The son of an Episcopal priest, the Reverend George Warrington Eccles, and his wife Lydia Lawrence, he was initially educated privately at home by his parents and later sent to Trinity School in New York City, before enrolling as an undergraduate at Columbia University.

He was in command when the Japanese simultaneously attacked Pearl Harbor as well as American and British positions in Southeast Asia on December 7, 1941.

Wounded in action, Eccles was later awarded the Navy Cross,[1] the Silver Star, and The Netherlands Order of the Bronze Lion.

In this key position, Eccles coordinated the planning, construction, and support of advance bases in the Central Pacific, a critical aspect of the American island-hopping strategy in the war against Japan.

While in that position from 1947 to 1951, Eccles wrote his first book, Operational Naval Logistics (1950), a manual for the United States Navy that was a pioneering work on the fundamentals of his subject.