USS BENNINGTON MONUMENT

On the morning of 21 July 1905, Bennington’s crew was preparing her to sail to the aid of the monitor Wyoming which had broken down and was in need of a tow. After her crew had finished the difficult task of coaling the ship that morning, most of them were belowdecks cleaning themselves from the dirty job. Unbeknownst to anyone on board, three problems with one of Bennington’s boilers – oily feed water, an improperly closed steam valve, and a faulty steam gauge – were conspiring against them. At about 10:30, excessive steam pressure in the boiler resulted in a boiler explosion that rocked the ship, sending men and equipment flying into the air. The escaping steam sprayed through the living compartments and decks. The explosion opened Bennington’s hull to the sea, and she began to list to starboard. Quick actions by the tug Santa Fe — taking Bennington under tow and beaching her – almost certainly saved the gunboat from sinking.

The combination of the explosion and the scalding steam killed a number of men outright and left others mortally wounded; the final death toll was one officer and sixty-five men, making it one of the U.S. Navy’s worst peacetime disasters. Nearly all of the forty-six who survived had an injury of some sort; eleven of the survivors were awarded the Medal of Honor for “extraordinary heroism displayed at the time of the explosion”. One of the survivors was John Henry Turpin, who had also survived the explosion of Maine in Havana in February 1898 and was, reportedly, the only man to survive both explosions.