also often cite the opinions and writings of American relief workers, educators, businessmen, and missionaries, for the Navy people were always interacting with the other Americans in the region, and it is in some ways artificial to separate them.