Heinrich Behnke (Medal of Honor)

He faced a boiler emergency aboard ship and acted with valor

Heinrich Behnke was born in Germany on 10 April 1882. He emigrated to the United States and entered its Navy in the early twentieth century. By January 1905 he was serving as a seaman first class aboard the battleship USS Iowa.

On 25 January a manhole plate blew out of one of the ship's boilers. The failure created a dangerous emergency inside a steam-powered warship, where a damaged boiler threatened the men working nearby as well as the machinery on which the vessel depended. Behnke's conduct during this accident led to the Navy's highest recognition for bravery.

His Medal of Honor citation identifies the failed equipment as boiler D and recognises his extraordinary courage during the emergency. It does not describe a battle against an enemy: his decoration was one of the naval awards made for life-threatening professional duty in peacetime. The award was announced in March 1905.

Behnke continued in naval service and ultimately held the rating of chief watertender, a specialist responsible for the operation of a ship's boilers. That later rating appears on his military headstone, linking his subsequent career with the machinery emergency for which he had been decorated.

He died on 19 June 1952, aged seventy, and was buried in Long Island National Cemetery at Farmingdale, New York. His grave records both his final naval rating and his Medal of Honor.