In September 1922, in the land of Troy, arrived a non-romantic “Helen.” Sailing across the Mediterranean by “tramp” steamer, American Dr. Esther Pohl Lovejoy, M.D., landed ashore in a fishing launch, as the “fair-haired” savior of many stranded refugee Armenians and Greeks in Asia Minor, who faced war, disease, and poverty.
A graduate in 1894 of the University of Oregon, Lovejoy was among 7% of the doctors in America who were women. Several led an overseas health effort.
The female doctors were well trained, educated, dedicated caregivers striving for quality health by the American Women’s Hospitals (AWH). Established in 1917 by the Medical Women’s National Association (MWNA), their original mission on the entrenched Western Front was for caring for wounded, gassed, and diseased soldiers.
The Great War was called off in November 1918 via an armistice. Filling in the void were numerous revolutions and mini-wars. The Treaty of Sevres (Aug. 10, 1920) reduced the former Ottoman Empire to Anatolia, except for its western coast, occupied by a Greek expeditionary army in 1919 and also retrenched Greek settlers.
Esther Pohl Lovejoy in an undated photo.
Invigorated by their nationalistic dream of a new Republic of Turkey, the Turks sallied forth, retaking the province of Smyrna, except for the narrow waterfront on the eastern Aegean Sea, including the cosmopolitan city-port of Smyrna. Stranded there were the downtrodden, endangered, innocent, refugee masses of humanity —men, women, children and infants — whose stark countenances, were captured in a myriad of contemporary photographs. Their bleak expressions appealed for aid.
The tragic melodrama, which followed, bequeathed to history the sobriquet, “On the Smyrna Quay.” (Vagabond author Ernest Hemingway was an eyewitness, who wrote “In Our Time,” in 1925 including a chapter entitled, “On the Smyrna Quai.”)
The Greek army — which apparently committed depredations upon Turkish citizens and property — had evacuated the Smyrna Quay on Sept. 8, 1922.
The internecine Greco-Turkish war of 1919-1922 ended. Not the strife. The next day, a Turkish cavalry unit entered the former largely Christian city, “to keep order.” On Sept. 13, Turkish soldiers and officers torched the Greek and Armenian quarters of Smyrna in retaliation for the blinding in one eye of a Turk officer by a bomb-hurling Armenian.
Some 300,000 Greeks and 50,000 Armenians fled the “Great Fire” of Smyrna, which destroyed three-quarters of the once-thriving trade-port. Packed together, they were in a perilous limbo on the Smyrna Quay, wedged between the sea and the city’s smoldering ruins. Smyrna, a “paradisiacal” city of tolerance vanished in smoke.
Smyrna Quay as it appeared in 1897, more than two decades before the city was destroyed by fire.
On the mainland, peace thrived only within the confines of the American Women’s Hospitals. With the close of the internecine Greco-Turkish war of 1919-1922, “men who had fought each other to the death [became] solicitous regarding the welfare of their wounded enemies” while they were confined together under presiding female medical care. Dr. Lovejoy savored the feminine persona in charge of male patients.
“Glancing down the ward, the scene was nearly comical, [as] Turks, Greeks, and Armenians were all hobnobbing together as if they belonged to the same fraternity,” observed Dr. Lovejoy. As “Samaritans,” Dr. Lovejoy and her fellow American women doctors were all gladly accepted by the infirm and interned former male warriors, who graciously surrendered to their angelic caregivers.
Presently, they enjoyed a civilized, peaceful, and sanitary, if charming and convivial environment — when compared to that of the military battlefield. (Was this setting a formula for peace?)
Clad in American-made pajamas, convalescing former Armenian, Greek, and Turkish soldiers, were “looking wistfully out the windows” toward their respective homes in Greece, Anatolia, and Armenia. They perhaps wondered if their families, houses, and crops might miraculously all still be safe. Although a refuge, the AWH was not an Eden, as anguished patients’ minds contemplated an uncertain future.
Isolationism was returning to America by 1920. Woodrow Wilson’s cherished dreams of both a League of Nations membership, as well as, a U.S. trusteeship over Christian Armenia had died. (December 1921 saw Soviet Armenia come into being.)
Refugee children, displaying “prominent abdomens, due to poor diet and malaria, having emaciated, skeletal arms and legs, and also ill-clothed and barefoot,” were treated by the AWH. Along with her personnel, Dr. Lovejoy helped deliver babies, not only inside of the AWH facilities but also on the traumatic Smyrna Quay itself.
