Ships
- USS Windham Bay (CVE-92) Captain from 2 January 1946 · Relieved on 1 March 1946
Maxwell Franklin Leslie was born in Seattle on 24 October 1902. He attended the University of Washington, then entered the Naval Academy in 1922 and graduated in 1926, in the same class as Wade McClusky, Howard Gilmore and Lofton Henderson. He trained at Pensacola in 1929 and qualified as a naval aviator in 1930. When the war began he was executive officer of Bombing Squadron 3, and he flew with it from Enterprise while she escorted Hornet on the Doolittle Raid.
At Midway, on 4 June 1942, he led VB-3's seventeen Dauntlesses from Yorktown. His squadron and McClusky's Enterprise dive bombers reached the Japanese carriers just as the Zeros had been pulled down to the wave tops by the torpedo attacks. A faulty electrical arming switch had already dropped Leslie's own bomb, but he dived anyway and strafed the flight deck while his squadron wrecked Sōryū, which sank that evening. With Yorktown under attack and his fuel gone, he and his wingman ditched beside the cruiser Astoria and were picked up by her whaleboat. He received the Navy Cross.
He served overseas for the rest of the war and commanded the escort carrier Windham Bay in early 1946. He then held ship and shore posts until he retired in 1956, and his papers are held by the National Air and Space Museum. He died in San Diego on 26 September 1985. Monte Markham played him in the 1976 film Midway.