“Bill McGee is no armchair historian…He’s lived what he writes about whether it’s joining the Navy in ’42 at age seventeen simply to get into the fight, or cowboying in the West in the postwar ’40s, or working in broadcasting in the early days of 1950s and ’60s television.”
– Barnaby Conrad, founder of the Santa Barbara Writers Conference and author of Matador
About Bill McGee
Bill McGee and his co-author/wife, Sandra (Joanne A. Calitri International)
William “Bill” L. McGee is an award-winning World War II military historian and memoirist. His writing career spanned six decades. He leaves a literary legacy of twenty-two books, each written in his signature writing style described as journalistic, straightforward, and “as precise and economical as a Mickey Spillane novel.” (Marine Corps League Magazine)
Bill McGee’s writing career was launched in the 1950s in the entertainment industry. During his 32-year career in broadcast sales and marketing, he wrote twelve “how-to” guidebooks for television station managers and sales representatives to train them how to better serve their advertising clients and how to effectively use cooperative advertising.
In the 1990s, Bill became a World War II military historian of the Pacific war, the theater of war in which he served in the U.S. Navy. He wrote the acclaimed Pacific war trilogy, Amphibious Operations in the South Pacific in WWII. In 2018, Volume 2, The Solomons Campaigns, 1942-1943, won the Military Writers Society of America Silver Medal Award for History. Volume 3, Pacific Express: The Critical Role of Military Logistics in World War II is on the Marine Corps Commandant’s Professional Reading List for logistics. Bill also wrote seven memoirs, including Operation Crossroads, Lest We Forget!, a recounting of his participation in 1946 at the first postwar atomic bomb tests at the Bikini Atoll.
Bill McGee had a favorite saying about writing: “To anyone who has ever considered writing, there is only one way—ass in seat.”
In 2000, Bill collaborated with his wife, Sandra, on The Divorce Seekers: A Photo Memoir of a Nevada Dude Wrangler. This began a collaboration that lasted for the next twenty years. When asked what it was like to work together as husband and wife, Bill and Sandra would smile at each other – and claim they seldom disagreed.
However, Sandra has her favorite saying about writing: The strongest drive is neither love nor hate; it is the urge to edit another’s copy.”