In 1941, a weekend pass in San Francisco and an impetuous sailor’s good intentions erupted into an international incident with Nazi Germany.
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.
