A great story of bravery and serving time in the brig -Into the Fire, Twice

Chief Water Tender John King saved his shipmates and was awarded two Medals of Honor. – By Colonel Dwight H. Sullivan, U.S. Marine Corps Reserve (Retired)

Chief Water Tender John King—the namesake of the U.S. Navy guided-missile destroyer DDG-3—is one of only 19 service members to receive two Medals of Honor. But his pair of medals, entrusted to the U.S. Navy by a nephew from Ireland, have mysteriously vanished. It was during the Spanish-American War that King first distinguished himself—a war whose aftermath would pull the U.S. Navy to the far reaches of the Pacific.

The Philippine archipelago consists of roughly 7,640 islands. During the Philippine-American War, one of the U.S. Navy’s key missions was projecting power to their far-flung shores. One of the warships executing that mission was the Annapolis-class gunboat USS Vicksburg.

On the evening of 27 May 1901, the Vicksburg weighed her port anchor and stood out from Zamboanga on the island of Mindanao’s southwest tip. On board were U.S. Army Brigadier General William A. Kobbé and two Army captains. Accompanying the Vicksburg was the Army transport Aeolus, carrying a company of 120 infantrymen. Their destination was Palawan, the westernmost of the Philippines’ principal islands.

While crossing the Sulu Sea, the Vicksburg and Aeolus  were joined by the USS Samar, a small gunboat captured from Spain’s navy during the recent Spanish-American War. But as the Vicksburg neared the objective, disaster struck. The gasket on the B boiler’s lower manhole plate blew out at 0310 on 29 May.

Steam and scalding water spewed into the fireroom. The main stop valve, which controlled the steam leaving the boiler, could be closed from the berth deck; however, someone would have to brave potentially lethal conditions in the fireroom to close the A boiler’s auxiliary stop valve and the B boiler’s dynamo stop valve.

Water Tender John King wrapped himself in a blanket, covered his face with a wet cloth, and lowered himself into the searing fireroom from an upper grating. He managed to close the A boiler’s auxiliary stop valve. He then tried three times to accomplish what Commander Edward B. Barry, the Vicksburg’s captain, described as the “very difficult and dangerous task” of shutting the B boiler’s dynamo stop valve.

His strength exhausted, King could not close it. Machinist H. L. Cook also tried and failed. Sailors then hosed down the A boiler, dousing its fire. That allowed Chief Machinist A. V. Kettles to close the dynamo stop valve, ending the danger to the Vicksburg and her crew. At Commander Barry’s recommendation, Secretary of the Navy John D. Long approved a Medal of Honor for King later that year.

Because of King and his shipmates’ courageous actions, the Vicksburg’s main engines were stopped for just three minutes before the ship continued toward Palawan. While approaching the island later that morning, Commander Barry ordered the ship cleared for action.

The convoy’s objective was the island’s capital, Puerto Princesa. Behind the governor’s house flew the distinctive flag of the Philippine Republic; the United States was fighting to suppress the archipelago’s independence movement. About 30 Filipino men, some in uniform, were spotted ashore.

After heaving to 500 yards from Puerto Princesa’s wharf, the Vicksburg’s crew used a kedge anchor to position the ship with her broadside guns facing the town. A party, including the Vicksburg’s executive officer, Lieutenant Commander James H. Glennon, went ashore in an armed boat to demand the capital’s unconditional surrender. Forty-five minutes later, as the three U.S. vessels loomed menacingly in the harbor, the town’s occupants hoisted a white flag. A joint U.S. Army–Navy force then seized the seaside hamlet without resistance.

The man at the center of the Vicksburg crisis had come a long way to be there. John King was born 39 years earlier—or maybe 38; he was inconsistent when listing the year of his birth on official documents—on the outskirts of Ballinrobe, Ireland, when the entire Emerald Isle was still part of the United Kingdom. He immigrated to the United States in 1886, enlisting in the Navy seven years later.

His preenlistment occupation was fireman. Just under six feet tall and weighing 181 pounds, King initially was assigned the sweltering, grimy job of coal passer. That rating required hauling buckets of coal weighing up to 150 pounds in engine rooms where temperatures sometimes exceeded 120 degrees, filling buckets with ash, cleaning bilge strainers, and stowing coal in bunkers. As another coal-passer-turned-water-tender of the era summarized, “It is hard and awful dirty work, and it is work that is never done.” But in little more than two months, King was done with that rating, progressing to fireman second class.

When the Spanish-American War broke out, King was serving on board the battleship USS Massachusetts as a water tender—a petty officer first class responsible for the boilers that produced the steam that turned the ship’s propellers.

The Massachusetts saw action in Cuban waters but missed most of the decisive Battle of Santiago de Cuba because she set off to Guantanamo Bay for coal just before it began. In September 1900, King reported on board the Vicksburg as the gunboat prepared to transit the Atlantic Ocean and Suez Canal on her way to the Philippines.

