After the war, Talley led various engineering districts, including the North Atlantic Division, before retiring as a brigadier general in 1956.

After retirement, he was involved in civil engineering and oversaw the reconstruction of central Alaska after the Good Friday earthquake.

[2][5] Talley first entered the military as a reserve officer in the United States Army Coast Artillery Corps in the mid-1920s.

[8] When Talley returned to the United States, he worked to make maps based on aerial photographs for nine years, publishing the textbook Photogrammetry.

[6] In the lead-up to the American entry into World War II, on September 11, 1940, Talley, by then a captain, traveled to Yakutat, Alaska, where he had been placed in charge of the construction of Elmendorf Air Force Base.

[10] Convinced that the United States was going to enter the World War soon, he ordered construction to continue on projects such as Elmendorf throughout the winter.

He was given broad authority over construction and was made the head of the Army Transport Service's Alaska division, though he eventually lost that role after diverting a ship to supply Umnak.

[15] In June 1943 Talley traveled to Europe, where he helped plan the Normandy landings and served as the V Corps' deputy chief of staff.

The majority of the 1st Infantry Division's officers disliked Talley by the time the operation was launched, considering him "a thorn in our side" because he treated them as though they knew little about planning an amphibious invasion.

As commander of the area, he oversaw up to 63,000 soldiers— responsibility that the Anchorage Daily News considered was typically held by a three star general.

[2][3][16] Under Talley's command, the brigade headquarters returned to England, and embarked for the United States on 23 December 1944.

Part of the brigade headquarters went by air to Leyte to join the XXIV Corps for the invasion of Okinawa—which Talley helped plan, while the rest traveled directly to Okinawa on the USS Achernar.

[2] He entered the National War College in 1949[19] and was head of the estimates branch of the intelligence division on the Army General Staff from 1949 to 1952,[5] briefing the Joint Chiefs of Staff on the Soviet Union's military capacity during the Korean War and other relevant intelligence.