George W. Leland (c. 1834 – March 18, 1880) was a Union Navy sailor in the American Civil War and a recipient of the U.S. military's highest decoration, the Medal of Honor, for helping to free his grounded ship.

[1][2] On November 16, 1863, Lehigh was in Charleston Harbor providing support for Union troops on shore when the ship ran aground on a sand bar and came under heavy fire from Fort Moultrie.

Despite intense Confederate artillery fire, Leland and fellow sailor Coxswain Thomas Irving rowed a small boat trailing a hawser from Lehigh to another Union ironclad, the USS Nahant.

For this action, all five sailors involved in the operation were awarded the Medal of Honor on April 16, 1864.

Rowing the small boat which was used in the hazardous task of transferring hawsers from the Lehigh to the Nahant, Leland twice succeeded in making the trip, only to find that each had been in vain when the hawsers were cut by enemy fire and chaffing.Leland died on March 18, 1880, at age 45 or 46 and was buried in Lewiston, Maine.