Despite his courage and proficiency, King was no model sailor. The Vicksburg’s logbooks contain numerous entries recording his late return from liberty, including a 60-hour unauthorized absence in Hong Kong. The gunboat’s chief master-at-arms once had to go ashore in the Philippines to retrieve King after he was arrested. Even worse, the water tender was discovered intoxicated on board the Vicksburg several times, offenses for which Commander Barry ordered him confined in double irons. On the day the Navy Department issued the general order announcing King’s Medal of Honor for his bravery in the Vicksburg’s fireroom, he was shackled hand and foot for being drunk on board the vessel while in a Chinese port.

The most striking entry in King’s disciplinary record was from February 1908, when he was assigned to a torpedo boat in Norfolk: “Shot by sentry.” The Washington Post explained that King, who was drunk and past the end of his liberty, “was trying to regain his vessel by stealth” when a Marine sentry “spied him trying to slip around the back wall of the reservation. Upon being ordered to halt, King broke into a run. The sentry fired, the bullet entering King’s body under the left shoulder.” King was hospitalized for 27 days.

Later that year, King was reassigned to the 423-foot scout cruiser Salem. He continued to perform his duties well, and he continued to cause trouble. In December 1908, a summary court-martial sentenced him to a month in the brig for overstaying his liberty in Boston by a whopping 205 hours. Yet, whatever his failings as a rule follower, King’s record would soon prove that his value to the Navy ran far deeper than any court-martial suggested.

As the Salem participated in mock battle exercises off the Virginia Capes on 13 September 1909, a boiler tube came out of its hole. High-pressure steam escaped, blowing flames from a furnace into the ship’s fireroom like some mythical dragon. A plume of fire shot across the compartment, hitting a boiler on the far side then deflecting up to the overhead. Despite suffering severe burns on both arms from the flames, King—along with Oiler Fred Bancroft, who was also burned—managed to adjust pumps and valves to stop the inferno.

Finding a coal passer overcome by heat, King lifted him through an airlock onto the ship’s orlop deck. As King continued his damage-control efforts, a chief petty officer noticed his badly scalded arms. The chief physically restrained King from returning to the fireroom and ordered him to the sick bay. The ship’s senior engineer officer concluded that King’s actions averted serious damage to the ship, adding that he “deserves all the more credit for placing himself in danger to save others.”

King was soon promoted to chief water tender and summoned to Washington, D.C. At the White House, President William Howard Taft pinned a second Medal of Honor on King’s chest, next to the one he had received for his heroics on board the Vicksburg. After the medal recipient’s encounter with the President, the Bureau of Navigation informed the  Salem’s captain that “the deportment of John King and his general appearance on this occasion was such as to reflect credit upon the enlisted personnel of the Navy.”

Three years later, King swore an oath renouncing “all allegiance and fidelity” to “George V, King of Great Britain and Ireland,” and became a naturalized U.S. citizen. Almost 23½ years after first enlisting, on 26 December 1916, King was transferred to the Fleet Naval Reserve—a more-or-less retired status for sailors with between 20 and 30 years of service.

For King, it turned out to be far more than a retired status. Just three and a half months after his release from active duty, he was recalled when the United States entered World War I. During his brief interlude as a civilian, the heroic veteran had taken another life-altering step: On 7 March 1917, the 55-year-old King had married Delia Holland, a widow 16 years his junior originally from his hometown of Ballinrobe.

After being recalled to active duty, King served until 20 August 1919, including almost four months in the New York Naval Hospital. When King was not receiving medical care, the Navy used him and his two Medals of Honor to aid its recruiting effort.

During the Roaring Twenties, King moved back to Ireland, where he and his wife settled in the Ballinrobe area. There, he was known for giving candy and coins to the town’s children. After Delia died in 1936, King returned to the United States. Soon after taking up residence in Philadelphia’s U.S. Naval Home, he fell over an iron bench, fracturing his right thighbone. He was sent to convalesce at the Army and Navy General Hospital in Hot Springs, Arkansas. Suffering from pneumonia in both lungs, he passed away on 20 May 1938 at 76. Or maybe 75. Whatever his correct age, he died in such obscurity that he was buried in an unmarked grave.

But the Navy did not forget its uncommonly heroic water tender. A guided-missile destroyer launched in 1960 was named for the two-time Medal of Honor recipient. During her shakedown cruise in 1962, the ship made a port call at Dublin. Her captain, Commander Albert M. Sackett, visited King’s old home in County Mayo. King’s nephew John Flannery presented his uncle’s two Medals of Honor to Commander Sackett for display on board the ship. Until then, the medals had been stored in an old cookie tin. The Bureau of Naval Personnel sent the ship a duplicate set of medals, including a Medal of Honor with a Gold Star, for display purposes.

King is still honored in his hometown. In 2010, a seven-foot bronze statue of the decorated sailor was erected in Ballinrobe’s Cornmarket, as the town square is known. But the town and King’s relatives are missing two precious heirlooms. When the USS John King (DDG-3) was decommissioned in 1990, the pair of Medals of Honor awarded to the destroyer’s namesake could not be found. Their fate remains a mystery.