Relief ship Mercurius ready for trip to Asia Minor.

Item Detail

With her hold practically loaded to capacity with motor trucks, motorcycles, ambulances, blankets, shoes, clothing, foodstuffs, and condensed milk, the relief ship Mercurius is ready to sail for Asia Minor, Syria, Armenia, and Persia to distribute its cargo to the disease-stricken people of these countries.

Context

These photographs come from the American Unofficial Collection of World War I Photographs (165-WW) within Record Group 165, Records of the War Department General and Special Staffs, held by the U.S. National Archives. The United States government assembled the collection during and just after the First World War from many sources, among them the publicity work of the American Committee for Relief in the Near East (ACRNE), the relief organization that Congress incorporated as Near East Relief in 1919. The Near East images date from 1918 and 1919, as American relief in the region moved from wartime emergency to organized operation.

The selection documents two sides of that effort. In the field, it records relief stations, hospitals, and orphan care among Armenian, Assyrian, and Greek survivors of genocide and displacement across the Caucasus, eastern Anatolia, and northwest Persia. At home, it records the American mobilization that paid for the work: fundraising drives, relief ships loading at New York and Hoboken, and the volunteers who sailed to distribute food and supplies.

These photographs were made in the Ottoman lands that the Armenian Genocide had emptied between 1915 and 1918. They show American relief reaching into Asia Minor: the dispensary and boys' programs at Aintab (Gaziantep), parties traveling toward Van beneath Mount Ararat, and the aftermath of deportation on the roads from Erzroom (Erzurum) toward Trebizond (Trabzon). Several frames record Armenian families broken by the killings and the survivors who remained. The images date from 1918–1919.