Responsibility for the burning of Smyrna

The question of who was responsible for starting the burning of Smyrna continues to be debated, with Turkish sources mostly attributing responsibility to Greeks or Armenians, and vice versa. Other sources, on the other hand, suggest that at the very least, Turkish inactivity played a significant part on the event. However, the majority of non-Turkish researchers agree that the fire was caused by Turkish soldiers in order to completely eradicate the Christian presence in Anatolia.
George Horton was the U.S. Consul General of Smyrna; an anti-Turkish sentiment is explicit in his writings. He was compelled to evacuate Smyrna on 13 September, and arrived in Athens on 14 September. In 1926, he published his own account of what happened in Smyrna, titled The Blight of Asia. He included testimonies from a number of eyewitnesses, and quoted a number of contemporary scholars.
Horton's account states that the last of the Greek soldiers had abandoned Smyrna during the evening of 8 September, since it was known in advance that Turkish soldiers would arrive on 9 September. He said that Turkish soldiers set the fire on 13 September:
The Turkish soldiers first cleared the Armenian quarter, and then torched a number of houses simultaneously behind the American Intercollegiate Institute. They waited for the wind to blow in the right direction, away from the homes of the Muslim population, before starting the fire. This report is backed up by the eyewitness testimony of Miss Minnie Mills, the dean of the Intercollegiate Institute:
This was confirmed by the eyewitness report of Mrs King Birge, the wife of an American missionary, who viewed events from the tower of the American College at Paradise:
Horton quoted contemporary scholars within his account, including the historian William Stearns Davis: "The Turks drove straight onward to Smyrna, which they took (9 September 1922) and then burned." Also, Sir Valentine Chirol, lecturer at the University of Chicago: "After the Turks had smashed the Greek armies they turned the essentially Greek city (Smyrna) into an ash heap as proof of their victory."
The following is an abridged summary of notable events in the destruction of Smyrna described in Horton's account:
Charles Dobson, an Anglican chaplain in Smyrna, was convinced that the Turks started the fire. He wrote multiple reports stating this belief in response to Turkish denial of responsibility.
Winston Churchill, future Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, then-Secretary of State for the Colonies, wrote in 1929: "Mustapha Kemal's Army...celebrated their triumph by the burning of Smyrna to ashes and by a vast massacre of its Christian population".
One of the witnesses in Marjorie Housepian Dobkin's account was the American industrial engineer Mark Prentiss, a foreign trade specialist in Smyrna, who was also acting as a freelance correspondent for the New York Times. He was an eyewitness to many of the events which occurred in Smyrna. He was initially quoted in The New York Times as putting the blame on the Turkish military. Prentiss arrived in Smyrna 8 September 1922, one day before the Turkish Army marched into Smyrna. He was a special representative of the Near East Relief (an American charity organization whose purpose was to watch over and protect Armenians during the war). He arrived on the destroyer USS Lawrence, under the command of Captain Wolleson. His superior was Rear Admiral Mark Lambert Bristol, U.S. High Commissioner to the Ottoman Empire from 1919 to 1927, present in Constantinople. Bristol was intent on securing economic concessions for the United States from Turkey and made a concerted effort to prevent any news report to appear to show any favor to the Armenians or Greeks. He once remarked that "I hate the Greeks. I hate the Armenians and I hate the Jews. The Turks are fine fellows."
The former American vice-consul to Persia was so incensed by Bristol's efforts to stifle news coming out of Smyrna, that he took out an op-ed in New York Times to write, "The United States cannot afford to have its fair name besmirched and befouled by allowing such a man to speak for the American soul and conscience."
Prentiss' initial published statements were as follows:
Critics of Prentiss point out that Prentiss changed his story, giving two very different statements of events at different times. Initially, Prentiss had cabled his account, which was printed in The New York Times on 18 September 1922 as "Eyewitness Story of Smyrna's Horror; 200,000 Victims of Turks and Flames". Upon his return to the United States, he was pressured by Mark Bristol, a pro-Turkish American admiral who harboured viciously anti-Greek and anti-Armenian sentiments, to put a different version on record. Prentiss then claimed that it was the Armenians who had set the fire. Bristol reported that during the Turkish capture of Smyrna and the ensuing fire the number of deaths due to killings, fire, and execution did not exceed 2,000. He is the only one to offer such a low estimate of fatalities. William H. King even introduced a resolution in the U.S. Senate asking for an investigation into Bristol's pro-Turkish attitude.
