Edward Ellsberg Books in Order

Edward Ellsberg was born in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1891, and grew up in Colorado after his family moved west. He was the son of Jewish refugees from czarist Russia, and he entered the U.S. Naval Academy at a time when there were very few Jewish midshipmen there. He graduated in 1914, first in his class academically, with a strong engineer's mind and a habit of pushing straight at hard problems.

He was not built for quiet desk work.

After a stint aboard the battleship Texas, the Navy sent him to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for postgraduate work in naval architecture. He earned a master's degree there in 1920 and moved into the Construction Corps, where he built a reputation as a practical, hands-on officer. He liked machinery, disliked drift, and had a blunt streak that could help him or get him in trouble.

The turning point came in 1925, when the submarine S-51 sank off Block Island after a collision. The Navy had no real playbook for lifting a big submarine from deep, rough water, but Ellsberg volunteered anyway. During the operation he trained as a diver himself, becoming the first Construction Corps officer to qualify as a deep-sea diver, and helped lead the long, dangerous salvage effort that finally brought the boat up. The job made him a national figure and fixed his public image for good.

It also made him a writer.

His first big book, On the Bottom, grew out of the S-51 operation and became a best seller in 1929. It was later serialized in The Saturday Evening Post, which shows how wide his audience had become. When the submarine S-4 sank in 1927, he was called back to help again, and that disaster deepened his public role as the Navy's salvage expert. By then he had already left active duty, frustrated by Navy promotion rules and by criticism over his public speaking, and gone to work for Tide Water Oil as chief engineer. Even there, he kept inventing, lecturing, and writing, and he also patented several oil-refining processes.

The books that followed show how wide his range was. Pigboats turned submarine service into fiction and later became the film Hell Below. Hell on Ice retold the Jeannette polar disaster with the pace of an adventure novel, while Men Under the Sea pulled together stories of divers and underwater rescue. In Captain Paul, he shifted farther back in time to John Paul Jones. Readers tend to like him because even when he is writing history, he never loses sight of the people doing the hard, dirty work.

Pearl Harbor pulled him back into uniform on December 8, 1941. In World War II he was sent first to Massawa in Eritrea, where he helped clear scuttled ships and rebuild a vital Red Sea port under brutal heat and with very little support. Then came North Africa during Operation Torch, and later the huge engineering preparations that supported D-Day. Those experiences fed directly into Under the Red Sea Sun, No Banners, No Bugles, and The Far Shore, three books that show war from the side of salvage crews, harbor workers, planners, and officers trying to keep armies supplied. His wartime service eventually brought him two Legions of Merit and a British honor, but the books make the real point better than the medals do.

He retired from the Navy in 1951 with the rank of rear admiral. After that he kept writing, lecturing, and working as a consulting engineer, and he spent his later years between Maine and St. Petersburg Beach, Florida. He died in 1983, at ninety-one. If you like sea writing that cares as much about solving the problem as winning the battle, Ellsberg is still a very good companion.