Bill McWilliams

Bill McWilliams was born in Brownsville, Texas, and was raised in small towns in Texas, New Mexico, and Colorado. He received an appointment to the United States Military Academy at West Point through competitive examinations in the third congressional district of Colorado. He graduated with a bachelor of science degree, and earned a master of science degree in business administration from the George Washington University while attending the Air Command and Staff College at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama. He later attended the US Army War College in Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania, where he completed ten months of senior management training, equivalent to a master’s degree in public administration.

McWilliams’s Air Force service included assignments as a flight and classroom instructor in undergraduate pilot training and fighter training; a US Air Force Academy Air Officer Commanding and flight instructor for cadets receiving familiarization training in light aircraft; and a seven-month combat tour in the Republic of Vietnam where he flew 128 fighter-bomber close support and interdiction missions. Later, he served in the Republic of Korea for two years, and at the Air Force Tactical Fighter Weapons Center in Las Vegas, Nevada. After leaving the Air Force, McWilliams served for more than eight years in systems engineering and management positions in industry, including work on a concept development study for the integrated defense systems for the Air Force’s newest fighter, the F-22 Raptor; systems engineering for the missile sight on the Army’s Bradley Fighting Vehicle and the ground mapping and navigation sensors for the Navy’s Tomahawk cruise missile; and management system evaluation and auditing in various production programs, including Hughes Aircraft Company’s satellite production program.

While serving in operational and management positions, McWilliams conducted investigations and internally published reports on contentious and sensitive management, civil service, and military personnel issues. He also helped to investigate and report on the causes of fourteen major US Air Force aircraft accidents. He negotiated government employee union contracts, resolved trade union disputes and personnel complaints, worked with state and local governments as a major installation commander, and led and completed numerous management system analyses, evaluations, and audits.
McWilliams’s writing includes the 1,144 page Korean War history A Return to Glory: The Untold Story of Honor, Dishonor, and Triumph at the United States Military Academy, 1950–53; numerous newspaper and magazine articles, columns, and letters; a variety of Air Force safety publications; work in the United States Military Academy Association of Graduates magazine, Assembly; and newsletters for fraternal and professional organizations.

In February 2000, the US Military Academy Bicentennial Planning Group unanimously selected A Return to Glory as a Bicentennial Book, and five years later, the TV film rights were optioned. ESPN aired the one-hour Winnercomm documentary, “Faces of Sports: Brave Old Army Team,” in December 2005, followed by the highly successful TV movie Code Breakers.
McWilliams’s second book, On Hallowed Ground: The Last Battle for Pork Chop Hill, was released in October 2003. The work is a detailed account of the final battle for the outpost, which took place from July 6 to 11, three weeks prior to the Korean War armistice in 1953. His third major history, Sunday in Hell: Pearl Harbor Minute by Minute, is a meticulously-researched account of the devastating 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Oahu’s military and civilian airfields, and the seaborne evacuation of more than twenty thousand wounded military employees and civilians from the island of Oahu to San Francisco. It was published in November 2011, just before the seventieth anniversary of the attack.

McWilliams and his wife, Ronnie, were married the day after McWilliams graduated from the Military Academy, and they currently live in Las Vegas, Nevada. They have three grown children: a son and a daughter who reside with their families in Star and Boise, Idaho, and a daughter who resides with her husband near Philipsburg, Montana.