A near-contemporaneous account is given by René Puaux [Wikidata], correspondent for the respected Paris newspaper Le Temps, who had been posted in Smyrna since 1919. Based on multiple eyewitness accounts, he concluded that "by Wednesday [13 September] the putrefaction of the bodies, left unattended since the 9th in the evening, became untolerable, explaining what happened. The Turks, having pillaged the Armenian quarter and massacred a great portion of its inhabitants, resorted to fire to erase the trace of their actions." He also quoted a telegraph by Major General F. Maurice, special correspondent for the Daily News in Constantinople, concluding that "The fire started on the 13th, in the afternoon, in the Armenian quarter, but the Turkish authorities did nothing serious to stop it. The next day eyewitnesses saw a large number of Turkish soldiers throwing gasoline and setting houses on fire. The Turkish authorities could have prevented the fire from reaching the European quarters. Turkish soldiers, acting deliberately, are the primary cause of the terrible spread of the disaster."
Genocide scholar Rudolph J. Rummel said that the Turkish side was responsible for the "systematic firing" in the Armenian and Greek quarters of the city. Rummel said that after the Turks recaptured the city, Turkish soldiers and Muslim mobs murdered Armenians, Greeks, and other Christians in the streets of the city by shooting them and hacking them to death; by using the previous claims of Dobkin as a reference, he estimated that the victims of these massacres numbered about 100,000 Christians.
C.J. Lowe and M.L. Dockrill attribute blame for the fire to the "Kemalists," saying it was in retaliation for the earlier Greek occupation of Smyrna and was an attempt to push the Greeks out:
British author Giles Milton's Paradise Lost: Smyrna 1922 (2008) is a graphic account of the sack of Smyrna (modern İzmir) in 1922 recounted through the eyes of the city's Levantine community. Milton's book is based on eyewitness accounts of those who were there, making use of unpublished diaries and letters written by Smyrna's Levantine elite: He contends that their voices are among the few impartial ones in a highly contentious episode of history.
Paradise Lost chronicles the violence that followed the Greek landing through the eyewitness accounts of the Levantine community. The author offers a reappraisal of Smyrna's first Greek governor, Aristidis Stergiadis, whose impartiality towards both Greeks and Turks earned him considerable enmity amongst the local Greek population.
The third section of Paradise Lost is a day-by-day account of what happened when the Turkish army entered Smyrna. The narrative is constructed from accounts written principally by Levantines and Americans who witnessed the violence first hand, in which the author seeks to apportion blame and discover who started the conflagration that was to cause the city's near-total destruction. According to Milton, the fire was started by the Turkish army, who brought in thousands of barrels of oil and poured them over the streets of Smyrna, with the exception of the Turkish quarter. The book also investigates the role played by the commanders of the 21 Allied warships in the bay of Smyrna, who were under orders to rescue only their own nationals, abandoning to their fate the hundreds of thousands of Greeks and Armenian refugees gathered on the quayside.
Falih Rıfkı Atay, a Turkish journalist and author of national renown, is quoted as having lamented that the Turkish army had burnt Smyrna to the ground in the following terms:
Falih Rifki Atay implied that Nureddin Pasha was the person responsible for the fire in his account: "At the time it was said that Armenian arsonists were responsible. But was this so? There were many who assigned a part in it to Nureddin Pasha, commander of the First Army, a man whom Kemal had long disliked..."
Biray Kolluoğlu Kırlı, a Turkish professor of Sociology at Boğaziçi University, published a paper in 2005 in which she argues that Smyrna was burned by the Turkish Army to create a Turkish city out of the cosmopolitan fabric of the old city.
Turkish historian Reşat Kasaba noted in a short essay that various pro-Turkish sources offer different and even contradicting explanations for this event. He lists some pro-Turkish accounts: Some of them completely ignore the event or they claim that there was not a fire at all. Additional pro-Turkish accounts claim that the Greeks had severed "all the rubber pipes of the fire brigade", while others suggest that there were many fires, some started by Christians and some by Turks, or that "actual culpability has never been proven" and finally some other pro-Turkish accounts place the blame violent Çetes as a way of clearing the regular nationalist army and the Ottoman and Turkish governments from any responsibility in the events surrounding the fire.
