When Harold Sturtevant Jr. made a daring rescue of a fellow sailor in 1942, he earned a Navy citation for bravery. In part it praised him “for the promptness, initiative, coolness and speed with which he organized the rescue” of a colleague, who had been buried in their ship’s coal bunker. Yet just 14 months earlier, Navy Secretary Frank Knox had publicly denounced the same Harold Sturtevant as a “screwball.” The 24-year-old sailor had experienced a tumultuous 18 months.
Sturtevant, from Haverhill, Massachusetts, enlisted in the Navy in 1938 and was assigned duty as a fireman in the destroyer USS Craven (DD-382). In October 1940, he was placed under psychiatric observation at the Mare Island Naval Hospital as a chronic sleepwalker.
A few months later, Sturtevant and fellow psychiatric patient Edward Lackey, 23, received a weekend pass. It was 18 January 1941, a Saturday.
The two took the local ferry to San Francisco. There, according to Sturtevant, “we were taking a walk and we flipped a coin to see where we’d go.” Strolling up San Francisco’s main thoroughfare, they noticed a commotion at the corner of Market and O’Farrell Streets. Sturtevant recalled that their saunter “brought us to this place and we saw the crowd and the Nazi swastika” flying high atop a ten-story office building. The four-by-eight-foot red, black, and white Third Reich banner had been hoisted by the German Consulate in honor of Germany’s 70th anniversary as a unified nation.
Within two hours of the flag’s raising, a crowd estimated at 3,000 had gathered. Traffic was at an impasse. Then, as the throng watched, Sturtevant and Lackey sprang into action.
The two sailors climbed the building’s exterior fire escape all the way to the tenth floor. According to Sturtevant, “We clumb up and cut it [the Nazi banner] loose, that’s all and me with no insurance!” The spectacle brought cheers from the crowd, who sang out choruses of “Hip, hip, hooray!” Eight police cars were rushed to the scene in response to two riot calls.
‘No Ordinary German Diplomat’
The consul-general, who earlier that day had unwittingly set events in motion with his routine order to display the flag in honor of the holiday, was no ordinary German diplomat, to be sure. Fritz Wiedemann had been Adolf Hitler’s commanding officer during World War I, but the tie ran even deeper than that. According to Hitler, Wiedemann in 1917 had saved the future Führer’s life, pulling him free from a collapsed building. Hitler later had appointed Wiedemann his personal adjutant in the early years of the Nazi government—even making provisions for him in his last will and testament. When he was assigned the consular post in San Francisco in March 1939, the American press concluded that he was Nazi Germany’s spy chief in the United States.
In his memoirs, Wiedemann described his mixed emotions as the drama in California unfolded. On the one hand, he had been infuriated with the desecration of his nation’s flag. On the other, he found the events to be both surreal and comical. Too, he admired Sturtevant and Lackey for their courage in climbing up the fire escape. He had shaken his head in disbelief as Sturtevant inched his way out on the slender flagstaff, pulled out a jackknife and cut the halyards of the German banner. With near-perfect timing, a German vice-consul had leaned out a ninth-story window and snatched the ensign as it fluttered free from the pole—saving it from certain destruction at the hands of the incensed mob below.
The two sailors were arrested immediately and charged with malicious mischief. They were released within hours on a writ of habeas corpus filed by the American Legion in their behalf. The veterans’ group argued the pair should be commended—rather than punished—because flying that flag was in violation of California’s Military and Veterans Code. One statute made it a felony to display any “emblem which was an invitation or . . . stimulus to an anarchistic action . . . designed . . . as an aid to propaganda . . . that advocates by force and violence the overthrow of this government.” The American Legion considered it a case in point, given that Hitler’s best-selling book, Mein Kampf, advocated the overthrow of democratic governments, to be replaced by dictatorial National Socialism. Lackey and Sturtevant were released from city jail and turned over to the Navy.
