Keith Eiler

About

Keith E. Eiler, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and a retired lieutenant colonel of the U.S. Army, died on November 16, 2005.

Eiler's academic work centered on military history. His Mobilizing America: Robert P. Patterson and the War Effort, 1940–1945, a major treatise on U.S. economic and military mobilization during World War II, received the Hoover Institution's Uncommon Book Award in 1999. He then began research on the military-operational aspects of the war, which led to a study of General Albert C. Wedemeyer, the U.S. War Department's most prominent strategist and an officer who later commanded U.S. forces in the China theater and whom Eiler had served as an aide-de-camp.

Eiler graduated from the U. S. Military Academy in 1944 and went on to serve during World War II with the Third U.S. Army in Europe, where he was wounded in the Battle of the Bulge; during the Korean War, he served with the Eighth U.S. Army in Korea.

Eiler holds masters' degrees in civil engineering (Harvard University) and international affairs (George Washington University) and a doctorate in the history of American civilization from Harvard.

(2005)