But for much of her life, and even today, she is better known by her male pseudonym, George Eliot, which she adopted to conceal her gender at a time when women were excluded from intellectual circles.

On the morning of Dec. 7, 1941, George Elliott Jr. was a 23-year-old Army private learning how to master state-of-the-art radar equipment in Hawaii. He and fellow private Joseph Lockard were ...