A few people know early in life how they intend to spend the rest of that life, and then they go about taking whatever steps are needed to turn goals into reality. For the rest of us—well, things just happen. So it was for George Elsey, who was born during World War I and came to maturity during the second global conflict. That war changed his life dramatically.
Now, these many years later, Elsey has reflected on his event-filled career in an engaging memoir. What he had intended as a tale to entertain his grandchildren turned out so good that it wound up in book form. Late last year the University of Missouri Press published his An Unplanned Life. It is a truly apt title. The value of his story is that it reaches far beyond his own experiences to illuminate an era that is now long past.
One doesn’t get far into the book before discovering just how different life was before World War II. While growing up in western Pennsylvania, Elsey was inspired by an article about Princeton University in Reader's Digest. Tuition was $450 a year in the mid-1930s, and he got a $400 scholarship because the university wanted some public-school graduates to go along with the prep-school types common up to then.
Once Elsey completed his studies at Princeton in 1939, he set forth on life’s next step by entering grad school at Harvard with a plan to become a college history professor. He was making successful progress there under the tutelage of Dr. Samuel Eliot Morison, but then came war clouds. One of his fellow graduate students was a Naval Reserve officer who suggested that Elsey apply for a commission. He left Harvard in the autumn of 1941 and made his way to Washington. Elsey was in the Capitol on 8 December of that year, and security was minimal. He just walked in and watched President Franklin D. Roosevelt ask Congress for a declaration of war in the wake of the attack on Pearl Harbor. Five days later, Elsey was an ensign, assigned to the Office of Naval Intelligence.
British Prime Minister Winston Churchill arrived in Washington that December, and his aides set up a portable map room, a miniature version of the one he had in London. Roosevelt soon decided he needed a White House map room to track the progress of the war. The officer who received the task was Lieutenant Robert Montgomery, a Naval Reservist and movie actor. (He later starred in They Were Expendable.)
By being in the right place at the right time, Elsey was assigned to duty in the map room in April 1942 and thus had a firsthand view of those who ran the war.
Having opportunities is one thing. Success depends on performing well when the chances come along. In his map-room work Elsey demonstrated skill as a wordsmith (as his memoir itself demonstrates), and he was an acute observer. In 1944 another opportunity presented itself. His Harvard mentor, Morison, had been assigned to write an operational history of the Navy’s role in the global conflict. Morison believed in going where the action was, but he could be in only one place at a time, so he depended on surrogates.
Because Morison was going to the Pacific, he asked Elsey and another reserve officer to cover the Allied invasion of northwestern Europe. In March 1944, Elsey rode the troopship Queen Mary to England and then went aboard the USS Ancon (AGC-4), which would be Rear Admiral John Hall’s flagship for the D-Day assault on Normandy’s Omaha Beach.
Following the invasion, Elsey walked the French beaches. He made observations both ashore and on board ship, meeting people, recording impressions, and gathering documents. He sent back four pouches full of material for eventual use in one of Morison’s volumes. Some years later, he organized the material for The Invasion of France and Germany, Volume XI of Morison’s History of United States Naval Operations in World War II. Though Elsey does not say so, my guess is that he also drafted some of the text himself.
After Normandy, Elsey returned to the White House and was subsequently with new President Harry S. Truman at the Potsdam conference in Germany in mid-1945. He provides his own view on Truman’s controversial decision to drop atomic bombs on Japan. Elsey says that Truman did not make the decision; it was the Japanese who unwittingly decided for the bombs by rejecting the Potsdam Declaration’s terms for surrender.
Once the war was over, Elsey became a civilian on the White House staff, where he worked with presidential advisor Clark Clifford. Elsey’s writing ability helped in putting together what is now known as the Clifford-Elsey Report, a key document in helping to shape U.S. foreign policy toward the Soviet Union as the two nations plunged into the Cold War. And Elsey was a constant presence on Truman’s whistle-stop campaign in 1948, the one that led to his surprising election victory when all the polls suggested otherwise.
The planned career as a history professor never materialized, and one gets the sense from his book that George Elsey much preferred that things happened the way they did.