H. W. Eldredge was born circa 1910 in Brooklyn, graduated from Dartmouth College, and finished a sociology dissertation at Yale University in 1935. At the start of World War II, Eldredge joined the United States Army Air Force and traveled to Great Britain in the spring of 1943 via a convoy from Halifax, Nova Scotia. Once there, he was recruited by a Harvard professor to help him record the official Army history of the 8th Air Force. "But I wanted to be doing something," he wrote in his autobiography, "not recording what other people had done or might do." Reassigned to intelligence work, Eldredge helped distract German agents from the Allies' plans for an invasion of France through Normandy. He returned to teach at Dartmouth College after the war and served as head of the Department of Sociology for a time. Eldredge, who was also the author of several monographs in the field of sociology, died in 1991.