James H. Willbanks

James H. Willbanks is Professor Emeritus of Military History at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. He retired from CGSC in April 2018 after forty-nine years of combined federal service. For two years prior to retiring, Dr. Willbanks served as the General of the Army George C. Marshall Chair of Military History. Dr. Willbanks joined the CGSC faculty in 1992, when he retired from the Army as a Lieutenant Colonel with twenty-three years’ service as an Infantry officer in various assignments in CONUS and overseas, to include a tour as an infantry advisor with a South Vietnamese regiment during the 1972 North Vietnamese Easter Offensive, for which he was awarded the Silver Star and Purple Heart with Oak Leaf Cluster. Prior to assuming the Marshall Chair, he served as Director of the CGSC Department of Military History for eleven years. Before that, he taught in the Department of Joint and Multinational Operations. He holds a B.A. in History from Texas A&M University, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in History from the University of Kansas. He is the author or editor of twenty books, including Danger 79er: The Life and Times of Lieutenant General James F. Hollingsworth (Texas A&M Press, 2018); A Raid Too Far (Texas A&M Press, 2014); Abandoning Vietnam (University Press of Kansas, 2004); The Battle of An Loc (Indiana University Press, 2005); The Tet Offensive: A Concise History (Columbia University Press, 2006); and Vietnam War Almanac (Facts on file, 2009). He is a former two-term Trustee of the Society for Military History, is on the editorial board of the Modern War Studies series for University Press of Kansas and the History Advisory Committee of ABC-Clio Publishing, and serves on the Editorial Boards of Vietnam magazine. He and his work have been highlighted in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, US News & World Report, Wall Street Journal, Army Times, Stars and Stripes, the History Channel, and PBS. He served as a consultant to Ken Burns and appeared on camera in the 10-part 18-hour documentary on the Vietnam War for PBS which began airing in the Fall of 2017. He and his wife now reside in Georgetown, Texas.