Germany Lodges a Protest
By Monday the matter had become international. The German government issued a strong protest alleging the incident proved that America was “governed by a democracy which did not know how to deal with gangsters.” The influential German newspaper Der Montag, appalled by reports of the cheering San Francisco crowd, editorialized that the spectacle proved that “only in democratic countries is it possible for a war-mongering clique to win such influences over the masses.” Wiedemann, in his memoirs, wrote that Hitler was so infuriated that he wanted to declare war on the United States right then and there.
The sailors were brought before San Francisco Municipal Judge Peter J. Mullin on Tuesday. Sturtevant told the judge he hadn’t known the flag was flying from Germany’s consulate—and that if he had, “we wouldn’t have done what we did.” He continued: “We of the Navy are paid and taught to protect human life. When I saw the crowd there, and saw they were angry about the Nazi flag, I acted as I thought best—I was afraid that if the flag was allowed to continue to hang, it might lead to a riot and somebody’d get hurt.” During the hearing, a Navy physician testified that the two had been under psychiatric evaluation for several months. Sturtevant’s problem was his sleepwalking, the doctor noted, but called Lackey “medically and mentally irresponsible and unfit for Navy duties.” Inquiries from the press prompted Secretary Knox to declare that a Navy investigation “discloses that they were screwballs.”
Out of the Navy, then Back
Judge Mullin found both sailors guilty, sentencing them to 90 days in the city jail. He suspended the sentences based on Navy assurances that the two would face a court-martial. Lackey was issued a medical discharge within a month. Sturtevant, however, was held in the brig for three months while the Navy conducted its own inquiry. Dismayed at the young sailor’s fate, the American Legion provided private counsel for his defense. The lawyer said Sturtevant indeed was guilty—but of nothing more than “over-zealous patriotism.” Ultimately the Navy quietly discharged Sturtevant. He returned to civilian life, then joined the Merchant Marine and “went to sea on a tanker.”
But eight days after Pearl Harbor, Sturtevant was again in the news—showing up at a Navy recruiting station in Boston seeking to re-enlist on 15 December 1941. Two days later he “was back in the good graces of Uncle Sam,” the Associated Press reported, his application for re-enlistment having been accepted. It was just five months after his return to the Navy that Sturtevant turned up in the news columns again when he was cited for heroics in rescuing “a fellow sailor who was buried in a coal bunker aboard a cruiser.”
The family name last came to prominence in the news media two months later, in July 1942. This time it was Sturtevant’s 45-year-old father, Harold, who made national headlines: He had volunteered for the U.S. Army in order “to do in a bigger way—the same thing his son did to a Nazi swastika.”
Fritz Wiedemann, Der Mann, Der Feldherr Werden Wollte, Margita Tappe, trans. (Berlin: Velbert-Kettwig, 1964), p. 238.
“Thousands See U. S. Sailor Slash Down German Flag Here,” San Francisco Examiner, 19 January 1941.
“Nazi Consulate Ordered Evicted, Lease Cancelled Over Flag Row,” San Francisco Examiner, 19 January 1941.
“Flag Rippers Tried Here,” San Francisco Call-Bulletin, 20 January 1941.
“Diplomatic Dispute Looms,” San Francisco Chronicle, 20 January 1941.
“International Mixup Looms Over Flag Case, San Francisco Examiner, 20 January 1941.
“More on Flag Riot, Sailors to Be Sentenced Thursday,” San Francisco Chronicle, 21 January 1941.
“Nazi Flag Rippers Get Sentences Here Today, Serving May be Held Up, Knox Calls Pair Screwballs,” San Francisco Call-Bulletin, 23 January 1941.
“Sailors Get 90 Days, Suspended Sentence,” San Francisco Chronicle, 24 January 1941.
“Dooley Will Defend Sailor,” San Francisco Call-Bulletin, 8 May 1941.
“Gob Who Tore Nazi Flag Asks to Reenlist,” San Francisco Chronicle, 16 December 1941.
“He Tore Down Nazi Flag; Back in Navy,” San Francisco Chronicle, 18 December 1941.
“S. F. Nazi Flag Case, Sailor Involved Now Cited As Hero,” San Francisco Call-Bulletin, 8 April 1942.
“Father of Swastika Ripper Joins Army,” San Francisco Chronicle, 18 July 1942.