When Navy storekeeper Jim Leavelle left the destroyer USS Hammann (DD-412) in spring 1941 and reported to his new assignment, he expected a quiet tour of duty. For months he had lived the rather spartan life of a “tin-can sailor” as his ship followed the carrier Enterprise (CV-6) around the Pacific. It was a lot of time underway on rough seas, with liberty ports few and far between.
But all that changed when Leavelle reported to the supply department of the USS Whitney (AD-4), a destroyer tender that spent most of her time in port, tending to the needs of the destroyers that came alongside for maintenance and other support. Leavelle fulfilled supply requisitions and stood his assigned watches. When off duty, he often would don his liberty uniform and join some of his shipmates to spend time and money in the bars and restaurants on Hotel Street. It was a near-idyllic life for sailors who had survived the Great Depression and found subsistence and security in the Navy.
However, on a Sunday morning as the ships in port were conducting morning colors and Leavelle was on deck enjoying the morning sunshine, a nearby boatswain’s mate pointed at an aircraft low over the water and headed for East Loch where the Whitney was moored with five destroyers alongside. Leavelle watched the plane approach with mild interest, wondering why it was flying so close to the water, when he heard concussive “thumps” coming from the direction of Ford Island. Any doubts about what was happening left Leavelle as the aircraft began strafing the cluster of ships.
Leavelle and his shipmates raced to their battle stations, and several began returning fire with the Whitney’s .50-caliber machine guns as Japanese planes swarmed the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor. Bombs cascaded from diving aircraft, torpedoes laced the harbor water, and machine gun bullets stitched deadly paths across runways, ripping into aircraft and the men trying to get them aloft. Soon great columns of black smoke towered over burning ships, some of them already settling into the harbor mud. One of the great battleships was turning turtle, her masts plunging into the oil-covered water and her screws thrust upward to the sky. Airfields were strewn with wrecked aircraft and hangars burned furiously.
An hour and a half later, the last of the attacking planes disappeared over the horizon, leaving a scene of death and destruction never equaled in the U.S. Navy’s history. Nearly 2,500 Americans died on that “day of infamy,” but Petty Officer Leavelle was not among them. He and his shipmates survived the attack, and several months later, the Whitney departed Pearl Harbor for the South Pacific to support embattled destroyers in need of repairs.
On the third day out, Leavelle was descending a ladder when a rogue wave swept him off the ladder and slammed him onto the deck below. Both of his knees were seriously injured, requiring him to be evacuated to a naval hospital in California. For Leavelle, it was an ending but also a new beginning. His injuries required a medical discharge from the Navy, but while at the hospital, he met and married a Navy nurse.
After leaving the Navy, he worked as an auditor for the Veterans Administration until 1950, when he began a career as a homicide detective in a Texas police department. Thirteen years went by, and Jim had his fair share of cases, but none made more than the local news.
Then, on a late November day, Detective Leavelle donned his large white Stetson hat as he was handcuffed to a prisoner being moved from police headquarters to a local jail. As he and the prisoner entered the garage below the headquarters, they were met by a large contingent of reporters eager for a picture of the prisoner. Flashbulbs popped as the throng closed in on Leavelle and his prisoner.
Suddenly a squat figure in a dark suit and a fedora emerged from the crowd brandishing a .38-caliber handgun and, without hesitation, opened fire. At that instant, Robert H. Jackson, a photographer with the Dallas Times Herald, captured the photo that would earn him a Pulitzer Prize and become one of the most famous pictures in U.S. history: the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald by Jack Ruby.