Kasaba later reports that Smyrna's fire brigade was underwritten by the London Insurance Company and included both non-Muslim and Muslim firefighters and adds that:
On 17 September, when the massacre and the fire in the city had come to an end, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, future Turkish President and then-Commander-in-Chief of the Turkish armies, sent the Minister of Foreign Affairs Yusuf Kemal the following telegram, describing the official version of events in the city:
A French journalist who had covered the Turkish War of Independence arrived in Smyrna shortly after the flames had died down. He wrote:
Military Governor of Smyrna after the 9th of September 1922 was the commander of the 1st Army Corps, Brigadier general İzzettin Çalışlar, a Greek-Speaking Turkish officer and Mustafa Kemal Atatürk's Chief of Staff during the Turkish War of Independence, who was an eye-witness and present during and after the events. Within his Army Corps the only division that was allowed to enter Smyrna after the 10th of September was the 8th Infantry Division under the command of Major General Kâzım Sevüktekin. The 8th Infantry Division had lost nearly a battalion of its strength, 617 soldiers, 24 officers, as well as 86 war animals when they arrived in Smyrna on the evening of the 10th of September. Moreover, the Shock Battalion of the division was sent to protect Karşıyaka; an overwhelmingly Christian (Greek-Armenian-Levantine) neighborhood that was saved from the fire, where Turks were only 19% of the population in 1921. Its Artillery Battalion was spread outside the city center and was stationed in Naldöken, Yenikale, Abdullağa, Kadifekale against allied ships. The only military units that were in downtown during the fire were the reduced number of about more than 3 battalions of 189th and 131st Regiments, and one battalion (3rd Battalion) from the 135th Regiment; within the 8th division. Moreover, the Mounted Pursuit Company of the 1st Army Corps, along with the 57th Division of the Army Corps, was sent to pursue the remainder of the Greek troops under General Frangou in Çeşme; further reducing the number and animals of the division. Çalışlar wrote the following classified intelligence report on the 5th of October 1922 in Smyrna:
Paul Grescovich, an Austrian-born engineer and the chief of the Smyrna Fire Department, seen by Prentiss as "a thoroughly reliable witness", put the blame on Greeks and Armenians. He reported that Smyrna had seen an abnormal amount of fires in the first week of September, some of which were arson cases. Once Turkish troops captured Smyrna, Gresovich asked for more men and equipment to fight the fires. The Turkish authorities didn't provide additional support immediately. They first arrested the Greek firemen, who made up about a fifth of Grescovich's force. The fire department went a few days with reduced staff. On the 11th and 12th, the Turkish army assisted the firefighters in extinguishing fires across the city.
At the same time, Grescovich reported, Armenians were caught setting fires. He stated especially that "his own firemen, as well as Turkish guards, had shot down many Armenian young men disguised either as women or as Turkish irregular soldiers, who were caught setting fires during Tuesday night [12 September] and Wednesday [13 September] morning". Prentiss reports Grescovich as stating that at least six fires were reported around freight terminal warehouses and the Adine railroad passenger station at 11:20, five more around the Turkish-occupied Armenian hospital at 12:00 and nearly at the same time at the Armenian Club, and several at the Cassaba railroad station. Grescovich then asked the military authorities for help, but got no assistance until 6 pm when he was given soldiers who, two hours later, started to blow up buildings to prevent the fire from spreading. Grescovich also criticized the Turkish military for failing to prevent the fire and for responding to it negligently and ineffectively.
The Grescovich Report has faced some criticism, including by Robert Shenk, a professor and retired captain in the U.S. Naval Reserve, who wrote that "any fire chief of a city utterly destroyed by fire might have many reasons to invent things in his report".
Turkish scholar Pelin Böke, notes that the report has not been published in any book in its original, whole, form and that it was either partly censored or mistranslated in the previous cases that it was quoted. Historian John Murat apparently references a version of the report which reads "GRESCOVICH REPORT Commander of the Smyrna Insurance Fire Brigade. Revealing the prearranged fire of Smyrna by the Turks. Constantinople 1922."
According to US scholar Donald E. Webster, who taught at the International College in Izmir between 1931 and 1934:
In an article published in Current History, Turkish Colonel Rachid Galib stated that Harry Harling Lamb, the British Consul General at Smyrna, reported that he "had reason to believe that Greeks in concert with Armenians had burned Smyrna".
Turkish author, researcher and jurist Bilge Umar, whose parents were witnesses to the event and long-time inhabitants of Smyrna, wrote in 1974 that both Turkish and the Armenian sides were guilty for the fire: "Turks and Armenians are equally to blame for this tragedy. All the sources show that the Greeks did not start the fire as they left the city. The fire was started by fanatical Armenians. The Turks did not try to stop the fire."
Echoing Umar's account, and devoting an entire chapter of his biography of Atatürk to the fire, Lord Kinross argues: