USS Bennington (PG-4)
 The USS Bennington in 1898
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The USS Bennington was a gunboat of the United States Navy , which was found in the 1890s in service. The ship, named after the Battle of Bennington , belonged to the three-unit Yorktown class and was keeled as the third ship of her class in June 1888. The construction contract was initially awarded to the Philadelphia ( US state of Pennsylvania ) based shipyard of NF Palmer & Company , which in turn entrusted the construction of the hull of the Delaware River Iron Shipbuilding and Engine Works in Chester (Pennsylvania). The Bennington was launched on June 3, 1890 and was sold on June 20, 1891 as Gunboat No. 4 put into service. The construction costs were about 490,000 US dollars (around 11.8 million US dollars based on today's value). The Bennington's first in command was Commander Royal B. Bradford.
Technology and armament
The 74.49 m long and 10.97 m wide Bennington had a steel hull and three masts schooner - rigging , the sail area 590 square meters was. The machine system consisted of four coal-fired and (filled) steam locomotive boilers, each weighing around 42 tons, as well as two horizontally installed three-cylinder triple expansion machines , which drove two propellers with a diameter of 3.2 m via two shafts . Two of the 5.41 m long boilers, which were originally supposed to have been operated at a pressure of 160 pounds per square inch (11 bar), stood in their own watertight compartment. The operating pressure was later reduced to 135 to 140 psi (9.5 bar). The engine output was 3,392 PSi .
If the weather made it possible and there was no time pressure, the Bennington should be sailed to save coal and thus increase the range. While the maximum speed under sail was around 7 knots , the Bennington reached a top speed of 17.5 knots under steam. This result was achieved during test drives; in later use the speed should have been around 16.5 kn. Usually there was a coal supply of 390 ts on board, with which the ship had a range of up to 4,300 nautical miles at 10 kn.
The Bennington was comparatively heavily armed, so the armament, six 15.2 cm guns L / 30 Mark 3, was more powerful than that of many other gunboats at that time and also partly even more powerful than that of some cruisers during the First World War . The guns were able to fire a 47.7 kilogram shell over a maximum distance of 16,460 m. The rate of fire was around 1.5 rounds per minute. Two of the guns stood side by side and in separate mounts on the forecastle and behind the superstructures on the poop deck . Two more cannons were housed on either side of the ship. All guns were equipped with turret shields that had 76 mm thick armor protection.
The lighter armament consisted of four 5.7 cm cannons of the Hotchkiss model and four 3.7 cm Maxim Nordenfelt automatic cannons (1 pounder L / 42.5 Mark 6). There were also two Gatling repeater guns on board.
Working time
After being commissioned, the gunboat first completed test drives and training runs before it was assigned to the newly established so-called Squadron of Evolution of the US Navy in autumn 1891 . This squadron, which consisted of the first new and modern American warships with steel hulls, after no new warships had been built for a while since the Civil War and the fleet had been greatly reduced, consisted of three armored cruisers and three gunboats , including the Bennington , together.
Service from 1891 to 1898
In November 1891, the Squadron of Evolution left New York on a visit to Brazil . The Bennington then stayed temporarily in South American waters and completed patrol services there before moving to Europe in July 1892, in advance of the celebrations for Columbus' departure for the New World 400 years earlier, and visiting Spanish and Italian ports, among other things . On February 18, 1893, the Bennington left Cádiz with a replica of the Pinta caravel (one of Columbus's ships during his first voyage of discovery) and brought it to Havana in Cuba for the festivities , taking the Canary Islands and the Netherlands Antilles during the voyage were started. On March 26, 1893, the gunboat returned to the United States and entered Hampton Roads .
In the following years, the Bennington was prepared for a longer service at foreign stations and between May and August 1893 subjected to a major overhaul at the New York Naval Shipyard . After taking part in the Columbian Naval Review , the gunboat ran again to Europe and remained in the Mediterranean until February 1894 before being detached to the Pacific in the same month . The Bennington then moved across the Atlantic , passed Cape Horn at the beginning of April 1894 and finally reached the Mare Island Naval Shipyard in California on April 30, 1894 after coal had been replenished in Valparaíso , among other places . The gunboat remained at the Pacific station for nearly four years , completing a relatively uneventful service as a patrol ship off the west coast of South and Central America . In 1895 and 1897 there were also two trips to Hawaii .
Spanish-American War and Wake Occupation
In connection with the outbreak of the Spanish-American War in April 1898, the Bennington was ordered off the California coast and took over security services there. However, it was not involved in combat operations during the entire conflict. The gunboat was then detached to the Philippines to help secure this colony newly won by Spain.
On January 17, 1899, while the Bennington was on her way to the Philippines, the crew of the gunboat took possession of the uninhabited atoll Wake on the direct order of then US President William McKinley for the United States to set up a telegraph station there set up.
Filipino-American War
After the Bennington had entered Manila on February 22, 1899, she participated in the suppression of the uprising of the Philippine independence movement in the following two years , with the gunboat, among other things , fired at coastal fortifications of the insurgents near Legazpi . On September 12, 1899, the Bennington also managed to land the rebel coast freighter Parao southeast of Luzon . The gunboat remained in Philippine waters until the summer of 1901, although Hong Kong and the Japanese Yokohama were called at temporarily and for the purpose of necessary repairs . In the summer of 1901 the Bennington finally moved back to the United States after a stopover in Shanghai and was temporarily transferred to the reserve on September 5, 1901 at the Mare Island Naval Shipyard. While the gunboat was in reserve, the center mast was removed and the Gatling guns disembarked.
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Service from 1903 to 1905
Eighteen months later, on March 2, 1903, the Bennington , meanwhile under the command of Commander Chauncey Thomas, was taken back into active service. In the following two years, the gunboat completed guard and patrol trips off the entire west coast of the United States and Central America, including the waters off Alaska and around the Aleutian Islands in the north and Panama in the south to the areas of operation. In the spring of 1905 a visiting trip to Hawaii , which lasted until the beginning of July 1905, followed .
The boiler explosion on July 21, 1905
On the morning of July 21, 1905, Bennington, lying in the port of San Diego , was commissioned to come to the aid of the USS Wyoming monitor , which had lost a propeller and sustained an engine damage off Port Hartford. While the crew of the Bennington was still opening steam, the front boiler on the starboard side exploded at 10:28 a.m. , with the front of the boiler including the fire box being blown off. The boiler was torn from its anchorages and thrown aft , knocking through the bulkhead to the boiler room behind and there hit the rear starboard boiler, which then also exploded. Parts of the upper deck were torn open by the devastating detonations and debris and crew members were thrown into the water. Almost all of the crew members in the boiler rooms were killed, and because all the steam pipes in the boiler rooms were torn open, superheated steam penetrated the crew quarters above the front boiler room and the galley , and many seamen were severely scalded . In addition, holes were torn in the hull below the waterline on the starboard side . Although fast water einflutendes put fortunately the fires that the ammunition chamber of 15.2 cm gun threatened on the starboard side, so that there were no further secondary explosions, but made quickly for a growing list . To prevent the gunboat from sinking, the tug Santa Fe came up and dragged the damaged vessel to a nearby sandbank , where the Bennington was set aground.
A total of 66 seafarers were killed and 46 injured in the disaster, 14 of them seriously. The small hospital in San Diego was initially overwhelmed with the care of the many injured and above all the burn injuries, which is why emergency hospitals had to be set up by volunteers.
To classify the disaster: The number of casualties on board the Bennington exceeded the personnel losses of the United States Navy during the entire Spanish-American war. The boiler explosion on board the Bennington was and is the second worst disaster for the American Navy in peacetime. A total of eleven members of the crew were later awarded the Medal of Honor for their rescue efforts and for their behavior during the accident . To commemorate those killed , an 18 m high obelisk was erected in January 1908 at Fort Rosecrans National Cemetery in San Diego, where most of the victims are buried .
Reconstruction of the accident
On July 28, 1905, an investigative committee of the US Navy, consisting of Commander Holland N. Stevenson, Captain Thomas S. Phelps and Captain Edwin K. Moore, began in San Diego to deal with the disaster and to investigate the cause. The committee presented its final report on August 21, 1905. In this it was found that the two aft boilers of Bennington were under steam on the morning of July 21, 1905, while the two front boilers had to be filled with new feed water , which, however, was contaminated with oil residues. After the boiler had been heated up, the valve on the starboard boiler that connected the pressure gauge to the boiler and not the one that was responsible for air regulation was accidentally closed. This resulted in a constant pressure increase in the boiler, which, however, was not displayed on the pressure gauge. At about 10 a.m. the port boiler gauge showed 135 pounds per square inch of operating pressure, but the starboard boiler gauge still showed no pressure build-up. As a result, the boiler was increasingly heated. Normally a safety valve on the starboard boiler should have automatically blown off steam at a pressure of 145 pounds per square inch, but this valve was defective and failed for reasons that could no longer be clarified. The result was an uncontrollable increase in pressure in the forward starboard boiler. At about 10:26 a.m., a coal digger noticed a small leak in the firebox of the boiler and informed a supervisor. Before countermeasures could be initiated, the explosion occurred at 10:28 a.m.
Whereabouts of the ship
The Bennington was not put back into service after the severe explosion. The gunboat was later towed to the Mare Island Naval Shipyard and decommissioned there on October 31, 1905, as repairs were no longer considered worthwhile. The ship remained at the shipyard for around five years and was finally deleted from the ship register on September 10, 1910. Although it was sold for scrapping in 1910, the former gunboat was sold to the Matson Navigation Company in 1912, which had it towed to Hawaii and used there as a stationary barge for the fresh water supply until 1924 . In 1924 the former and now increasingly rotting Bennington was finally sunk in front of Oahu itself.
Trivia
The second ship in the history of the American Navy to be christened Bennington , the aircraft carrier USS Bennington - an Essex- class ship - which was commissioned in August 1944 , suffered heavy staff losses in two disasters. On April 27, 1953, the superheated steam pipe of a boiler exploded on the carrier , killing eleven crew members.
On May 26, 1954, the H-8 aircraft catapult of the carrier Bennington , located in the bow area on the port side , exploded for reasons that have not yet been precisely clarified, although very likely due to a leak in the hydraulic system of the catapult in question . The blast killed 103 crew members and wounded over 200, making this the United States Navy's worst peacetime disaster to date in terms of casualty figures.
Footnotes
- ↑ a b c d http://www.uss-bennington.org/early-gb4-explosion.html
- ^ Bauer, K. Jack / Roberts, Stephen S .: Register of Ships of the US Navy, 1775–1990: Major Combatants . Greenwood Press. New York 1991, p. 155.
- ↑ http://www.navweaps.com/Weapons/WNUS_6-30_mk1.htm
- ↑ http://www.fleetorganization.com/1892intro.html
- ↑ http://www.history.navy.mil/research/histories/ship-histories/danfs/b/bennington-i.html
- ↑ http://navysite.de/cv/cv20.htm
literature
- Bauer, K. Jack / Roberts, Stephen S .: Register of Ships of the US Navy, 1775-1990: Major Combatants . Greenwood Press. New York 1991.
- Chesneau, Roger / Kolesnik, Eugene M. (Eds.): Conway's All The World's Fighting Ships 1860 - 1905 . New York 1979.
