Plate 1: Rear Admiral Mark Bristol (www.destroyerhistory.org)
Sam Topalidis (2026)
(Pontic Historian and Ethnologist)
Introduction
Mark Lambert Bristol (1868–1939, Plate 1) graduated from the United States Naval Academy in 1887. In 1898, he was a lieutenant on the USS Texas. From 1901 to 1903 he was aide to the Commander-in-Chief North Atlantic Fleet.1 From 1911 to 1913, he commanded the light cruiser Albany in China waters. When the United States entered World War I (April 1917), Bristol was commanding officer of the USS North Carolina, convoying troops to Europe. In 1918, he was promoted to the temporary rank of Rear Admiral. He was commander of the USS Oklahoma and then as commandant of the Plymouth base. After World War 1, the Ottoman Turk regime had collapsed and in Anatolia, the Allied powers sent troops and ships to protect their nationals. From 1919 to 1927, he served as the United States’ High Commissioner in Turkey. In 1921, he was promoted to Rear Admiral. In 1927, he was commander in chief of the Asiatic fleet. Mark Bristol returned to the United States in 1929 to the General Board at the Navy until his retirement in 1932 (www.nytimes.com/1939/05/14/archives) (www.destroyerhistory.org).
Posting in Anatolia
In his 29 May 1920 report from Istanbul to the US State Department, Bristol stated that Soviet war materials were landing at Anatolian ports on the Black Sea coast for Mustafa Kemal’s Nationalists. In September, he also reported that large quantities of rifles, ammunition and field guns were still being landed for Kemal’s army. French and Italian ships were also unloading heavy guns and ammunition at Samsun (Anatolian north coast; Fig. 1). On several occasions, US destroyer captains reported seeing Bolshevik gold being handed over to Kemal’s representatives (Patterson 1986:83–84). All these arms and gold would have been invaluable to Kemal’s armies during the Greco-Turkish War (1919–1922) in western Anatolia.
Fig. 1: North and central Türkiye (Istanbul to Samsun = 620 km, Google maps)
At Samsun, American missionary and the Near East Relief (NER)2 stations were located and two substantial American tobacco companies were also doing business. To support American interests, at least one American destroyer was anchored off this port from May 1921 through to the fall of 1922. It was through Bristol’s efforts that harmonious relations were established between the United States and Turkey. He became more sympathetic to the Turks than to Turkey’s Christian peoples despite the terrible sufferings of the latter groups during World War I and then under Mustafa Kemal’s Nationalists (Shenk and Koktzoglou (2020:34, 37); www.nytimes.com/1939/05/14/archives/.
On 17 June 1921, it was reported that some 3,000 draft-age Greek men from Samsun, including workers from the American tobacco companies were deported inland. Roughly half of these deportees were massacred around 50 km south-west of Samsun (Shenk and Koktzoglou 2020:77).
On 18 July 1921, it was Commander Arthur Leroy Bristol on USS Overton at Samsun who courageously sent a strong message to Rear Admiral Mark Bristol (no relation) that probably moved the Rear Admiral to telegram Mustafa Kemal and to protest the ordered deportations of Samsun’s Greek women, children and old men.3 Such a major protest from America [temporarily]4 halted the deportation of as many as 10,000 Greek residents of Samsun itself as virtually all of the Greek men of Samsun had already been deported or sent to labour battalions, been killed, or had joined Greek guerrilla groups (Shenk and Koktzoglou 2020:54).
In late March 1922, Forest Yowell and medical doctor Mark Ward, the directors of the NER organisation at Harput (in eastern Anatolia) explained to the US consul at Aleppo (in modern Syria) that they had seen deportation miseries. Some 20,000 Greeks had come through Harput, two thirds of whom were women and children. Yowell and Ward had carefully estimated some 14,000 people had died somewhere along the deportation routes, primarily from starvation, exposure or disease. Turkish authorities in Harput had been frank in their intentions to have all the Greeks die. From reports that reached him, Ward would later conservatively estimate that 100,000 Greeks had been driven out of their villages towards the south or east (Shenk 2012:113).
In early May 1922, Ward and Yowell met Rear Admiral Mark Bristol in Istanbul and let him know they would speak out about what they had seen. Bristol advised them against publishing anything. A report of Yowell’s story was published in The Times (of London) on 6 May. This provoked alarm and dismay in both America and Britain. Bristol was furious. The US State Department kept Yowell’s statements mostly out of the American press, but it did get into The Christian Science Monitor newspaper from Boston (Shenk 2012:114–115).
In March 1921, the American Anatolian College at Merzifon (just over 100 km south-west of Samsun; Fig. 1) was closed by the Turks, because of its [falsely] reputed connection of the Pontos Club [a Greek literary and athletic organisation] with revolutionary activity. In July 1922, Don Hosford (from the Anatolian College) explained to Bristol in person that he knew the students and the leaders of the Pontos Club and had attended some of its meetings and found them innocuous.5 Nevertheless, to Hosford’s considerable frustration, despite having ‘absolutely no proof’ Bristol stubbornly insisted that revolutionary activity had indeed been taking place at the American College (Shenk 2012:95).
A year after the July 1921 massacres at Merzifon, Carl Compton (from the Anatolian College) also called on Rear Admiral Bristol to inform him of the massacres at Merzifon, but found Bristol reluctant to believe him (McGrew 2015:170). (Note 1.)