Horrific scenes of women being assaulted by the Turkish military were terribly commonplace. Mistaken at first for a refugee, Dr. Lovejoy was gun-butted, with a resulting head wound. But, Lovejoy’s inner “Amazon spirit” helped her to survive.
Smyrna Quay burns after Turkish forces seized the city and burned much of it in ethnic fighting following World War I.
To not lose their place, soon expectant refugee mothers had babies while standing in line. Some clutched dead infants who had perished from exposure and starvation. Premature births also occurred, due to the anxious, pressing, crushing, refugee lines.
The lengthy refugee lines on the Smyrna Quay to pass Turkish inspection before squeezing through narrow gates to 26 awaiting Greek “mercy” vessels, was a quite harrowing gauntlet. (The sailing of these Greek rescue ships was the result of bold blackmail of an unstable Greek government by an American Methodist minister, Asa Jennings, who threatened to broadcast that Athens was abandoning 300,000 Greeks in Smyrna to die.) Turkey agreed upon the evacuation for Sept. 27-Oct. 7.
Refugee males, ages 17 to 45, were forcibly taken from their wives, and children, who futilely clung to them, to be terminally enslaved as hard laborers deep in the Turkish interior. The resilient Dr. Lovejoy persuaded one Turkish officer to allow a young Armenian man to go through a gate with his family onward to freedom.
“Pawing” over the queued refugees, the Turks often absconded with the last of their personal belongings. In the harbor a U.S. destroyer’s searchlights illuminated the Smyrna Quay at night, lessening criminal assaults upon refugees, who quieted.
Named for myrrh, an ancient perfume of the Near East, Smyrna’s air now reeked of stench. Dead animals, including mules, whose forelegs were deliberately broken by the Greek refugees, to preempt Turkish ownership, were forced over the Smyrna Quay to drown. Dead human bodies too, of refugees, whirled in an eddy by the quay.
Hundreds of thousands did successfully evacuate from the “hellhole” Smyrna Quay, during Sept. 17-Oct. 9, 1922. (DD-336 U.S.S. Litchfield and Japanese, Tokei Maru, also humanely took aboard refugees.) They were dumped on the “quarantine islands” of Lesbos, Chios, Crete, and Macronisi,” which were “pestholes.”
In highly overcrowded transit vessels known as “floating hells,” they did not have food or water. On the quarantine islands, they were served mush and water and lived in tents. Medical supplies were accessed in sufficient amounts to treat typhus, typhoid, cholera, pyorrhea, tuberculosis, malaria, trachoma, smallpox, and malnutrition.
Delousing stations and milk stations (for newborns) were set up. In Salonica, 500 babies were born. Ambulances for supine patients were sluggish, ox-drawn carts.
Hundreds of sight-restoring eye surgeries had been performed by AWH doctors. Blind, adult refugees, formed lines, each led by a child to have this God-sent surgery.
Capably led by activist AWH Director, Dr. Lovejoy — who had returned to the United States, to publish articles, books, and also make public addresses — A “Mr. American Dollar” funding campaign stimulated goodwill. Raising relief money was her niche.
“Plague [was] a death-dealing enemy, spreading as a blight, [but] applied science provided an invulnerable defense against disease,” lectured Dr. Lovejoy. By spring 1923, vaccine and soap were at last arriving in quantity at Crete and other AWH establishments in the eastern Mediterranean. There was no U.S. isolationism here.
American Women’s Hospital personnel donned medical masks. “For, who knew what possible airborne diseases lurked both behind and before the mask,” stated Dr. Lovejoy. Apocryphal tales of AWH personnel fleeing their contagious patients were counterbalanced by the actual unceasing, close-up, dedication and steadfastness as AWH doctors and assistants treated the diseased, even though they were unsalaried.
Opera house Golden Horn box seats for the rich, in Athens — the cradle of western democracy — had a new clientele of refugee Greek, families. The meek had come first.
On May 1, 1923, yet another treaty (belatedly) authorized the great “Exchange of Populations,” which had already taken place. (For its part in the exchange, Orthodox Greece banished thousands of its Muslim residents.) The treaty-making amenities of the Lausanne Quay were a far cry from the refugees’ outcry on the Smyrna Quay.
Several humanitarian agencies and organizations had come to the fore. The American Women’s Hospitals, the American Red Cross, the International YMCA, the American Friends’ Service Committee, the American Near East Relief, all in concert, helped to save more than a million lives in post-Great War, Serbia, Bulgaria, Greece, Turkey, Armenia, and South Russia. They galvanized America’s overseas foreign aid.
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Futini is a Napa-based history enthusiast. This is the latest in an occasional series marking the 100th anniversary of the First World War and its world-shaping aftermath.
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