Security· Civil Aid and Humanitarian Operations
USS Arizona Marines consular guard, Constantinople
A brief interwar deployment that showed the global reach of the ship's Marine detachment.
In 1919, with the defeated Ottoman Empire under Allied occupation and the Greek-Turkish war beginning, the battleship USS Arizona was among the American warships sent to the eastern Mediterranean. Her Marine detachment was landed to guard the United States consulate at Constantinople during the Greek occupation of the city, a tense period when American diplomatic posts needed protection amid the disorder of occupation and the collapse of Ottoman authority. The Marines provided security for the consulate and its staff and withdrew later in the year. No casualties were suffered. The episode was a small but characteristic instance of the way American battleships' Marine guards served as a ready force for protecting diplomatic missions and citizens abroad, projecting a measure of order into one of the most unsettled corners of the postwar world.
Record no. 555