After the defeat of the Greek army in western Anatolia in late August 1922 (during the Greco-Turkish War) Mustafa Kemal began forcing Christians out of Anatolia. During the exodus of Christians from northern Anatolia, American officers on gunboats off the coast often helped facilitate embarkations, arranging refugees’ passage aboard Greek, British, Russian and Turkish steamships. ‘American naval captains might have shuttled refugees themselves, but Bristol forbad this’ (Morris and Ze’evi 2019:463).
What to make of Rear Admiral Mark Bristol?
Rear Admiral Mark Bristol would become an extremely controversial character connected to the defeat of the Greeks in the 1919–1922 Greco-Turkish War and the exodus of hundreds of thousands more from Anatolia. American destroyers in Smyrna harbour (Izmir in Fig. 1, in western Anatolia) at the time of the huge fire [started by the Turks] in early September 1922, were instructed by Bristol not to intervene. Fortunately, there were American sailors and missionaries who ignored Bristol's orders and worked to evacuate a significant number of Christians to Greece. Rear Admiral Bristol hardly kept his biased views hidden as he told The New York Times in 1922, ‘I hate the Greeks, I hate the Armenians, I hate the Jews. The Turks are fine fellows’ (https://britishempire.co.uk/article/plymouth/markbristol.htm).
Opponents of Rear Admiral Bristol included missionaries, some members of the NER organisation, influential American historians, diplomats and Armenian and Greek lobbies in the USA. An overwhelming majority of the American press also did not share Bristol’s views. The American public was also against the Turks as they heard about their atrocities committed on the Armenians (Özoğlu 2021:27).
Rear Admiral Mark Bristol is generally treated as a hero by Turkish historians. He suppressed accounts which showed Turks in a bad light. Despite his prejudices, the Rear Admiral supported relief to the Anatolian Christians during their exodus from Turkey and following their arrival in Greece, as long as they did not engage in ‘anti-Turkish’ propaganda (Clark 2006:136).
Note 1
When the Greeks of Merzifon were made aware that Topal Osman [a notorious Turk from Giresun who with his followers were responsible for many atrocities in Pontos] was coming to their town many fled to the mountains (Fotiadis 2019:400). A massacre of Christians in Merzifon began on 23–24 July 1921 when Topal Osman and his brigands rode into town. They spent four days pillaging and killing. This carnage was followed by several days of murder at the hands of local Turks, assisted by gendarmes and troops. Hundreds of Greeks and Armenians from the town fled for protection to the Anatolian College at the Merzifon campus (Morris and Ze’evi 2019:412).
The governor of the province arrived in Merzifon and put a stop to Topal Osman’s killings. Topal Osman’s actions were reported to Ankara, whereupon he was ordered to proceed to Ankara (Shenk and Koktzoglou 2020:229). Topal Osman then came to the Anatolian College at Merzifon and requested to be driven to the next town. Don Hosford drove him and that same evening Hosford and the truck returned safely (Compton 2008:94). Hosford summarised the massacres at Merzifon as follows:
… there was no distinction in the treatment between Greeks and Armenians. From a Christian population of 2,000 to 2,500, almost all the men were killed. Women and children were also killed, in all upwards of 700. All [the remaining] Greeks were deported. About 700 Armenians were left in the town … Every Christian house was looted and 400 houses were burned. ... Repeated tales of the utmost cruelty were borne to us, such as the burning of churches with Greeks inside (Meichanetsidis 2015:133).
Acknowledgements
I wish to thank Michael Bennett for his comments to an earlier draft.
1. The author is unaware of his activities from 1903 to 1911.
2. The NER was an American organisation which aided victims of the Ottoman empire, specifically Armenians, Greeks and Assyrians during the genocide.
3. Arthur Bristol was soon detached from USS Overton in August 1921. Was this a co-incidence? Probably not.
4. Words within brackets ‘[ ]’ within a reference are the author’s words.
5. See https://pontosworld.com/index.php/history/sam-topalidis/813-the-american-protestant-mission-at-merzifon-pontos
References
Clark B (2006) Twice a stranger: how mass expulsion forged modern Greece and Turkey, Granta Books, London.
Compton CC (2008) The Morning Cometh: 45 years with Anatolia College, supplemented by Carl Compton’s UNRRA Letters to his wife Ruth, reproduced in 2002, The Board of Trustees of Anatolia College, Thessaloniki, Greece.
Fotiadis KE (2019) The genocide of the Pontian Greeks, (unknown translator into English), KE Fotiadis, (unknown place of publication).
McGrew W (2015) Educating across cultures: Anatolia College in Turkey and Greece, Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, Maryland, USA.
Meichanetsidis VTh (2015) ‘The genocide of the Greeks of the Ottoman empire, 1913–1923: a comprehensive overview’, Genocide Studies International, 9(1):104–173.
Morris B and Ze’evi D (2019) The thirty-year genocide: Turkey’s destruction of its Christian minorities 1894–1924, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.
Özoğlu H (2021) The decline of the Ottoman empire and the rise of the Turkish Republic: observations of an American diplomat, 1919–1927, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, Scotland.
Patterson DW (1986) Admiral Mark L. Bristol and American Naval involvement in Turkey, 1919–1923, MA Thesis, Old Dominion University, Norfolk, Virginia, USA.
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Shenk R and Koktzoglou S (eds) (2020) The Greek genocide in American naval war diaries: naval commanders report and protest death marches and massacres in Turkey’s Pontus region, 1921–1922, University of New Orleans Press, USA.